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Xerox University Microfilms 300 North Zeob Road Ann Arbor. Michigan 4810C 76-18,015

NOWIK, Nancy Ann, 1941- MELODRAMA IN THE LATE NOVELS OF HENRY JAMES. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1976 Literature, American

Xerox University Microfilmst Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106

0 Copyright by Nancy Ann Nowik 1976 MELODRAMA. IN THE IATE NOVEIS OF HENRY JAMES

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements fo r the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

HY Nancy A. Nowik, A.B., H.A.

The Ohio State University 1976

Reading Committee: Approved by Professor Thomas Cooley Professor Suzanne Ferguson Professor Julian Markels

tment of English ACKNOWIEDGMENTS

During the several years spent at work on this dissertation, I have-become indebted to several people for financial, emotional, and intellectual assistance* For their continued support and en­ couragement, I am grateful to my parents —Dorothy and Theodore Nowik, to my foster parents—Zita and Adam Kudlacik, and to all their children* Further, I am grateful to my friend and colleague Anne Shaver, who gave me both space and time* Finally, I owe special gratitude to my adviser Julian Markels, whose talent as catalyst has generated what is best in this study, and whose talent as teacher and mentor has long been recognized*

i i TABIE

ACKNOWIEDGMENTS ......

Chapter

X. ISOLATION AND "THE KINGDOM OF THOUGHT"...... i I I . DEFINING MELODRAMA...... j

H I . JAMESIAN MELODRAMA: LIFE AND A R T ......

IV. HANGING FIRE: THE SACRED FOUNT AND TEE AMBASSADORS

!

V. THE NINOS OF THE DOVE...... , i i VI. THE GOLDEN BCWli......

i

LIST CF REFERENCES ...... "Man is the only animal capable of boredom, the only animal that cannot spend energy as other species do, in random movement. He is agitated by passions which only the passion of fear holds in check. Civilization subdues his actions, but it does not rid him of the de­ sires. He is eager for change and for adventure; he likes repose only after exertion; he is naturally curious, and wants to try, to finger, to sample. . . . He craves the great emotions which, when twice or three times they do come to him, turn out too painful after all. Where will he find the emotion without the pain? The answer is, in art; pulp fiction for the vulgar, Henry James for the 'elect.1,1 Oscar Handel A Definition of Tragedy Chapter One ISOLATION AND "THE KINGDOM OF THOUGHT"

At the climax of The Sacred Fount (1901), the nameless narrator- hero believes (erroneously) that he has hit upon the key secret to the tr iv ia l rid d le which perplexeB him throughout the novel and which is in fact the sole subject of the novel. He thinks he has found out the identity of a certain woman's lover: "Thus solidified, this conviction, it spread and spread to a distance greater than I could just then traverse . . . but which, exactly for that reason perhaps, quickened my pride in the kingdom of thought I had won. I was really not to have felt more, in the whole business, than I felt at this mo­ ment th a t by my own rig h t hand I had gained the kingdom"'1- (ita lic s mine). Maxwell Geismar, that formidable anti-Jacobite, sees the narrator as insane—he well may be—and has no sympathy with his kind of cere­ bration. He believes the hero demonstrates "the monomania of the in te lle c t," and he links the hero with James: "Whether in parody or self-revelation too, the narrator of The Sacred Fount not only has the view and tone of the later Prefaces? but he is very close to the possessed or obsessive author of the Notebooks also, asserting his 2 own will and talent against the world's indifferent verdict."

1 2

What G&ismar ca lls ths monomania of the In te lle c t, however, James c a lls the religion of consciousness, a heightened and often melodrama­ tic consciousness achieved only through isolation. Detached observer, spectator, “observant stranger," as he called himself, James was cer­ ta in ly no stranger to Iso latio n . Legend has i t th a t sometime in the 1890's, when an unidentified host chided him for having followed the funeral procession of a complete stranger into a church, seating him­ self directly behind the immediate family for the duration of the service, a nonplussed James gave the reply, “Where emotion is, there am I . “3 The anecdote reveals the paradox inherent in Henry James: he was at once a detached spectator and a highly emotional man. 3h fact it was, say Hatthiessen and Murdock in their edition of James's Notebooks, a “mixture of passion and patience [thalj] made him re­ markable as an observer,"^ the patience no doubt the result of long self-discipline, and the passion the result of both his commitment to his art and his native temperament. Another anecdote further exemplifies the dichotomy, this one re­ la te d by Desmond McCarthy and located in th a t book of anecdotes on James, The Legend of the Master. After a luncheon parly of which [James} had been, as they say, “the life," we happened to be drinking our coffee together while the rest of the party had moved on to the verandah. “What a charming picture they make", he said, with his great head aslant, “the women there with their embroidery, the. ..." There was nothing in his words, anybody might have spoken them; but in his attitude, in his voice, in his whole being at that moment, I divined such complete detachment that I was startled into speaking out of myself, “I can't bear to look at life like that," I blurted out, “I want to be in everything. Perhaps that is why I cannot write, i t makes me feel absolutely alone. ..." The effect of this confession upon him was instantaneous and surprising. He leant forward and grasped my arm excitedly: "Yes, it is solitude. If it runs after you and catches you, well and good. But for heaven's sake don't run after it. It is absolute solitude." And he got up hurriedly and joined the others. On the walk home i t occurred to me that I had for a mo­ ment caught a glimpse of his intensely private life, and rightly or wrongly I thought that this glimpse explained mucht his apprehensively tender clutch upon others, his immense pre­ occupation with the surface of things and his exclusive devo­ tion to his art. . . .? Here, as in the first anecdote, a pattern emerges. The detached ob­ servation is followed by a surge of emotion as James perceives not only the perfect rightness of his observation but the source of it— his "absolute solitude." The perception w sb made with detachment, but it is not viewed with detachment retrospectively. He grasps an arm "excitedly." He speaks of absolutes. He is so moved by his reflection that he hurries away. So from the same source of the ob­ servation, the solitude, comes the emotional response, and it cannot, a fte r a l l , be suppressed. Detached, scrupulous, superbly disciplined novelist, James was romancer and melodramatist, seeker and exploiter of the emotionally heightened life , the man who could see beyond his workroom and his drawing-room world to write, "I have the imagination of disaster and see life indeed as ferocious and s i n i s t e r . James used melodramatic plots and devices to create suspense and tension for the reader, yet he also used them to place his main characters into potentially dis­ astrous situations which iso late them from th e ir frien d s, spouses, loved ones. Thus isolated, they are forced into mental states, into moral decision-making most interesting for the novelist to study and recount. In their drawing-room civilisation, with their devotion to form and "honour,” James's characters lead surface lives of convention and routine. They play rigid roles. But their personal relationships are taken very seriously and provide the only emotional agitation of their lives. If the agitation causes great pain, if it isolates the protagonist from those who matter most to him (while illustrating for the reader James's belief that loneliness and isolation are part of the very nature of all human interaction), it also provides both bloodletting and catharsis for the characters in that stratified, conventional world. Thus Jamesian melodrama brings the protagonist into heightened emotional states, while at the same time, the civility of Jamesian melodrama imposes order upon the chaos in which the char­ acters find themselves. His characters, despite their newly raised consciousness, proceed in a certain prescribed way. There is very little outward abandon in James's characters, despite their depths of passion. Very cautiously and carefully they act out their dramas, as if they know what James knew, that his kind of society demands rules and standards to make life endurable. That Jamesian melodrama can both provoke passionate emotional states and impose order upon the chaos of life is paradoxical only until we remember that both strains"existed concomitantly in James and that melodrama can be any man's way of making hie personal dramas important. I t was the ex­ citing, even dangerous life of the mind that James stalked and re­ corded in his fiction, and melodrama was his technique, his genre, and ultimately his world view. "The kingdom of thought" in James's fiction, however, is not the "monomania of the Intellect" Geismar took it to be. In each of the three major novels of the Last Phase, i t is true, vie find conscious­ nesses that are obsessed, sometimes almost manic, often silly, often deluded. But in each case the central character of the novel ul­ timately avoids insanity while being forced by the melodramatic plot in to a te rrib le iso latio n in which he must work out the terms of his mental salvation. In Poe's "Ligeia," the melodramatic stage trap­ pings, the pentagonal room with its inner circle formed by the hanging tapestries, are meant to keep the outside world out—so that Poe can concentrate on the narrator's interior drama. James uses much the same strategy to force his main characters into intense mental an­ guish, a painful "kingdom of thought." It is commonplace to remark that often in James we have a world without wars or politics or in­ trusive, mundane considerations, a setting in which the characters are thus free—it is one of James's favorite notions—to play out their destinies. Like Poo, James substitutes for wars and politics and jobs the heightened inner life and the sensational trappings of melodrama. And in each major novel, melodrama is employed to create situa­ tions in which the main characters become isolated, forced into a loneliness that leaves them bewildered and sometimes half-crazed. In the early Roderick Hudson, the iso latio n imposed on Roderick had been a result of his vocation as artist. In the 1077 novel The American, Christopher Newman is forced into isolation by his naive to* and his nationality. In that book the gothic trappings—hints of murders, a duel, a castle, a cloistered convent—are the means of introducing Newman to evil. But in the end, all the Bellegardes really do is break their promise to him. There is far less spying and duplicity here than in the later works, where conspiracy and op­ pression become the equally melodramatic but more subtle replacements of the gothic devices. James's next major novel, Portrait of a lady, demonstrates tho new subtlety. A trap is set for Isabel Archer through the duplicity of Mme. Merle and Gilbert Osmond. Isabel is forced into a spiritual and emotional isolation that Osmond wishes to maintain at any price. He would even deny her the outlet of telling her dying cousin Ralph about her grief. Each of James's subsequent novels deals in some way with the ul­ timate isolation of the major character. 3h The Princess Casamassima (1886) Hyacinth Robinson is betrayed by his friends one by one, u n til he commits suicide. In the nightmare denouement of The Bostonians (1886), Olive Chancellor is alone and utterly defeated as she tries to appease a hostile crowd from the stage of an auditorium. In What Maisie Knew (1897) the protagonist is isolated in the peculiar separ­ ateness of a child's world. And in The Spoils of Poynton (also 1897), Fleda Vetch, for the sake of Owen Gereth's "honour," must end up with no one or nothing—not even a Maltese cross. In the three major novels of the Last Phase, the central charac­ ters are not so much isolated from the distractions of the outside world as they are gradually isolated from everyone else. In The

Wingb of the Dove there is a great deal of melodramatic "stuff"— betrayal and villainy, lies and spying, plus the essentially melo­ dramatic situation of a rich and beautiful young girl doomed to an early death. A language of fear and the ’'imagination of disaster" are consistently employed. Lord Mark sees Hilly as "threatened, haunted, blighted,and she herself has inexplicable fears at the same time that she positively seeks a life of mystery and adventure. VJhen Susan Stringham says, "My dear child, we move In a labyrinth," she responds, "Of course we do. That’s just the fun of ItJ . . . I want abysses" (X, 186). Hilly has an "imagination of disaster," and that imagination is gradually forced to be solitary. Milly is con­ strained into complete secrecy and Bilence as she perceives the plots » t against her. Even the standard Jamesian outlet, the ficelle, is re­ moved from her after she learns Susan has moved into Mrs. Lowder's camp and w ill now go to any lengths to dupe H illy so th a t her fin a l days will be happy. Milly is betrayed by at least four people, and the fact that the reader leaves her point of view, her consciousness, more than l£0 pages before the conclusion of the novel—a fact con­ sidered a structural flaw by many—is nevertheless suggestive of her complete aloneness, her ultimate separateness, as she turns her face to the wall. Even in a less sinister fiction like The Ambassadors. the isolat­ ing of Strother is the central fact of the novel. XT he were not lied to and isolated from the truth of Chad's affair from the begin­ ning, i f he were not deceived by l i t t l e Bilham, Chad, Mne. de Vionnet, and even his fic e lle Maria Gostrey, then he could not have worked out his transformation, his imperfect salvation. Ho must learn to toddle alone, he says, and perhaps it is because Iferia could not share his transformation with him, his period of greatest isolation and inner conflict, that she finally cannot share the remainder of his life with him. I t is in his last completed novel, The Golden Bowl, that James brings to apotheosis the human being isolated in "the kingdom of thought." Through the years James had refined or cauterized certain stock elements of melodrama. He had replaced happy endings with re- i nuncintions or dispossessions. Ho had offered complex character portrayal instead of the conventionalized emotions associated with , melodrama. And the suicides, duels, and murders had disappeared from his work by tho time of the Last Phase. But the sensationalism of melodrama remains. The introduction of the central character to evil, the conspiracy, oppression, cruel victimization, deceit, and betrayal remain and are at the heart of The Golden Bowl. Maggie Vorver, through her discovery of the adultery of her husband and her best friend Charlotte, is isolated not only from husband and best friend but from her father, who is married to that friend. In her isolation, she works out the plans for her salvation. Recognizing and rejecting her former innocence, she plots to win her husband back. She spies and manipulates, and then, in a move that I believe unique in James's fiction, in a brilliant and awful turning of tho tables, she gradually, and with a growing sense of elation as well as regret, forces Charlotte into tho position of isolated one, as friend, lover, and husband hide from Charlotte what they lcnow about the af­ fair. Now Charlotte is totally manipulated, as if "a long silken o halter looped round her beautiful neck." And the imposed isolation becomes almost unendurable for her. Jbggie hears her voice one day as Charlotte speaks to a group of visitors to their estate: "The high voice went on; its quaver was doubtless for conscious ears only, but there were verily thirty seconds during which it sounded, for [Maggie) , like the shriek of a soul in pain. Kept up a minute longer i t would break and collapse. . • 11 (II, 292). 3ii tho three major novels in question, the formalized melodrama­ tic situations provide rituals which dramatize characters' states of deep emotion. The late novels deal with protagonists in splendid but terrible isolation, men and women besot by treacheries and vic­ timized by lie s . And recognizing the p o ten tial of melodrama to d is­ play those emotions most human and universal, James heightened his fiction with his use of conspiracy and betrayal, his images of dis­ aster, his oblique dialogues, his deliberate ambiguity, to isolate his characters' minds for the purpose of examining their workings more closely than any American n o v elist had dons before him. What I am here calling James's melodramatic bent was perceived in James as early as 1918 in Joseph Warren Beach's The Method of Henry James.^ But Beach and other major critics of his time (Edmund Wilson in "The Pilgrimage of Henry James" [l925j ] 10 and Cornelia P. Kelley in her 1930 The Early Development of Henry James'1"1') shared tho opinion th a t James's melodrama was confined to the w ritings of the early years. Then in 193U in a spocial James number of Hound and Horn, both Steven Spender and H. R. Hays^ called new attention to James'8 melodramatic tendencies. After Hays and Spender, Jacques 10

Barzun, in another James number, entitled his essay “James the Melo- d ram atist.,, He called James's work “aesthetic melodrama" and linked it to James's moral attitude.^ Since Barzun such critics as Graham Greene (in 1951)» Elizabeth Stevenson in her 19h9 The Crooked Corri­ dor, and Dorothea Krook in The Ordeal of Consciousness (1962) have recognized the presence and importance of the melodramatic in the later works as well as in the early fiction.^* So there was ample precedent as well as need for Leo Levy's 1957 monograph, "Versions of Melodrama: A Study of the Fiction and Drama of Henry James, 1865-

1897 Because Levy's study is more thorough than anything which pre­ viously considered James and melodrama, and because his conclusions seem to me so just, ny debt to him is a large one. X will be accept­ ing some of his premises and definitions of melodrama as well as his vision of the rela tio n be tee on melodrama and m orality in James. His essay ends with the year 1897, but X will be following his lead as he looks ahead to the novels of the last great phase. In spealdng about the la te novels he claims: “Melodrama becomes the persuasive device of a supreme rhetorician of moral life, a style of dramatization, evi- dont in language, image, and scene, through which a high sense of moral excitement is. communicated.""1*^ I t is not clear why Levy ends his study with the year 1897* Perhaps i t is because he has been es­ pecially interested in James's plays and the immediate effects the writing of the plays had on him. While Levy does not tre a t the la te novels, his conclusion offers his general view of them: “Melodrama becomes a major technique of the la te novels, the means by which 11

James infuses his most deeply felt moral concerns with a sense of peril and crisis. He freely invokes the emotional implications of melodrama, ytit escapes i t s constrictive ideology." 17 Six years a fte r Levy’s monograph, Maxwell Geismar's Henry James and the Jacobites was published. If Levy's study of melodrama had shown an implicit approval of the devices and ends of melodrama in the late works, Geismar's does not. He sees James as a major "en­ tertainer11 rather than a major writer. He sees the characters of the late novels as puppets of the Jamesian plot, which was "most typically a combination of sentimental romance and of cunning melodrama." For Geismar, "The typical Jamesian chronicle was one of manipulation, rather than of human revelation—of characters preying upon each other, of James preying upon them all, for tho sake of those grand dramatic 'effects,' those theatrical entrances and exits, those tricky stage climaxes" (italics his).’*-® In the late novels, which he consistently refers to as "romance melodramas," Geismar sees elements of magic, the popular thriller, tho detective story, even sadism. "While indebted to him for point­ ing out so many elements of melodrama and verifying my own sense of their presence, my study seeks to "correct" his, to be polemical, to show that tho melodrama of the late novels is not so much the cheap trick of America's major "entertainer" as a means for isolating men­ tal and emotional states for the purpose of better demonstrating and analyzing them. And if James demonstrates the manipulation Geismar condemns him for, is ho not simply recognizing realistically that 12 manipulation is often at the heart of his—and our-*-"civilized" world? I use Qoismar then, but for the purpose of opposing him. And I use Levy, but only to go beyond him, I believe, in several ways. First, this study treats the later novels, which he looks ahead to but does not give readings of. Second, it examines in a more de­ ta ile d manner the melodrama, both th e a tric a l and fic tio n a l, th at the young James was exposed to. Third, it does more than Levy's study with biography—with tho relation between James's life and art, with tho melodramatic tendencies of James himself, as expressed (early and late, but especially late) ip his letters, his autobiography, E del's biography, and James's Notebooks and Prefaces, lty study is in tho tradition of Sainto-Beuve, who believed, along with James, that the artist "is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself."*^ I would like to dem­ onstrate that tho melodramatic elements of James's late fiction re­ flect the inherently melodramatic emotions of their author; that his melodramatic temperament sheds light on his themes, plots, conclu­ sions, characterizations, and even style; that a comparison between the "germs" or donnoos of tho Notebooks and Prefaces and the worked out stories in the novels reveals a remarkable consistency of vision as James aims, through the device of the central intelligence, for expression of the "heightened" life. 'What James wiBhes for each of his central consciousnesses is what he elsewhere wished for the ju­ dicious critic. Ho must be able to "lend himself, to project himself and steep himself, to feel and feel till he understands, and to understand so well that he can say, to have perception at the pitch of passion and expression as embracing as the air* . . " (italics mine).**0 Such a study of melodrama as this one must begin with on attempt at defining the term. Next, in Chapter Three, because the study is in part biographical, claiming as it does that James himself was in some ways as melodramatic as his works, attention must be paid to the James family, to the backgrounds and the education that shaped Henry James's moral and aesthetic vision* And because the study is also something of an historical one—-melodrama was a Movement as well as a genre and a world vision—-attention must be paid to the external melo­ dramatic influences of James's youthful playgoing and reading. With­ out becoming a search for "influences," th is section w ill neverthe­ less look at certain trends (like Qothioism) and certain authors (like Hawthorne and Balzac) to demonstrate James's affinity for the melodramatic mode. In Chapter Three I also offer a section summariz­ ing the kind of melodrama found in James's earlier works, so that his later achievement will be more apparent and appreciated. With the definitions of melodrama, an examination of James's personal affinities for it, and the review of James's uses of it in the early fiction completed, I turn to the novels of the Last Phase— The Sacred Fount, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl—to demonstrate James's uses of oblique dialogue, degrees of specification, and the stock character to create melodramatic tensions in those late novels. FOOTNOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE

*4lanry James, The Sacred Fount (New York: S crib n er's, 1901), p. 2 # . ^Maxwell Geismar, Henry James and the Jacobites (New Yorks Houghton M ifflin, 1963), p. TOT” ^Although several of my colleagues have also heard this anecdote, none of us has been able to find the source. ^Tho Notebooks of Henry James, od. F . 0. Matthiessen and Kenneth Murdo'cV"(New Yorlc: Oxford[Jnlversity Press, 1961), x. ^Tho Loponcl of tho Master, compiled by Simon Nowoll-Smith (London: ConstaBTo',' l9hV), pp. 126-27. ^Honry James in Letters to A. £ . Benson and August Mo nod, ed. E. F. Benson (Londons' iSlklri"T5aT3iews and' Marro't, 1930), p.' 3?. ^Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, the New York E dition (New York: Scribner1 s,’1]?6jSy, II, l£t>. Ail subsequent page references are from this edition. %enry James. The Golden Bowl, the New York Edition (New York: S crib n er's, 1909), H , fcbt. A ll subsequent page references are from this edition. 9Joseph Warren Beach, The Method of Henry James (Philadelphia: A lbert S aif or, 195b). See the chapter "Obscure W ginnings," pp. 166-190. lpEdmund Wilson, "The Pilgrimage of Henry James," [reviowj The Now Republic (May 6, 1929). ^C ornelia p. Kelley, Hie Early Development of Henry James, revised edition (Urbana: ' Vniverslty of ll!Linois“'Pross, 1969), pp. 121-30 . ^Stephen Spender, "The School of Experience in the Early Novels," and H. R. Hays, "James as a S atirist," Hound and Horn, VII (April- May, 1935). 15 13 Jacques Barzun, "Jamas tho Melodramatist," Kenyon Review, V (191*3), 510. •^The Greene essay e n title d "Hie P o rtra it of a Lady" appeared in The Lost Childhood and Other Essays (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1951), p. 1*1*1 Elizabeth Stevonson^s Tho Crooked Corridor: A Study of Henry James was published in New York by taacmillan in 19h£.' In Dorothea Krbo'k’s more recent study The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge Ilhiversity l^ress, 1962), see p.

^L eo Levy, Versions of Melodrama: A Study of the F ictio n and Drama of Horny James, 1855-T897 (Berkeley"and LosTnioTes, University of California Press, 1957). ^L evy, p. 115. ■^Levy, p. 116.

^Geismar, p. 7. l^christof Wegelin, "Jamesian Biography," Nineteenth-Century F ictio n 18 (December, 1963), 286.. . ^%enry James, "Criticism" £l89l} • Roprintod In The Portable Henry James, revised edition. Ed. Ibrton D. Zabel (New York: Viking, 19557,“pT521. Chapter Two DEFINING} MELODRAMA.

Attempts at defining terms are invariably begun with apologies and defensiveness--or with refusals to define at all. In her intro­ duction to Strange Alloy: The Relation of Comedy to Tragedy in the Fiction of Henry James, Ellen Leybum says, "It is no part of ny in­ tention to offer a new definition of £comedy and tragedyj, nor to justify James's own loose usage. What constantly interested him was the mixture and interaction of what he regularly calls comic with the painful in human experience.In The Crooked C orridor, E lizabeth Stevenson says much the same thing when she writes that "it is hope­ le ss to unravel the threads of the comic and the tr a g ic . In James they are different facets of the same truth."2 Presently I too wish to explore the mixture and interaction of tho comic and tragic in James. But a study of melodrama calls for examination not only of comic and tragic elements, but of those ele­ ments variously labelled "ironic," "gothic," "romantic," "realistic," " tra g ic -iro n ic ," "p a th etic." Hie term "melodrama" has su ffered so much abuse, has come to stand for something so inferior to tragedy, th a t one c r iti c begins h is study of melodrama with the statem ent, "I would like to defend a dirty word." He continues, "It qualifies, I should say, as just about the dirtiest word in the lexicon of the 16 17 3 modern c ritic of the drama—second only*, perhaps, to 'sentimental.'" Tho reason for this bad reputation, I believe,, is that so many defi­ nitions of melodrama contain the word tragedy and suggest implicitly that the former is inferior to the latter. Tradgedio manque, popular tragedy, pseudo-tragedy, para-tragody, "illogical or irrational tragedy"—all these definitions of melodrama suggest tragedy failed. But genuine tragedy, by anybody's definition, is rare, existing only in literatu re, whereas melodrama is common in both life and art, Melodrama is more like life ; i t is a dominant mode of living. Soap operas, detective stories, science fiction, news reports of crime and disaster, thrillers of any ldnd—all of these not only acknowl­ edge the melodramatic mode in our personal lives but cater to it. Even our politics is melodramatic: Edward VUI attempting to justify his abdication;^ Eagleton licking his lips, his eyes filled with tears, rejected for the vice-presidential nomination, "victim­ ised,11 one might say, by his party and by tho nation's reaction to his h isto ry of mental illn e ss; or Ted Kennedy, referring to the "tragedy" at Chappaquidick. But an unlighted bridge, a drinking driver, undetermined destination, unanswered questions—despite the terrible loss of life, tho event and our reaction to it are ultimately melodramatic. And now, more recently, we face Richard Nixon's drama. In 1970, before Watergate, he was the subject of a book entitled Nixon Agonistes, whose author, Garry W ills, makes Nixon look sympa­ thetic, even downright tragic, at the same tima that he is appalled by Nixon.-* But now Tartuffe might provide a better parallel than Samson, fo r Nixon's long lif e in the p o litic a l arena ends with the 18 melodrama of tho "hypocrite unveiled." like Tartuffe, Nixon dis­ plays no inner dividedness, arrives at no insight, accepts no re­ sponsibility for his actions. His lack of inner conflict makes his story melodramatic rather than tragic. Further, the belief that it is the difference between accident and fate which makes a destiny tragic rather than melodramatic can bo applied to the stories of these other politicians. The Duke of Windsor, Eagleton, Kennedy—oach is the victim not of fate and inevitability but of his own political ac­ cident. Clearly, we use the term melodrama easily, in our daily lives and in our literary judgments, even when the pejorative connotations of the term are undeserved. But even less negative definitions of melodrama, those th a t do not employ the word tragedy, f a i l to take into account melodrama *s universality and its appeal. "Literature of disaster," or drama of intrigue, or romantic drama, or "that middle class offspring of the rorrantic drama" (this is Zola who thought that his Naturalism had killed melodrama),6 or "tho Naturalism of the dream life"1—only this last definition touches on a universal as­ pect of melodrama, the rela tio n of melodrama to what is most real in us, although the reality exists at a subconscious or unconscious le v el. To explain the universal appeal and continued popularity of melodrama, l e t us begin with the dictionary d efin itio n . The Oxford English Dictionary provides both its early and its more current us­ age! "In early 19th c. use, a stage play (usually romantic and sen­ sational in plot and incident) in which songs were interspersed, 19 and in which the action was accompanied by orchestral music appro­ priate to the situations. In later use tho musical element gradu­ ally ceased to be an essential feature of the 'melodrama,1 and the name now denotes a dramatic piece characterized by sensational inci- O dent and violent appeals to the emotions, but with a happy ending.11 In his The World of Melodrama (1967) > Frank Rah il l expands upon th is definition, concentrating upon nine to e n th-c entury melodrama, but creating a usage which he believes valid even today: Melodrama is a form of dramatic composition in prose partaking of the nature of tragedy, comedy, pantomime, and spectacle, and intended for a popular audience. Primarily concerned with situation and plot, i t calls upon mimed ac­ tion extensively and employs a more or less fixed complement of stock characters, the most important of whibh are a suffer­ ing heroine or hero, a persecuting villain, and a benevolent comic. It is conventionally moral and humanitarian in point of view and sentimental and optimistic in temper, concluding its fable happily with virtue rewarded after many trials and vice punished. Characteristically it offers elaborate scenic accessories and miscellaneous divertissements and introduces music freely, typically to underscore dramatic effect. 9

This definition covers a century of melodramas—gothic, domestic, spectacular, nautical, historical. Rahill makes these distinctions to aid us in examining and categorizing, but in fact basic motifs and patterns run through them all with startling similarity. Vice threatens Virtue, tho villain attempting to seduce the pure heroine while the hero is often helplessly out of the way (usually tied up in a cave or a forest, or across the sea, or without a weapon at incon­ venient times). Comic characters provide comic relief (an old couple, an old drunk, a soubrette). and scenes of violence and sensationalism a lte rn a te with ludicrous comedy, while suspense and coincidence are found throughout. Values like patriotism, purity, self-sacrifice, and fidelity are stressed, for indeed melodrama is a simplification and idealization of human experience An important distinction should be made at this point, a distinction between the ideology of melodrama (represented by the sim plified values discussed above and by the Manichoan lineup of the good characters against the bad) and the trappings of melodrama (the p lo ts , se n sa tio n a listic situ a tio n s, settings, landscapes, images, and excesses) to be discussed later. Those nineteenth-century melodramas with their quivering hero­ ines and simple, decent heroes, with titles like "Ten Nights in a Bar-Room,” "Jfcr Poll and 1-Jy Partner Joe," "Laugh 'When You Can," and "Married Rales" became too sim plistic, too turgid, for "modem” view- o rs, and stage melodrama began to decline with the coming of the new century. Several reasons account for its temporary demise. Noted melodramatic actors died off, and the young ones had a different kind of training. Tho old repertory stock system disappeared. A more sophisticated audience gradually returned to the theatres that had catered almost exclusively to the masses, and they demanded a new kind of drama. Further, the tone of the twentieth century found it­ self less favorable to and for the old melodrama. A new confusion between right and wrong, between hero and villain, existed in this no longer idealized, no longer simple world in which, as Michael Booth says, "Twentieth-century man does not know where he stands and has faith in neither absolutes nor ideals. Furthermore, he is psy­ chologically interested in probing human motives and the deepest ro­ l l cesses of the human mind, in interior rather than external action." 21

Yet, curiously, we are not as inim ical to melodrama as th a t statem ent might suggest. Melodrama, slig h tly a ltered , is s t i l l with us as an art form today, still as popular as i t was one hundred years ago. For when stage melodrama declined in the early years of this century, the cinema took over, and "the sensation play was effectively killed by transference to the screen. A public that loved realism on the stage found motion-picture photography infinitely more satisfy­ ing. • • • Dialogue, techniques, and effects may be subtler than on the stage, but essentially melodrama has not changed. Music rein­ forces emotion and incident even more emphatically than before. Character types and sentiments are basically the same."’*-2 And today the popularity of melodrama is attested to on television—in the Western, the police and private detective drama, and above all in soap opera. Tragedy is too neat for some people—a work of art with a decisive ending. But lif e is not lik e th a t. Life goes on tomorrow, life, many would say, is melodramatic. And indeed in a recent article in The New York Times attempting to analyze the new popularity of the soap opera among college students, one student explained: VA soap opera moves awesomely slow, as slow as l i f e i t s e l f , A day in re a l life is a day in the soap opera, not like an evening show where everything is compressed into an hour or two. The soaps set up an unresolved situation and you spend a month waiting and waiting and waiting for then to resolve it. It's addicting,"^

With a vocabulary incorporating both ancient and modem terms, twentieth-century critics list the reasons for the continuing appeal of melodrama in our th e atre, our cinema, our T.V., and our fic tio n . 22

Eric Bentley, longtime defender of melodrama, alludes to Aristotle (to explain the value of experiencing pity and fear while viewing or reading melodrama) as well as to moderns like Freud and William Jamas to explain the value of self-pity and exaggeration in our lives, '’Having a good cry" can be important for mental health, ho states, recalling Studies on Hysteria, in which Freud and Breuer ex­ plain what happens when "emotional impressions are not allowed to wear themselves out."^ For Bentley, melodrama provides a "poor man's catharsis," allows him the emotional release he has been other­ wise trained to exclude from his daily life. Our modem antagonism to self-pity and sentiment, says Bentley, often masks a fear of emotion as such. But "grandiose self-pity is a fact of l i f e " f o r many. Ho suggests we check our dreams to see if they contain the melodramatic gestures and tears that we deny ourselves in daytime. "That we are all ham actors in our dreams means that melodramatic action, with its large gestures and grimaces and its declamatory style of speech, is not an exaggeration of our dreams but a duplication of them. In that respect, melodrama is the Naturalism of the dream life [italics h i s j. Nor is it only to our dreams that melodramatic acting corresponds. Civilisation, as I have been saying, asks us to hide our feelings and even instructs us in the art of doing so. What feelings we can­ not completely conceal we reduce to mere shadows of themselves. Next, Bentley asks two questions, What does Fear look like? and What does Hatred loolc like? He provides two long answers, both de­ voted to detailed physical descriptions such as "Bie pupils are 23

. • • enormously dilated" or "convulsion of lips and facial muscles, of limbs and trunk," Bentley then notes: Novi someone might suppose I have been quoting descriptions of melodramatic acting. We today have certainly never thought of anyone but a stage villain grinding his teeth or giving vent to fiendish hate in a sardonic laugh. Actually, the firs t of these quotations is from Charles Darwin's book on the emotions, and the second is from an old Italian manual on the same su b je c t. W illiam James used to read both passages to h is classes a t Harvard, and they are preserved, where I xtyself found them, in his Principles of Psychology, If these are fair accounts of emotion, then melodrama is not so much exaggerated as uninhibited ,16 Finally, Bentley argues that up to a point "melodrama is actually more natural than Naturalism, corresponds to reality, not least to modem reality, more closely than Naturalism, Something has been gained when a person who has seen the world in monochrome and in miniature suddenly glimpses the lurid and the gigantic. His imagin­ ation has been reawakened,"

If these reasons, therapeutic or inspirational, help to account for melodrama's appeal in the second half of the twentieth century, then thoy must account as well for some of its appeal in the nine­ teenth. Yet that era had specific reasons of its own to find identi­ fication and release in Victorian melodrama. In Hiss the Villain. Michael Booth explains -the enormous popularity of nineteenth-century melodrama in both England and America in these terms s In both countries rapid industrial expansion • • • cre­ ated huge urban working classes living in conditions of the utmost drabness and squalor, who demanded entertainm ent as relief from the long working day. Their level of literacy and taste was low, and the entertainment of melodrama with its combination of cheap sentiment, violent incident, and 2k

scenic thrills, was just what they required* • • • More gener­ ally, the Victorian public enjoyed less sophisticated artistic pleasures than we do today, and thrived on the sensationalism, and the extremes of pathos, nobility, virtue and vice that nov­ els and melodramas alik e supplied.3-' As Richard Altick points out in his Victorian Studies in Scarlet, "the waters of socio-historical psycho-analysis are perilous"; but even he, in his investigation of the Victorian fascination with murder, does speculate on sensationalism and violence as escape and titillation in Victorian lives. And their fascination with murder is linked with their attraction to melodrama. Altick ventures : It does seem likely that the Victorian masses' sustained enthusiasm for murder was in part a product of their intellec­ tually empty and emotionally stunted lives, so tightly con­ fined by economic and so cial circumstances. In current murder they found a ready channel both for the release of such rudi­ mentary passions as horror, morbid sympathy, and vicarious aggression and for the sheer occupation of minds otherwise rendered blank or dull by the absense of anything more pleas­ ing or intellectually more elevated. The recurrent presence of murder, delivered to their fireside by broadsheets, news­ papers, and even Staffordshire figurines, and to their hours of outside entertainment by means reaching from gaslit melo­ drama to peep shows and waxworks, gave the Victorians some­ thing to think about, something for their emotions to respond to in however crude a fashion.18 Even the upper classes hungered for vicarious violence, for largeness of gesture and emotion, in their lives. As the nineteenth century wore on, they increasingly abandoned the theatres for the more elite drama of the opera, and both Imported and native operas flourished. As David Grimsted says in Melodrama Unveiled, "Hie melodramatic tradition, which began by connecting drama and music, reached its fulfillment in the total union of the two in early nineteenth-century opera. Works such as Beethoven's Fidelio or 2$ D onizetti’s Lucia d i Laramermoor or Verdi’s Aida were the lastin g monuments of nineteenth-century melodrama. Inane plots and fla t characterizations did little to obstruct their power in evoking hu­ man emotions. They wore pure melodrama. But what does Henry James have to do with th is world of nine­ teenth-century stage drama? It is not simply that his peculiarly nomadic childhood and young adulthood allowed him to know firsthand and more familiarly than most the stage melodrama of America, England, and France. Not even that later in the century ho would write his own melodramas for the London theatre, plays so "civilized" that a disappointed gallery once hissed him off the stage, but not so subtle that they ceased to be melodramas. While James’s inveterate theatre- going and la te r play-irriting does lin k him in special ways to stage melodrama—and tho following chapter w ill discuss th a t background in some detail—it is his novels I am examining in this essay. And the connection is this: that the ideology of melodrama (the lack of communication between various moral stances, tho Ilanichoan battle be­ tween the forces of good and evil) and the trappings of melodrama (sensationalism, villainy, violent appeals to the emotions, excesses of all kinds)—these were as popular in the nineteenth-century fic­ tio n as they were in drama, and we see James influenced by the melo­ dramatic novels of the times as well—by the works of Turgenev, Dickens, George Sand, and most of a ll Balzac, who used melodrama in a most conscious and moralistic way. The two genres, drama and fiction, shared the characteristics of melodrama in the nineteenth century, each borrowing from and influencing the other.20 Early stage melodramas 26 wore In fa c t often based on gothic novels. James himself would turn his in many ways gothic novel Tho American into play form, and popular plays often presented themes and situations for writers to flesh out into novels. I f we compare any of James's novels to Rah il l 's d efin itio n of stage melodrama, we seo that James discarded much from the basic pat­ tern. Ho discarded pantomime and spectacle, for instance, as he translated tho material from dramatic to fictional form. But he kept as much as he discarded, kept the admixture of tragedy and comedy. And however much he enhanced them, he kept the stock characters—the suffering heroine, the persecuting villain, the benevolent comic, tho matronly representative of society. Further, he kept a conventionally moral and humanitarian point of view throughout much of his fiction. Vlhat emerges clearly in James's novels are melodramatic conven­ tions and assumptions, oven if his treatment of plot and character is more subtle than that of stage melodrama. James might replace the happy endings of conventional melodrama with his endings of renuncia­ tion, and ho might make character development more important than plot. But he continued to work nevertheless with characters who are typos. Even more important, the types are arranged, especially in tho early novels, so that struggle is being waged between the forces of good and e v il. For melodrama frequently depicts tho endless bat­ tle of God and Satan. Perhaps, as Jacques Barzun suggests, the es­ sence of melodrama is the "deep conviction th a t ce rtain deformed ex­ pressions of human feeling are evil and that this evil is positive and must be resisted. 27 In his moral stance, then, and in his conventions and assump­ tions, James transferred melodramatic trappings and tono from the stage to his ta le s and novels* As Manfred Mackenzie says, One thinks of tho more hectic Inflammations of the marvel­ lous in his work, of the 'fam ily secret* in The American and tho anarchist p lo t of The Princess Casamassima. There are out­ crops of Gothicism in 'Gabrielle do Bergerac' and The Turn, of the Screw, which is his superfine Castle of Otranto, Again and again James reverts to the figure of the femme jjTatalo or, after coming under Ibsen's influence, the 'strong woman,1 " He is fre­ quently drawn to tho figure of the defenseless child—'What Maisie Knew might be his subtly relentless David Copperfleid, And in The Portrait itself vie find the story of tho heiress betrayed, a staple 'convention of melodrama with its strong element of victimization and Implicit idealization of the moral attitu d es assumed to be held by the audience. This story ap­ pears in Washington Square and The Wings of the Dove as well, and is a kind of simple unit that James vexes and refino3 in many fascinating ways.22 It is the refinement, the new subtlety, the new emphasis on charactor development, that bring James's fictions to bo mistakenly called tragedies by some critics. The reader grows increasingly aware of a seriousness, a profound sadness and even hopelessness, in ­ herent in many of them. James is, wo are reminded, our most impor­ tan t modem novelist—an ticipator of Freudian thought and forerunner of Joyce and Faulkner. Wo must take him and his view of life seri­ ously. But must wo see his novels as tragedies? And if they are not—if they are instead melodramas—does th a t make his achievement any less great? To continue what has become an implicit task of the chapter—the defense as well as the definition of melodrama as a universal, viable, entertaining, and valuable genre in its own right—i t now becomes necessary to consider melodrama in relation to tragedy. As Robert Heilman says: 28

Tragedy and melodrama are contiguous in that both are ways of dealing with catastrophe; though In part committed to catastrophes of d iffe re n t make-up and o rig in . In the main they look in different ways at catastrophes that emerge from the human capacity for evil* Hence they may be mistaken for each other We do not often find either in pure form. . . . One is not better than the other* Melodrama is not merely tragedy with character left out* It is a separate and no less worthwhile mode of viewing experience, of envisioning existence* How to distin­ guish the two? For some, inevitability is the kernel of tragedy—the hero's fate must be determined. Others claim that the enlightenment of the hero is the sine qua non of tragedy. Others say that tragic heroes must always earn their fate, or that full development of char­ acter is the difference between true tragedy and something less. S till other critics say that reaction to the work rather than the work it­ self determines its definition—so that the evocation and purgation of certain emotions must take place in the audience or in the reader for a work to be tragic. Perhaps a closer look at some of these com­ monly held d istin ctio n s between tragedy and melodrama, and an appli­ cation of them to a representative few of James's novels, especially the late novels, will allow us to see more clearly how James's novels are melodramas, and how their melodrama works. I lis t six frequently recurring distinctions that warrant our attention: (1) In melodrama the hero is a victim rather than a person who has earned his or her fa te ; (2) in melodrama the hero i s undivided in te rn a lly ; (3) in melo­ drama the overthrow of the hero or heroine is not Inevitable; and (U) concomitantly, in melodrama the hero haB not had a single, serious, overriding purpose "carrying from the beginning the necessity of the 2 9 hero's undoing”; (f>) in melodrama the ending is not conclusively tragic; and (6) in melodrama there is no catharsis of pity.and fear for the audience.

(1) The hero in melodrama is a victim rather than a person who has earned his or her fate or has been fated by the gods. Children and animals do not make suitable tragic heroes, victims, as they are, of adults and of a world in which they have l i t t l e power. Further, adults who are victims likewise are unsuitable as tragic heroes. Lacking free w ill and control, they have no direction of th e ir des­ tin ies. Ve can do little more than pity them. None of them would be capable of the definitive action of an Oedipus, of his own incrim­ inating and self-aware power to choose his behavior despite the proph­ ecy th a t fated him. In The Bull From the Sea, Mary Renault recreates Oedipus' ver­ sion of his confrontation with his father at the crossroads. He is telling the story to TheseuB many years later: ”So. Did I not know that every man or woman past forty must be my father or mother now, before the god? I knew. Vlhen the redbeard cursed ma from his chariot's road and poked me with his spear, and the woman laughed beside him, did I not remember? Oh, yes. But ny wrath was sweet to me. All ny life, I never could forgo ity anger. 'Only this once,' I thought. 'The gods will wait for one day.' So I killed him and his f oot-runners, for my battle-fury made me as strong as three. The woman was in the chariot, bumbling with the reins. I remembered her laughter. So I dragged her down, and threw her across her husband1 s corpse. . . . "And later, when I rode as victor into Thebes, shaven and washed and garlanded, she met my eyes and said nothing. . . . I never told, she asked no questions. Never, until the end.”2U Pew characters in modem literature have this power to alter their own destinies, to take this kind of chance Oedipus took. Either society victimizes modem man, the product of his environment (the fiction of Hardy and Wharton offer examples of the protagonist's de­ feat by social forces), or modem man is victimized by his friends, his loved ones. Curiously, James was unlike his contemporaries Hardy and Wharton in his view of society and social forces. More inter­ ested always in tho psychological than the sociological and natural­ istic, he places his characters in society—gives them money and po­ sition so they are free to make choices. But when they ruin or limit their chances for happiness, neither they nor James blames society. Even in the one of the three major late novels that has an unquali­ fied victim as its heroine, Milly Thoale's demise is blamed on bad luck (for her fatal illness) and on personal (rather than class) betrayal by her friends. In The Ambassadors, Strother might view himself as a living proof that character is destiny, but he would never see himself as victimized by outside elements—even by the lies told him about the "virtuous relationship." Ho makes free choices; he freely reflects. Social forces are not dealt with in tho novel, and society is made up into a variegated classlessness in Strether's Paris, As for Ifeggie in The Golden Bowl, she is perhaps mors of a victim than she knows (a victim of her father's amorality as he purchases people as if they wore objets d'art)• But in the story proper, she gains control over herself and every other major character. She is, on one level, to­ tally victorious. While society is vaguely all around her (witness the parties Charlotte is forced to attend on Maggie's behalf while Maggie and her fa th e r s i t home to g eth er), the novel i s no t about society or social forces at all. It is the drama of four individu­ als. Society in James goos nameless and faceless. The characters in James's fiction, then, are rarely victims of society or social forces. But neither are they, like Oedipus, the victims of fate. Strother has openly chosen the fate he felt he de­ served. Maggie may be a victim of her father's amorality and her pe­ culiarly isolated upbringing and resulting innocence. But when she so successfully loses the innocence, we feel she chooses a new fate (she will remain Amorigo's wifo) at the same time that she is still a victim of her own powerful and naive cruelty and shortsightedness, Thus James, while rejecting the views that his characters are fated or that society has victimized his heroes, shows instead that they are victimized by their friends and by themselves. Victimization remains the key word. None of James's characters is what Heilman calls 0edipu3, an archetypal figure who "wants to obey imperatives but is betrayed by the riotous impulse,"2^ (2) The hero in melodrama is undivided internally. In Tragedy and Melodrama (1968), Robert B, Heilman s ta te s the te n e t in another way: Tragic man is essentially "divided,1* and melodramatic man es­ sentially "whole," In tragedy a fundamental human dividedness ap­ pears in characters like Hamlet and Orestes, for example, men caught between clear mandate and personal desire or ambition, between law and lust, between what they ought to do, and what they want to do, between imperative and impulse. Heilman suggests that we 32 distinguish carefully between tragedy and drama of disaster, for while the latter might seem to be the former, in disaster "the ori­ gin of the unhappiness jis locatodj In another person or an impor- sonal force*" 27 Pie disaster principle makes us always victims, be­ cause what happens comes always from without: "Kan is pitted against a force outside of himself—a specific eneny, a hostile group, a 20 social force, a natural event, an accident or coincidence." Heilman offers examples of great dramas of disaster: The Tro­ jan Women, Romeo and Ju liet, War and Peace, Richard m , Pie Duchess of Maifi—and we wonder how to classify James’s late novels* Wings, of course, f i t s the scheme p erfectly —a drama of d is a s te r with a clear-cut victim. The Ambassadors is harder to pigeon-hole* Heilman states, "In tragedy we act; in the literature of disaster, we are 29 acted upon." 7 And in a peculiar way, S trother does n e ith e r. He never acts, never takes charge of his destiny or tries to alter it* But neither is he acted upon in any way that ultimately makes a dif­ ference* When Heilman states that "tragedy is concerned with the nature of man, melodrama with the habits of man* • • we think he might have had Strether in mind as the illustration for melodrama* As for teiggie in Pie Golden Bowl, perhaps she does come to recognize a tragic dividedness in herself as she learns of her capacity for c ru e lly and d u p licity . Yet she seems to absorb h er new knowledge very easily, with remarkably little moral struggle. The conflict thus remains external, a silent war waged against Charlotte, against the ftdnce, even against her beloved father. Melodrama is not sta­ tic; i t has its own dynamics, to be sure. But in The Golden Bowl 33 the conflict is not so much within the characters as between them: "Hie issue here is not the reordering of the self, but the reordering 31 of one's relations with others. . . • " (3) In melodrama the overthrow of the hero or heroine is not inevitable; and (h) concomitantly, in melodrama tho hero has not had a single, serious overriding purpose "carrying from the beginning the necessity of the hero's undoing.For Aristotle a successful tragedy £arouse0 from the start two basic emotions, pity and fear. The fear is tho painful sense of impending evil and hero the word impending is important. Fatality must be implicit in the beginning of the dramas "It is the business of the author to organize a situa­ tion in which, artistically speaking, tho chances of a happy resolu­ tion are n il."^ Hie author, soys Ifendel, "must furnish the data

<31 which explains why the protagonist's quest is hopeless Why shouldn't Ahab k i l l the whale? we ask. I t is not impossible to k ill a whale. But of course, the original configuration includes the whale's symbolic significance, which we accept without hesitation. We declare a t once with Melville th a t the whale as given can­ not be killed. Suddenly, having accepted this world, we pass from the tale of whaling to a tragedy. And again, given this configuration, we refuse to admit even as a possibility (for we have left life for art) a later accident that could de­ stroy the configuration, and alter the theme. It is not pos­ sible (except in bad art) that the first mate should overrule Ahab, or th a t the boat should sink in a storm, fo r Melville has isolated the essentials of the theme and must carry out his examination to the necessary end,3? In a Henry James novel, his "given," his donnee, his original configuration," does not carry within itself the doom of his novel's conclusion. Nor do his characters always begin with a single, 31* serious, overriding purpose "carrying from the beginning the neces­ sity of the hero's undoing." Early in The Portrait of £ Lady, vie are told about Isabel Archer that "she had an infinite hope that she should never do anything wrong. At the novel's conclusion, she is still trying to do nothing wrong ("How passionately she needed to feel that her unhappiness should not have come to her through her otm fault" (n , 28lj). She is bound to appearances and to a strong sense of duty ("One must accept one's deeds. I married him before all the world," she says [U, ZBhJ), and she knows that she is proud and thinks a g reat deal about what "seems rig h t" ( I I , 1|16). She believes she must return to Osmond because she said she would, and for the some reason must keep her promise to return to Pansy. She believes too (and quite rightly) that she must flee from Caspar Goodwood, who is no feasible alternative as a husband. So she returns to Rome, to her martyrdom: she has her reasons.

But why is it we are not at peace with her decision? Even while realizing how consistent to her character she is being, and realizing further s till tho nineteenth-century strictures against divorce, we remain unconvinced that her return to Osmond is her only possibility (and James's l880's readers were equally distressed). Our heroine's doom was not inevitable, nor did she havB a single, serious over­ riding purpose (the charge of Pansy comes much too late in the novel). Hie rage or dismay the reader feels at the end in not ca­ th a rtic •

As for Strether, although his task as ambassador and spy and mediator may have in i t from the beginning the seeds of his undoing, he is so mild and middle-aged, his task is so much a task of intrigue, the language of the novel so much a heightened diction of diplomacy, th a t the whole novel becomes mock-heroic. S tro th e r's task is re a lly small-time, almost slight. He is sent to bring back an erring, prod­ igal son involved with a dangerous foreign lady. Although he finds a situation more complex than ho was prepared for, Strother's task cannot, by i t s very nature and despite the good i t does him, be con­ sidered a highly serious and universally important one. The task is only semi-serious, and the conclusion—Strether's rejection of both Europe and a life with Iteria Gostrey—while fitting enough for this timid, wry man, is only semi-serious as well. In this novel, the ending is clearly, conclusively non-tragic. Strether's logic is that he must not "out of the whole affair . . . have got anything for himself. A dead give-away, for tragedy is in- oxorable but never logical. In The Wings of tho Dove, Milly is James's "heiress of all the ages." Like Isabel, she is ready to affront her destiny. She has no serious purpose beyond the general one of "experiencing" life, and her overthrow is not inevitable from the novel's opening pages. Since she is so totally a victim, it is impossible to discuss tragic inevitability in her case. In fact, one of the novel's major prob­ lems is th a t i t is p artic u larly d iffic u lt to take on f a ith the nov­ el's donnee—that is, that Milly is dying and that Kate wisheB to buy time by having Densher "make love" to Milly. The very implausi- bility of the plot contributes to the melodrama of the novel, is redo­ lent of something sinister, as will be demonstrated in Chapter $. Maggie Verver has no serious purpose at the beginning of The Golden Bowl, 3h fact, she has no real notion of seriousness when we first meet her. Because of her innocence, naivete, and amorality, it is perhaps inevitable (given this "original configuration"), that she lose her husband to Charlotte. But it is not inevitable that she get him back in the way she does. The sto ry could have gone several ways —its conclusion (ambiguous as it is) is not inherent in its begin­ nings. And here the very ambiguity creates melodramatic tensions. While we tend to associate ordinary melodrama with cle a r-c u t moral stan ces, Jamesian melodrama u tilis e s ambiguity to create more and more suspense for the reader. We would have to call James's novels failures of tragedy, if in fact there were any indication ho ever meant to write tragedies, be­ cause James fails to convince us that fatality and inevitability are implicit in tho hero's or heroine's setting out on his mission. As Mandel says, "We see a way out where the author did n o t. We, a t least, believe that the original configuration was by no means in­ auspicious."^ (£) In melodrama the ending is n o t conclusively tra g ic ; and (6) in melodrama the literature provides no catharsis for the audience. Treatment of items 3 and h already pre-ompt3 much of the discussion of points $ and 6, We already know, for example, why the ending of Portrait is unsatisfactory, why the ending in melodrama can be nei­ ther conclusively tragic nor cathartic. But the issue can be devel­ oped further. Surely a conclusively tragic ending brings death or a kind of destruction for the hero, a feeling of peace and catharsis for tho audience, and a sense of closure for both hero and audience. When we turn to tho conclusions of James1 s late novels, vie are re­ minded of remarks he made at various times about his endings. In his Prefaces (written in 1907 and 1908), he several times commented on the artist's difficulty in knowing when to stop. In the Preface to Roderick Hudson ho asked this quostion: "Where, for the complete expression of one's subject, does a particular relation stop—giving way to some other not concerned in that expression?" His answer: "Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is oternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so."^® James's remarks must be kept in mind v;hen we turn to the con­ clusions of tho novels of the Last Phase. In the final scene of The Ambassadors, Maria Qostrey has mado i t clear she would like to marry Strother, and ho has mado it equally clear that he can­ not marry her. She realizes that ho is right in his decision. So then she had to take it, though still with her defeated protest. "It isn 't so much your being 'right1— it's your horrible sharp eye for what makes you so." "Oh but you're just as bad yourself. You can't re­ sist me when I point that out." She sighed it at last all comically, all tragically, away. "I can'/b indeed resist you." "ftion there we are!" said Strethor (H, 327). 38 "Very pretty, very charming and pleasant and droll and sad all this concluding," James had said about his projected ending for The Am­ bassadors when he wrote to Harper's in September of 1900 his "Project of Novel. And we can only agree with his description of this last scene* There is nothing tragic about the novel's conclusion* In Wings of the Dove, Kate says to Densher as she turns to the door, "We shall never be again as we werel" There is drama here— and in the word "never" there is more than a suggestion of finality in their parting* Ambiguity exists as well (Densher has just said, " I'll marry you, mind you, in an hour"), so we cannot know with com­ plete certitude that theBe lovers are through with one another* It does seem, however, that their relationship is irreparably damaged— Kate knows Densher is now forever in love with H illy1 s memory—and to that extent tho conclusion is destructive* But one must remember that in Wings, the heroine's demise took place some fifty pages be­ fore the conclusion of the novel* The finality of the break-up of Kate and Densher is not the decisive issue in considering whether Wings is melodrama or tragedy* At the conclusion of The Golden Bowl, Adam and Charlotte have just left for Amsrica. Maggie, victorious at last in separating the Prince from Charlotte and in regaining his interest, has thrown out— perhaps in guilt, perhaps to demonstrate once more her unceasing magnanimity—one of her frequent compliments of Charlottes "Isn't she too splendid?" Seconds later she adds, "That's our help, you see." To which the Prince responds, "'See? I see nothing but you.' And the truth of it had with this force after a moment so strangely 3 9 lighted his eyes that aB for pity and dread of them she buried her own in his breast." No death or destruction here. The heroine seems to have been victorious, and achieving her end she almost makes of the novel a comedy. Only the words "pity" and "dread" suggest th a t Maggie's victory has not been a complete one. And for the reader, the conclusion leaves a doe ply troubling suspicion that toggle's victory has not been a moral one. One has only to compare the restlessness and coyness and am­ biguity of these three endings to the conclusions of a tragic novel like Moby Dick, to see that James was aiming for something quite different. In Moby Dick two characters command our attention throughout. Ishmael's story provides a comic ending, that is, a suc­ cessful, life-giving conclusion. But Ishmael's story ends with the same air of restlessness and ambiguity I attribute to James's end­ ings, since Ishmael is rescued but still orphaned. Ahab's story, however, the tragic story, ends with a finality and a catharsis. Ahab has drowned, and the Fequod is disappearing into the sea. I quote from the la st two paragraphs of "The Chase—Third Day"s . . . A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed tho main- true k downwards from i t s n atu ra l home among the s ta rs , peeking a t the f la g , and incommoding Tashtego there; th is bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing be­ tween the hammer and tho wood; and simultaneously feeling that ethereal th rill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-grasp, kept hie hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and holmotOd herself with it. liO

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf j a sullen white surf beat against its steep sidesj then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.uO The last part of tho passage is tranquil, spiritual, and, I believe, representative of the healing spirit of tragedy. But if tragedy is meant to complete, conclude, suggest man defeated but enlightened and at peace with the cosmos, then surely we cannot call James!s novels tragedies. Even when his characters are enlightened, they have no re la tio n to the cosmos—only to one another. They don’t d ie. And they never rest. They walce up to the world day after day. That ceaselessness of the struggle seems to me to be tho very heart of Jamesian melodrama. As James wrote in his 1878 "Ivan Turgenieff" essay: "Idfe in, in fact a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very ap t to be weak; fo lly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of senso in sm all, and mankind generally un­ happy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it." ^

While i t does not provide cath arsis, melodrama often provides closure, tidying-up, a sense of settlement. Jamesian melodrama, how­ ever, does not even provide these satisfactions, and in concluding th is chapter, I wish to concentrate on Jamas and his special devia­ tio n from the patterns of standard melodrama. His endings do not produce catharsis, and for some of the reasons mentioned above. As was discussed in points 3 and 1|, unsatisfactory endings—ondings that are not inevitable—tend to annoy or anger rather than bring peace. Next, a decisive ending results in a kind of peace or ca­ tharsis if only because the story is over, concluded. James's nov­ els, by his own admission, are never really over, which makes them peculiarly modem melodramas, like infinitely superior soap operas. Further, no one character completely captures our imaginations in melodrama because sympathy is diffused. The story is so much the story of relationships that the characters are bound to one another in a social rather than a cosmic way. Despite what I claim else­ where about the terrible isolation of the central character, there ore s till several other characters claiming our interest, even our sympathy. Even technically our sympathies are diffused—through shifts in point of view or through narrators who filte r the story for us. Thus no Jamesian character stands before us as utterly alone as an Oedipus, a Lear, a Hamlet, or even an Othello. In James, as in all melodrama, social relations, not cOBmic ones, are our ul­ timate concern.

Chapter Two, "Defining Melodrama," demonstrates two major points—that James's novels are melodramas rather than tragedies, and that they ore nevertheless serious works of art. The chapter's purpose i s to both id e n tify melodrama and reconfirm i t s worth. Chap­ ter Three examines both the special forces which shaped James's life and his vision of art and the early work in which he displayed his melodramatic vision. Accepting the given, then, that the novels are melodramas, I do not rework in the last three chapters of the thesis the points made in Chapter Two. Instead I use the chapters to iden­ tify and illustrate oblique dialogue, degrees of specification, and the stock character, devices used to foster and heighten the melo­ drama in each of the l a s t fo u r novels. FOOTNOTES FOR CHAPTER TWO

^Sllen Leyburn, Strange Alloy! The Relation of Comedy to Tragedy in the Fiction of Henry James (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), xvii. ^Elizabeth Stevenson, The Crooked Corridor: A Study of Henry James (New York: Macmillan, 19h9), p. l2!T. ” ^James L. Rosenberg, "Melodrama, 11 in The Context and C raft of Drama, ed. Robt. W. Corrigan and James L. Rosenberg (San Francisco: chandler, 19610, PP« 168-85. V . V/. Dupee, "The Secret life of Edward Windsor," The King of the Cats (New York: Noonday Press—Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1 pp. UO-bl. Dupee writes, "The Duke's account of the abdication crisis is likely to become classic in the literature of memoirs. No master plotter among novelists, not even Henry James, could have invented a richer 'situation' than the one that develops at this point. There is enmity without and treachery within • . . £bu£f the hero of A King's Story is no Henry James hero after all and his story is not a novei. It is an instance, perhaps, of what James used to call 'life a t i t s stupid w ork,1 and as such i t is not without pathos and beauty." ^Gary W ills, Nixon Agonistes: Hie Crisis of the Self-Made Man (Boston: Houghton M ifflin, 1976J. ^Eric Bentley, "Malodrama," in Tragedy: Vision and Form, Robert W. Corrigan, ed. (San Francisco: Chandler), p.2^6. ^Bentley, p. 223. ®Tha Compact Edition of Oxford English Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press, 197T)7Y,3 21-22. ^Frank R ah ill, The World of Melodrama (Pennsylvania and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967), p. xiv. ■^Michael Booth, Hiss the V illa in : Six English and American Melodramas (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1961*)'.' See his introduction, pp. 9-1*0. ^Booth, pp. 38-39. ■^Booth, p. ho.

1*3 14* R ichard D. Altick, Victorian Studies in Scarlet (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), p. 10": •l-^David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled; American Theater and Culture 1800-1890 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 2h0-iil.

20Altick, pp. 70-71. 21jacques Barzun, "Henry James, Melodramatist,11 Kenyon Review, V (Autumn, 191*3), 910. 22Manfrdd Mackenzie, "Ironic Melodrama in The Portrait of a Lady," Modem F iction Studies, 12 (Spring, 1966)',' 8. “ 23Robert Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968). See his chapter entitled "The Drama of Disaster." 2l*Mary Renault, The Bull From the Sea (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962), pp. 92-93. 2^Heilman, p. 11. 2^Heilman, pp. 10-13. 2?Heilman, p. 2li. 2%eilman, p. 79. 2^Heilman, p. 32. ^OReilman, p. 79. ^Heilman, p. 86. 32oscar Mandel, A D efinition of Tragedy (New York: New York University Press, 196T), p. 27. 33Mandol, p. 32.

^huandel, p. 33* ^Mandel, pp. 31*—39* 3%enry James, The Portrait of a Lady, the New York Edition (New York: Scribner’s, 1905), I ,”£87 ^Mandel, p. 38. h$ 30Henry James, Preface to Roderick Hudson, in The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, intro, Richard P, Blackmur (New York and London: Scribner*s, 193b), p. $ • 3^The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. 0, Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York: Galaxy—Oxford University Press, 1961), p, ijllt • b°Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Norton C ritical Edition, ed, Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York: W. V/, Norton, 1967), p. ii69. b^Henry James, "Ivan Turgenieff," French Poets and Novelists (New York: Macmillan, 190U). Chapter Three JAMESIAN MELODRAMAS LIFE AND ART

In hie critical biography of Henry James, F. W. Dupee praises the three autobiographical volumes James leaves as a record of his childhood, youth, and early manhood. They belong, he says, "with The Education of Henry Adams and they complement it: the personal as against the public history of an American mind."^ We are lucky to have the volumes—A Small Boy and Others (1913)» Notes of a Son and Brother (1911|)» and The Middle Years (1917)— filled as they are with wit and brilliance, plus the insights and data so valuable to those interested in James's life as well as his art. But valuable as they are, we are brought up short by one important facts in them Henry James lied. Edel points out that James "freely revised" as he quoted from the letters of his brother and father-- as if their texts needed the same retouching given his own work in the New York Edition. When his nephew protested, after Notes of a Son and Brother was published, at this violation of “William's language, Henry explained that he was showing i t a marked respect. He could hear, he said, the voice of William saying to him, "Oh, but you're not going to give me away, to hand me over, in my raggedness and try poor acci­ dents, quite unhelped, unfriendly: you're going to do the very best for me you can, aren't you?" His goal was to make the documents (and his own text) "engagingly readable and thereby more tasted and liked." He admitted that "I did in­ stinctively regard it at last as all ny truth, to do what I would with." And while he pleaded th a t he retouohed only form, he subtly altered content as well. Part of the family history had to be written as arts life in its raw state was U6 inartistic. This was why Janies joined two trips to Europe into one, and made his father write a letter to Emerson in stronger language than was in the manuscript.2 Edel suggests elsewhere the theory that James likewise revised some of the letters his cousin Hinny Temple wrote to the lawyer John Gray--to make them more "effective."^ And when we re c a ll how James destroyed his papers and correspondence in a bonfire at Lamb House,^ and how he demonstrated throughout his adult life a tendency not to trust people with the experiences of their own lives (hence his com­ mitting their donnees to his journals or his cutting them off when he had heard enough of their anecdotes) we see his consistent need to improve upon life for the sake of art. What can we use, then, to balance the picture of his life pre­ sented to us by Henry James? Fortunately, material is available, and particularly valuable are F. 0. Matthiessen's The James Family, Edel's massive five-volume biography, and Alice James’s journals. Further, we have James’s letters. Despite his caution, James left behind more evidence for his biographers and his critics than he

knew. Ab Edel says in his introduction to James's letters, "The Master had died in the belief that his friends were as reticent as he was. If he burned the letters he received, surely they burned his letters as well. ..." But a James letter was "too rare to suppress," and "the Master's friends clung to his letters as they clung to his memory."^ Thus we re ly on these m aterials, and on the comments of friends and acquaintances of the James family to comple­ ment Henry's autobiography, to allow us to piece together what that 1*8 family's strange life, their "private venture in American idealism,"? must have been like. It should be clear, however, that as much as the work of others balances James's own work—corrects it, if you will, it is his auto­ biography which remains most crucial in the following examination of his life. For when we turn to his autobiography for hard evidence for his melodramatic temperament, we find it immediately in the fact that James did lie and exaggerate. That in itself is proof of his melodramatic bent, his excitable temperament, his constant need to "heighten" life's experiences. The relevance of this biographical investigation to my thesis should soon be clear. While the first several pages of the chapter present only the barest sketch (little more than a chronology) of James's first thirty-three years, the next section backtracks to ex­ amine the melodramatic implications of the facts of his life. The chapter examines the youthful James's emotional make-up and intellec­ tual education as he lived under the strain of that curious household composed of the seemingly dominant father, the threatening older brother, the powerfully influential mother, and those remaining three siblings Garth Wilkinson, Robertson, and Alice—each neurotic, each doomed to early death or failure. The chapter demonstrates that even as a boy James displayed a melodramatic temperament, one that was en­ couraged by those around him, by his position as second son, and by the peculiar circumstances of his youth and early manhood. It was this particular life—and James's particular way of experiencing it— that when sublimated into art makes melodrama. Countless artists have turned the stuff of their lives into unmelodramatic art, but I hope to show how James's way of experiencing his family relationships and reading and playgoing and "laying his ghosts" was melodramatic* Somehow his temperament and his circumstances interacted to make for a melodramatic vision of life* He recognized the stuff of melodrama in his life| and he projected his vision into his art. Although i t is impossible to attempt in a chapter what Edel needs five volumes to do, a careful look at his "formative" years— and I am considering the first thirty-three as his most formative be­ cause not until he settled in Europe for good did he become his own person—is adequate to my purpose* In the first thirty-three years, one's basic patterns of thought are established, one's temperament is made f a ir ly consistent. By the time he moved to London, James's melo­ dramatic vision, gesture, and verbal expression were fully developed and functioning.

It is difficult to evaluate Henry James, Sr.'s role in the spir­ itual reformation of the I8lj0»s and ' £0’s in America, He was a Trans - cendentalist, an Idealist, a Swedenborgian, a philosopher, a prolific author of books that few people read then or read today* He was an optimist, a "personality." Not so much a public figure during his lifetime, he was, as Dupee remarks, "among the notable private per­ sons of the age* « • • Nearly everyone thought him remarkable. 'He Q i s , ' observed Emerson, 'the best man and companion in the w orld.'" Because his hatred of institutions, especially religious and educa­ tional ones, was coupled with an inherited fortune, Henry James, Sr. £0 was able to educate his children in his own way. AH five James * * children were bom between 181*2 and 181*8, and their father was as ambitious for the last three as he was for William and Henry. Their lives were a series of experiments with private tutors and various kinds of schools in both Europe and America. Henry James, Jr. was bom in 161*3, only sixteen months after William. He was taken to England at six months, then to France and England at about eighteen months. (He would later claim that his earliest memory was of the Place Vendome.) His American birthplace, Albany, remained home until 181*7, when the family moved to Manhattan* Then in June of 1855, when Herny was twelve, the family was off to Europe again, this time for an extended stay of three years. During these peripatetic years lived in America and Europe in the constant presence of his large, noisy, and competitive family, the very young James would envy, perhaps not so curiously, people who were orphans. As he recalls his orphaned couBins in A Small Boy and Others: "X think ry first childish conception of the enviable lot, formed amid these associations, was to be so little fathered or mothered, so l i t t l e sunk in the short range, th a t the romance of l i f e seemed to lie in some constant improvisation, by vague overhovering authorities, of new situations and horizons.11^

Yet while he might balk at being too much fathered and mothered, too muoh with his ubiquitous family, and while such frequent travel would make it difficult for him, already shy and withdrawn, to play with other boys, Henry never criticiz ed h is nomadic childhood as William and Alice would—perhaps because i t gave him the opportunity to read and write constantly, which i8 all he seems to have wanted, (When he was fourteen, his father said of him, "Harry is not so fond of study, properly so-called, as of reading. He is a devourer of li­ braries, and an irmonso writer of novels and dramas. He has consid­ erable talent, as a writer, but I am at a loss to know whether he w ill ever accomplish much,")3-® The history of Henry James's early years, then, is a history of travel and of reading. His life as a reader and writer was being shaped. We have no official record of the books Henry James read, but even allowing for the inaccuracies and failings of his memory, his first autobiographical volume, A Small Boy and Others, offers some idea of how much he read as a boy. In the opening pages of that first volume, James recalls his earliest days with William, at a time when they were "still book- 11 less." They did not remain bookless for long, and indeed books were a l l around them from the s ta r t. And so, i t seems, were authors: James recalls "Emerson's occasional presence in Fourteenth Street" j3*^ he meets Irving on a steamboat while he is s t i l l a child; and only slightly older, he meets Thackeray. So his world is peopled with authors, living authors, and very early on, he wants to be one too. The books th a t surroundod the young boys were not only th e ir father's heavy philosophical tomes. James remembers his grandmother reading the "fiction of the day," the pirated novels of the Mrs. Trollope, Gore, March, Hubback, and Misses Kavanagh and Aguilar Brawn to tiie novels, he learned that certain works were taboo, that "even the most alluring fic tio n was not always fo r l i t t l e boys to read,"33* He had heard about a novel entitled Hot Com, concerning the career of a little girl who hawked the hot com in the streets. Told he could not read it, he wondered "why, if it was to be so right for others, i t was only to be wrong for mo."*^ He waB evidently* puzzled in this way more than once. He had been given the novel The Lamplighter to pacify him, was told that it was a "grown-up" novel. And he might have believed it if he had not clandestinely read, in a little cabin on the New Brighton steamer, a novel by Baroness Tautphoeus called The In itials, a book h is father had bought for his 16 mother. This one was grown-up, "and the difference was exquisite." While James's father tried to divert his attention towards "suit­ able" reading—Punch, or Qodey's Lady's Book, or The Charm (an English periodical he subscribed to for his sons)—he must have also lifted the restrictions fairly early in Henry's childhood. For young Henry, in love with the smell of books, entranced by The Bookstore dn New 17 York City, the "fondest of ry father's resorts," kept reading everything he could. He consumed Poo, Hawthorne, Thackeray, Dickens, and Scott, and in Boulogne at age fourteen, after a nearly fatal at­ tack of typhoid, he read the classic French authors with an old tutor. But he read, and continued to read, a wealth of "bad" fiction too~ gothic novels, penny dreadfuls, sensation novels,*^ novels which, like Dickens' most popular works, fed the public's demand for melo­ drama, suspense, and violence. The plays and "entertainments" James saw as a boy similarly nourished his vivid imagination. In the years he was growing up, there was a close correlation between the popular fiction and the popular drama of the day. Novels were, according to Montague S3 Summers, the bibliographer of the genre, "merely the story of popular melodrama . . . resolved into fiction. Very often the melodrama it­ se lf was the dram atization of a famous novel. . . . F ictio n and the stage constituted a common pool from which writers for both genres • drew their material. Back and forth, writers for both genres drew their material. I t was when he was about eight years old that Henry, already ex­ posed to the "fiction of the day," began attending plays. (William had been taken to the theatre before him, and moro than thirty years later the remembrance still rankled.) As James recalled, his first play was a classic enough beginning, A Comedy of Errors. But soon he was attending plays like Jocko or the Brazilian Ape, Raoul or the Uight-Owl (Edel discovers it was actually entitled Zaoul or the Magic on S tar) , Love, or the Countess and the S erf, and Uncle TQmfs Cabin. He had earlier read (even before he read The Initials) the Stowe novel, and now he saw two versions of the play, the second at his first "theatre party." In A Small Boy and Others, he recalls his ex­ citement as he realizes that he could nor; be a critic—because he could compare the two versions. Further, he notes with great inter­ est the reactions of those people with him. Though he recognizes the shoddiness of the production, the audience and the play affect him deeplys "I could count the white stitches in the loose patchwork, and yet could take it for a story rich and harmonious j I could know we had all intellectually condescended and that we had yet had the th rill of an aesthetic adventure; and thin was a brave beginning for a consciousness that was to be nothing If not mixed and a curiosity that was to be nothing if not restless."2^ The boy James attended Nicholas Nickleby and As You like It as well as The Cataract of the Ganges• All were melodramas, but the last mentioned presented spectacle as well: Mme. Fonisi "dashed up the more or less perpendicular waterfall on a fiery black steed and with an effect only a little blighted by the chance flutter of a drapery out of which peeps the leg of a trouser and a big male fo o t, • • • 1,22 As James recalls other plays and researches his childhood, grop­ ing fo r "our e a r lie s t aesth etic seeds,"2^ he remembers Bamum*s, The Great American Museum, Franconi's, the Crystal Palace, Niblo's, the National Theatre—the buildings that presented these entertainments and plays (all melodramatic) that enriched his youth. His trips abroad gave him ad ditional opportunities—he would atten d the th eatre in England and France as well as in New York, But in France he missed La Dame aux Came lias because i t was unsuitable for children, and the London theatros offered, says Edel, "the same typo of enter­ tainment as those of New York—lu rid melodrama and sprawling fa rc e , sentimental drama and ranting eloquence, translations and bowdleri- zations from the French."2'* Back a t home, finding i t d if f ic u lt to play with other boys, James spent time writing plays of his own on quarto sheets of ruled paper: "I cherished the ^cene* . , • I thought, I lisped, at any rate I composed, in scenes, • • • ,,2<* In later years his familiarity with the Theatre Francais would make all other theatre less satisfying for him. But the influence of the early melodramas he witnessed so frequently as a boy stayed with him as a man. In both his plays and his fictions he would continue to compose in scenes. He would s till attend blatant melodramas, nil New York in 1875, fo r example, he saw The Two Orphans and Women of the Day. And although he grew much more discerning, labelling the la tte r play vulgar, ghastly, and monstrous, he nevertheless would re ­ sort freely to melodrama in his own published plays and in his novels from earliest to last. Residing in Newport for a time, James hurt his back (in October of 1861) in fighting a fire at a stable, suffering that "obscure hurt" which would remain with him, he claimed, for the rest of his life. Freed then from fighting in the Civil War, James used those years in Newport to continue his literary education: "Brought up on the early Victorians, he was introduced . . . to the recent French novel, with its very different specifications. He began to read Balzac and at the same time he encountered, in the current numbers of the Revuo des Deux Hondos, the more recent work of Gautier and Merimee, whose Venus d 'l l l e he proceeded to tra n sla te . Balzac's sys- tom and documentation, the storytelling finesse of the other two, strengthened his growing belief in professionalism."2^ Next, James entered into a period dominated by what Dupee calls the "belles-lettres mind"—"the kind of mind that expresses itself best in the essay, the lecture, the sermons, the history, the occa- 28 sional poem." And while la te r James would see pure fic tio n and drama as more important and would attack "the platitude of state­ ment," for now the "belles-lettres mind" had a strong hold over 56 him* James Russ oil Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton—and later Howells--were the most influential men of the period, and James would know them a ll. By the tims he was twenty-five, James had rejected both engin­ eering school and law school, having spent brief periods of time in each. Further, he would soon reject Norton's offer of the editorship of the North American Review (because of poor health, he claimed). He was, at this time, reading and writing about the French realists, and as Dupee says, The two writers who were closest to his mind were so dis­ similar a pair as Hawthorne and Balzac. He was influenced ‘ ‘ by George Eliot—her heroines, her morality—but the other two represented something larger: two opposing ideas of the a r t i s t . The two id eas were in James him self and were p er­ manently to remain in him in uneasy combination, Europe, the world, career, reputation, the power of the real, success by virtue of industry and accumulation, the artist as Master— this was Balzac j whereas Hawthorne was for him pretty much the opposite of these things; the contemplative, retiring, and only occasionally successful artist.^9 Perhaps i t was the "uneasy combination" that made the next sev­ eral years of his life relatively inactive ones. He remained at home in Cambridge, nursing his ailments, reading, and writing letters and reviews (he wrote fa r more and f e l t f a r b e tte r when William was away from home) Ho became close friends with Howells, he briefly mat Dickens, he worked on his essays. He was often bored and lonely. In l86p he departed for a fifteen-month stay in Europe, Tliero is no evidence to suggest that James at that tima intended to make Europe his home, yet ho gloried in being back there, and his responses were often emotional—"I went reeling and moaning thro' the streets, in a fever of enjoyment," he wrote about his visit to Rome. In London he visited the eating-houses, the theatres, the museums— and one day at the National Gallery, while he was looking at a Titian, he recognized, from a photograph, the little man with the large head who was sitting beside him* The language he uses is latter-day James, but it captures the enthusiasm of the young James: "I thrilled, it perfectly comes back to me, with the prodigy of this circumstance that I should be admiring Titian in the same breath with Mr. Swin­ burne—that is in the same breath in which he admired Titian and in which I also admired him, the whole constituting on the spot between us, for appreciation, that is for mine, a fact of intercourse, such a fa c t as could stamp and colour the whole passage ineffaceably, and this even though the more illustrious party to it had within the min- ute turned off and le f t me shaken."'' Back in Cambridge, worried about his largely emotional response to Europe, he cautiously wrote, "It's a complex fate being an American, and one of the responsibili­ ties it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe. Believing now th at when he returned to Europe i t would have to bo fo r years rather than fo r months, he embarked upon what he would la te r c a ll hiB "middle years," As Edel says, "By t r ia l , by erro r, by the happy accidents of nature and the long ordeal of discipline, the artist had been formed, a quiet, pondering, sovereign being, with * a great, strange, passionate gift of expression wedded to the gift of observation and insight. 'Ifystorious and incontrollable (even to oneself) is the growth of one's mind,' he wrote to William. 'little by little , I trust, my abilities will catch up with ny ambitions. 1 "3h Now Janes began to write even more, though not enough to please himself: "During his two years in Cambridge Henry Janes wrote not only a series of talesf but a short novel, eight travel sketches, two dramatic sketches, seven book reviews, and three art notices—and counted himself ’wantonly id le .'"^ Janes's next stay in Europe lasted a year and a h a lf, from late 1872 to l87h. He wrote travel pieceB for The Nation, published some stories, and began Roderick Hudson. He sometimes missed America, feeling that Europe was "holding one at arm's length, and condemning one to a meagre scraping of the surf ace. But back in Cambridge, afte r a winter in New York which he called "bright, cold, unremunera- 37 tiv e , uninteresting," he decided to return to Europe once more, perhaps for a long time. This was what Dupee calls "The Great Deci­ sion." I t was a decision based on many idlings—an unappreciative American press, a possessive American fam ily, the ambivalence of his feelings towards his native country. Europe offered him more pleas­ ure and better company. It offered health spas and better climates for this man who had been ill frequently even as an adult. It of­ fered a world which perhaps would sa tisfy what he called his "inward romantic principle." James probably did not fully realize how seri­ ous a step he was taking in 1875, although he wrote to his family jubilantly upon his arrival: "I take possession of the old world— I inhale it—I appropriate it." ^ During his 187U stay in Italy, James had complained of the lack of male companionship in his life. Now, in Paris, he found himself once more p art of a circ le of female American and Russian expatriots. But he did have one important and influential group of male compan­ ions, th a t group centering around Turgenev. Through th a t w riter whom he adnired so much, James met Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola, Daudet—he triumphantly wrote to a friend that he was "in the councils of the gods."39 The writers were stimulating company, and Turgenev became a friend as well as a kind of mentor for James, Even years later, in the Preface to Portrait of £ Lady, James would recapture the tremen­ dous excitement he felt when the tendency of the Russian to create a story beginning with a single central character seemed to justify his own tendency to do so.^° Yet even his kinship with Turgenev was not enough; and realizing that he would always be "an eternal outsider" in Paris (he had almost no contact with its closed aristocracy), he crossed the Channel and took lodgings, as he had always suspected he eventually would, in London in December of 1676. He was at that highly significant age of thirty-three when he came to the place that would be his true home for the rest of his life.

2his then is the bare outline of James's first thirty-three years, a chronology against which background can be discovered the emerging melodramatic sensibility. If we return now to the general effect on the household of the father's ideas and rootless wanderings during Henry's early years, and if we examine his psychic relation­ ships with his father, his mother, William, and his own wound, we shall see, I believe, how his life could and did make for an essen­ tially melodramatic response and vision in Henry James. 60

Although Henry seems to have objected little to the travel and rootlessness of the children's early years, William would later ob­ ject to his haphazard schooling, claiming it had retarded his devel­ opment as a scientist.^ And Alice James makes'clear in her diary that she disapproved of their childhood wanderings. She would warn William against repeating the same pattern with his children: ,rWhat enrichment of mind and memory can children have without continuity and if they are torn up by the roots every little while as we were? Of all things don't make the mistake which brought about our rootless and accidental childhood,11 ^ The father then, though acting in good faith, did not always display good Judgment. For all his originality, independence of thought, and authority, there was much about the elder Henry James that was eccentric, puerile, even infantile. He was in many ways a susceptible and extremely emotional man in an emotional household he helped to create. Alice tells about his bouts of homesickness (homesickness evidently overtook any member of the famity who was absent from the others for very long^): "Father's sudden returns at the end of 36 hours, having left to be gone a fortnight, with Mother beside him holding his hand and we fiv e children pressing close round him 'as if he had just been saved from drowning,1 and he pouring out, as he alone could, the agonies of desolation thro' which he had come."^ Later in her diary, Alice is reminded by someone who brings her a ChristmaB present early of "the beloved pater—so the wise and simple meet—who used to spoil our Christmases so faithfully for us, by stealing in with us, when Mother was out, to the forbidden closet and giving us a peep the week or so before. I can't remember whether he used to confess to Mother a fte r, or not, the dear, dear creature 1 What an ungrateful wretch I was, and how I wish he hadn't done it!" The famous "vastation" provides another illustration of James, Sr.'s being reduced to "almost helpless infancy." Living near Wind­ sor Forest during an extended stay in England, and while sitting alone in the dining room following a meal, he found himself overcome, as he describes it, hy "a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imag­ ination, by some damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from h is fe tid personality in ­ fluences fatal to life,"^ The terror laBted a full hour, and its effect l e f t him helpless fo r months, u n til, hearing about him from a casual acquaintance, James found some relief in the doctrines of Swedenborg. This was the man who created his children's intellectual atmos­ phere, who encouraged their debate and greatly valued their articu­ lateness, who expected them to be both high-strung and high- spirited,^ That the children's lives were strained there is no doubt one family friend in Newport would say la te r th at the "unhappy" James children fought like "cats and dogs, . . . Perhaps the family friend overestimated their unhappiness and misread their childish quarrels. But certainly it is apparent the children suffered from the stress and competitiveness of their unusual household—and from their father's "vastation," an-experience demonstrating the man's suggestibility as well as his emotionality and fearfulness. life was treacherous—even a return home was fe lt as just having been saved from drowning• In later years William would have several nervous breakdowns as he attempted to come to terms with evil in the universe, and Henry James too was never forgetful of the "vastation,1' and would, like his father and brother, conceive of life as a Manichean struggle with a real and palpable evil. There were difficulties in Henry's relationship with his father. If he often saw his father as generous, brilliant, loving, and lively, he also came to see him as ultimately limited and ineffectual. He was aware of his father's too easy optimism (an optimism persisting even after the vastation experience, which the father was evidently more able : to overlook than the son). Certainly the father's trans­ cendental and romantic ideology was tempered in the son, closer as Henry James, Jr., was to the realists and naturalists in his views of the limitations of man's perceptions, instincts, and behavior. James thought his father's theological scheme invalidated by an "optimism fed so little by any sense of things as they were or are." And elsewhere James had said, regarding his father's desire to protect his - children from unpleasant realities, "Our general medium of life ... • was such as to make a large defensive verandah, which seems to have very stoutly and completely surrounded us, play more or less the part of a raft of rescue in too high a tide, too high a tide there about us of the ugly and the graceless."-’0 In his The Pilgrimage of Henry James (192*>), Van Wyck Brooks quotos this passage and then glosses i t with the following remark-: "The ugly and the graceless were, to be sure, nine-tenths of human life; but that was the point, it was life itself this father feared on behalf of his children. . . . Cognizant of his father's over-protectiveness, Jamas further re­ sented (it was a forty-year resentment) being named Henry James, Junior: "Throughout his life Henry volubly protested against the parental failure to le t him have a distinctive name and (by the same token) an identity of his own, as he struggled in 'that family of competing egos' to find his own identity."-^ His ambivalent attitude towards his father is apparent—his awareness of the fortitude and the integrity of the man juxtaposed with his perception of his fa­ ther's emotional excesses and lack of literary success. 3h Notes of

£ Son and Brother James would wonder whether there was a relation be­ tween his father's early amputation of his lower leg and his apparent i n e f f e c t u a l i t y .A n d fa r e a rlie r than th a t, a t the time a t which he too was badly hurt during the same kind of situation (the fighting of a stable fire) in which his father had damaged his leg, young James must have felt it a peculiar parallel, an ominous coincidence. He must have wondered i f he too—Henry James, Junior—would be rendered ineffectual in adulthood. As for Mrs. James, if, in his adult, retrospective years, James saw his mother's greatest trait to be her completely self-effacing love for her family, he nevertheless was aware of a certain ambiguity and role-reversal in his home life, "a father strong, robust, manly, yet weak and feminine, soft and yielding, indulging his children at every turn; and a mother, strong, firm, but irrational and 6h co n trad icto ry .(L ilia Cabot Perry, who married a boyhood friend of tho Jameses, records still another view of the James family [albeit in later yearsj when she writes of the "poly banality of the James house, ruled by Mrs. James, when Henry James's father used to limp in and out and never seemed re a lly to 'belong' to his wife or Miss Walsh [Aunt KateJ, large florid stupid-seeming ladies, or to his clever but coldly self-absorbed daughter, who was his youngest child. • • • ") After his mother died, James would write in his Notebook, "She was our life, she was the house, she was the keystone of the arch. She held us all together, and without her we are scattered reeds. She was patience, she was wisdom, she was exquisite maternity. Her sweetness, hor mildness, her great natural beneficence were unspeak­ able, and it is infinitely touching to me to write about her here as one that was," Yet, according to Edel, as much as James loved her, he realized at some level that while she seemed self-effacing and sa crificin g , she was in fa c t the most demanding and manipulative of governing matriarchs. As Edel points out, James's stories frequently reveal his fear of women. Wives rob their husbands of their creative energy, force them to write potboilers in order to keep tho family in style, and at least in one stoiy, "The Lesson of the Master," the wife acts aB censor as well, forcing the writer to burn a manuscript.*^ Once his mother wrote to him, "You would make, dear Harry, ac­ cording to ny estimate, the most loving and loveable and happiest of husbands." But in a letter to a friend W itten in 1881, James would make a peculiarly negative and telling remark: "I am unlikely ever to marry. . . . I f I were to marry I should be g u ilty in iry own eyes of inconsistency—X should pretend to think quite a little bettor of life than I really do." In his first volume of the life of James, Edel had noted that, viewing his parents' marriage and its resulting dangers (especially to a writer who wanted to be anything but inef­ fectual), James "accordingly chose the path of safety. He remained celibate.""’® But by the time he wrote volume four, Edel had learned that James was evidently not always celibate. And from the vantage point of the final volume five, Edel suggosts that James's relation with his mother (one of both oxtrome dependence and fear) was a clas­ sic cose almost guaranteed to produce both homosexuality and "adult infantilism." James's homosexuality is reticently discussed in Edel's fourth volume,^ and in volume five Edel quotes a doctor who treated James extensively for what was apparently a nervous breakdown. Dr. Joseph Collins' diagnosis: Jame3 had "an enormous amalgam of the feminine in his malce-upj lie displayed many of the characteristics of adult infantilism* he had a singular capacity for detachment from reality and with it a dependence upon realities that was even pathetic. He had a dread of Ugliness in all forms. . . • His amatoxy coefficient was comparatively low* his gonadal swoop was too narrow," Dr. Collins treated James with "baths, massage and electrocutions."®^ But that was much later. During this earlier period (roughly tho first thirty-three years), James would write to William: "I be­ lieve almost as much in matrimony for mo3t other people as I believe in it little for ryself." Surely only a bachelor could maintain tho kind of social life he seemed to require in order to write. And 6 6 perhaps by this 'time he had developed an almost Miltonic attitude towards the role of chastity in the life of the artist. Or perhaps, again, he was reacting against his mother’s dominance. Or possibly he knew by now th a t whatever small sexual indulgence ha would allow himself would be with man. We can only speculate. But th is much is fact—that during his early manhood and for most of his life, James’s closest woman friends were usually married or widowed or divorced, and were invariably older than he. Yet for all his detachment from them, or because of it, he was extremely popular with women. He was balding and growing rathor plump, but woman seem to have found his brown eyes and his silly board very beautiful.^* One man, trying to analyze James’s popularity with women, finally said, "Ho seemed to look at women rather as women looked at them. Woman look at women as persons; men look at them as women. The quality of sex in women, which is their first and chief attraction to most men, was not their chiof attraction to James."^2 How can his mother be tied in with James's melodramatic vision? Perhaps not directly. But she evidently created in him a lasting fear of woman, a fear both sexual and artistic, one more fear in a mind already given over to a vision of life as emotionally risky, already given over to th a t famous "imagination of d isa ste r." Another important shaping factor in James's melodramatic vision was tho wound he incurred as an eighteen-year-old boy at Newport. In October of 1861, acting with other young men as a volunteer fireman, James found himself "jammed into an acute angle between two high fences." Immediately aware of pain, he waited some time before going to see a doctor who found nothing wrong with him* Journals and letters of a friend and a relative indicate that in the days and weeks immediately after the fire Henry visited his brother in Boston, continued to hike with his friends, was silent about any pain. Yet in Notes of a Son and Brother James would say that he suffered a •'horrid even if an obscure hurt" that would remain with him for the rest of his life. His own vagueness about the damage has led to much speculation, but in the end it seems that the accident causod noithor castration nor hernia nor groin injury, but rather a back injury, "a slipped disc, a sacroiliac or muscular strain—obscure but clearly p ainful. James's own cloudy recollections about the date and the particu­ lar circumstances of the accidont lead Edel to do some speculating that seems to me quite sound: "That the hurt was exacerbated by the tensions of the Civil War seems quite clear. Mentally prepared for some state of injury by his father's permanent hurt,, and for a sense therefore of continuing physical inadequacy, Henry James found him­ self a prey to anxieties over the fact that he might be called a malingerer • • • and had a feeling that he was deficient in the mas­ culinity being displayed by others of his generation on the battle­ field."^ (Both Henry and William hod been too ill to enlist in the Union Army.) Feelings of passivity and inadequacy were no t new to Henry James, They had been his since earliest childhood, were part of his earliest recollections. It is true Henry James, Sr. wa3 as ambitious for his last three as he was for William and Henry. But Garth 68

Wilkinson, Robertson, and Alice were less able to enter the competi­ tio n , to cope with the strain s of th e ir liv e s. Hie boys were less gifted than their older brothers, and Alice, who might have been the most gifted of them all, received no help from oithor parent in her difficult position of last child and only daughter. But in this large and noisy family the rivalry was greatest be­ tween William and Henry. 'William had the quicker mind, the more competitive nature, the larger capacity to associate with people. He had more interests. • . • His quarters were now a laboratory, now a darkroom, now a theater, now a studio, while Henry's wore monotonously the scene of endless reading and writing; and William's air of having a purpose in life was a ll the more impressive in that the purpose so 66 often changed, 1,00 F. W. Dupee's interpretation seems justified ty James's first volume of autobiography, A Small Boy and Others. In it James writes of tho failure of his powers in contrast to those of W illiam's: as i f he had gained such an advance of me in his sixteen months' experience of the world before mine began that I novor for a ll the time of childhood and youth in the least caught up with him or overtook him. He was always round tho corner and out of sight, coming back into view but at the hours of his extremest ease. We were never In tho same classroom, in the same game, scarce even in step together or in the same phase a t the same time; when our phaseB over­ lapped, that is, i t was only for a moment—he was clean out before I had got well in. How far he had really at any mo­ ment dashed forward i t is not for me now to attempt to Bay; what comes to me is that I at least hung inveterately and woe­ fully back, and that his relation alike to ou£ interests and to each other seemed proper and preappointed,

In tho face of this competition, Henry retreated, deferred. Un­ able to share his father's sense of participation in life (what Henry 6 9 Jamas, Sr. called the shared experience),68 he became his mother's fa­ vorite. The family called him Angel~he was sweet and quiet, he stu ttered and grew more withdrawn, became more and more the detached spectator. Family friend T. S. Perry records a telling passage in his journal when he writes, • When vie got to the house and the rest of us were chattering, Henry James sat on the window-3eat read­ ing Leslie’s Life of Constable with a certain air of remoteness." Edel then observes: If he could not participate in William's adventures he could actively employ h is mental resources: he could observe, and his memory clung tenaciously to all that it absorbed. They might urge upon him greater activity* he sa t back and looked, looked at everything with the calm yet hungry eyes of child­ hood and the aid of his fostered and stimulated imagination. It is no surprise that he attached so much importance to his eyes—that the heroes he most identified himself with were ■those he endowed with -the fin e s t perception and th at he gave first place always to his "observer" in his fiction and to the "point of view" from which ho narrated his tales,™ Again, how can we specifically relate James’s life to melodrama? Perhaps seeing these shaping forces—the ones that made him shy, iso­ lated, detached, the ones that made him homosexual, the ones that made him reject the Idealism of his father and come to terms with the competition and condescension of his elder brother—perhaps recogniz­ ing these forces, vie can understand better how art was, for him, the great release from life. Disapproving of his father's emotional ex­ cesses in life , he found more "appropriate" outlets for his own emo­ tional excesses in art. Now we can see vihat fertile ground had been prepared fo r Henry James's seeing melodramas on the stage and reading them constantly as a boy, whereas dozens of other children seeing or 70 reading those melodramas might have become calloused to them as children today do to television programs. James might want to free himself from the pitfalls of his fa­ ther’s life, but despite himaelf he shares the family neurosos~a sense of life on a large scale, an excess in using language, an ex­ aggerated fear of danger and of emotional entanglement. As James said about his youth in A Small Bqy and Others: . . . I imagined things—and as if quite on systom—'wholly other than as they were . . . an existence . . . cutting me off from any degree of direct performance, in fact from any degree of direct participation, at all • , . all elbowing and kicking presences within touch or view, so many monsters and horrors, so many wonders and splendours and rystories, but never, so far as X can recollect, roalities of relation. • • • They were something better . • • they were so thor­ oughly figures and characters, d iv in itie s or demons, and en­ dowed in this light with a vividness that the more reality of relation, a commoner directness of contact, would have made, I surmise, comparatively poor.7° Wo might also look briofly at the evidence of melodrama in the life of one of the other James children, in her responses to the family situation. One recalls Alice's asking her father whether suicide was a sin , his saying no and giving her permission to do i t whenever sho plensod, and she then tolling him she couldn't ever do it now that he had given her permission; or Alice's journal entry toward the end of hor life when her nurse took lier to be photographed: "like a sheep to the shambles, I have been led by Katherine Loring to the camera, . . . K. seized the ’psychic moment* of titillated vanity and brought the one-eyed monster to bear upon me; such can be a woman's inhumanity to woman. "71 in Alice as well as in Henry we see that exaggerated shyness, that sense of life on a large scale, an 71 excess in using language, frequent similes and metaphors of doom and danger. VJhat the journal entries suggest are striking ways in which family patterns, personalities, and lifestyles can—and do—seem melodramatic.

Since the beginning of my first chapter I have tried to show how two opposite strains—excess and detachment—were at work in Jamos, Concomitant with hiB discipline and his detached spectatorship was his emotional excess and his overactive imagination. The Small Boy passago quoted above contains within i t both strains. The famous Santayana anecdote (although Edel considers i t apocryphal) shows one side of the coin, the verbal excess. It demonstrates how his lan­ guage was often gigantic, excessive, a magnifying of feoling James utilized not only in fiction and letters but in his daily speech. The story is told of his being asked if ho would come to the home of a friend to meet George Santayana: "Comal I would walk barefoot in the snow to moot George SantayanaAnother passage helps to validate ny claim that Jamos possessed an exaggerated sense of l i f e ’s dangers. The quotation is from the amanuensis of his later years, Theodora Bosanquot. Here I deliberately offer some evidence from his la s t rather than his earliest years because i t further supports my thesis that melodrama was not cauterized from the later works, was certainly not cauterized from the older man. His vision, his sensi­ b ility , and many aspects of his a rt remain melodramatic, VJhat Bo- sanquet writes is this: "When he walked out of the refuge of his study into the world and looked about him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quiv- ering flesh of the doomed} defenceless children of light." 73 Another report of his later years supports the show of discipline as somehow peculiarly linked to the emotional excess, the combination witnessed by so many who knew him, and supported by the anecdotes which began Chapter One, the "Where emotion is , there am II" state­ ment and the Desmond McCarthy anecdote about the lawn parly. The story is Buchan's account of the elderly James looking for the f ir s t time a t the unedited Byron papers: "So . • . Henry James and I waded through masses of ancient indecency, and duly wrote an opinion. The thing nearly made me sick, but my colleague never turned a hair. His only words for some special vileness were 'singular 1 —'most curious1— 'nauseating, perhaps, but how quite inexpressibly significant."'^ This time the verbal response is tightly controlled, but it is accom­ panied by a racing imagination and a visceral response as well. Thus James seems to have continued to the end, the emotional excess and imagination of disaster held in check by his dignity and discipline, yet displaying themselves often in his speech and always in his writing. To look briefly now at manifestations of his melo­ dramatic techniques, themes, and vision in some earlier works is to see better how he employed and demonstrated them, with variation and with varying success, in his last four novels. The remaining chap­ ters examine certain melodramatic modes which have not been suffi­ ciently analyzed or appreciated—suspense-creating dialogue in The Sacred Fount and The Ambassadors. degrees of specification in The Wings of the Dove, and the stock character and her moral value 73 in The Qolden Bowl. How, moving backwards soma thirty years to ex­ amine James's earliest usage of melodrama in his fiction, we note that his most melodramatic trappings hove obvious associations with Gothicism. 3h James's early fiction we find ghosts, old manuscripts, European villains, convents and cloisters, English manor houses and eerie Italian Palaces, secret crimes and death-bed confessions, falls from mountain tops, the thunder and lightning of on Alpine storm. While it is true that the gothic is concerned with psychological states and melodrama neod not be, and while the gothic is not tra­ ditionally, conventionally moral (is in fact often morally ambiguous), and melodrama is almost always moral, s till the two have much in com­ mon. A sense of peril and crisis is associated with each. Both are concerned with evil, with sensationalism, with suspense and betrayal, and both are related to romance. Both melodramatic and gothic ele­ ments can be contained within the same work, augmenting and comple­ menting one another, and indeed barely distinguishable from one another. Certainly James was familiar with many gothic romances. As Loon Edel says: He know the world of goblins and demons and haunted houses, and he knew, to o , the h isto ry of w itch craft in America. Certain critics have emphasized his saturation with Haw­ thorne's fantasies and allegories, his admiration for such tales as Rappaccini's Daughter and Young Goodman Brown which he considered "little masterpieces ^But* if he had read Hawthorne closely he had also read Poe; at eighteen or nineteen heAhad translated I-ferimee's tale of terror, La Venus do 1 'lie , and was acquainted with the works of Ealzac, including the French master's tales of the super­ natural; and from his earliest days he had known the ghost stories of Charles Dickens, He knew Wilkie Collins and he considered Sheridan le Fanu "ideal reading in a country house for the hours after midnight." He was a devoted reader of Blackwood's magazine and in its pages found some of the finest tales of terror of the time, by writers now long forgotten. He invokes In The Qhostly Rental the name of the German romance w riter E. T. A. Hoffman, author of Phantasiestucke and ELbdre des Teufels t. whose tales in­ spired Offenbach's opera tea, Contes d 1 Hoffman. He had read the Gothic romances. • • 77? In the eighteenth century, gothic novelists like Horace Walpole attempted to explain the seemingly supernatural in natural ways to an increasingly irreligious audience, to "present with poetic logic out­ moded themes of a supematuralism now deemed illogical so that those who no longer believed in the unpleasant realities of the ghostly might s till enjoy the pleasures of having their emotional hackles 76 raised." A chief characteristic of the gothic novel is psycholog­ ical interest, concern for interior mental processes. Another is "its attempt to involve the reader in a new way," through submitting him to suspense and Bhock, the atmosphere often contributing to the reader's alarm.^ James's affinity for Gothicism is thus striking— the strong psychological interest, the personal tendency to respond strongly to atmosphere, to react on a grand scale and to involve his readers through suspenseful devices. The gothic devices then become melodramatic trappings permeating the early works. Further, aB Martha Banta points out, James "placed Gothicism dead center in sev­ eral of his full-length, non-ghostly novels; for instance, in The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove, whore his use of Gothicism goes beyond trappings to demonstrate 'the artistic poten­ tialities of the new psychology of se lf.'"7®

If the gothic tradition was a comfortable one for James to work in , so was the camedie humaine tra d itio n produced by James's acknowledged master, Balzac, Several Btudies of .'"influences" demon­ strate the greater literary indebtedness of James to George Sand, Turgenev, Hawthorne, Dickens, Thackeray, or Emerson, and no doubt he 79 did learn something from each. But James himself repeatedly Ort claimed his major indebtedness was to Balzac, and clearly In the early fiction we see him extensively borrowing plots and characters from the French writer* The sim ilarity between James's Washington Square and Balzac's Eugenie Qrandet has often been noted. And sev­ eral early stories, according to Percy Adams, seem to owe something to Balzac ("Poor Richard," "De Grey," "Gabrielle de Bergerac," "The Madonna of the Future," "The Sweetheart of M. Briseux," "Eugene Pickering").®^ With Hawthorne James shared what T, S, E lio t called a pervasive sense of horror* With Balzac he seems to have shared a love of the lurid, a fascination for themes of innocence betrayed, a penchant for tilling off his characters* Patently melodramatic, Balzac fed James's own melodramatic penchant. Further, he demon­ stra te d to James how melodrama could be used to examine and comment on both moral situations and psychological responses. Watch and Ward (1871) clearly demonstrates Balzac's influence, James later tried to repress this first novel and always referred to Roderiok Hudson (1876) as his first* Leo Levy offers an analysis of Watch and Ward in his Versions of Melodrama, and while X believe he is too harsh (the novel is not as bad as he leads one to suspeot), he is thorough in pointing out the melodramatic elements of the work. Excess is its greatest fault: " • • • an inclusive, undisguised 76 melodrama• morality, character conception, and the registering of Op events form a single imago of astonishing extremity." Roderick Hudson is also characterized by excess. Roderick's own excesses both make him appealing and account in part for his down­ fa ll. James demonstrates Roderick's excesses—-especially his postur­ ings: Roderick "pressed his hand to his forehead with vehemence, and then shook it in the air despairingly; a gesture that had of late be­ come frequent with him."®^ But James demonstrates a few excesses of hiw own in the novel, and one of them is his over plot ting. He has Christina want Rowland who wants Miry who wants Roderick who wants Christina, and this coming;full circle is somewhat improbable. Fur­ ther, the overplotting makes us too aware of the author—as if his hands and feet were seen in the wings. A greater fault of the novel is James's failure to fully ac­ count for Roderick's decline. Hie excessive stimulus of Europe is somehow to blame. "Genius" might be seen as another cause, for gen­ ius carries a certain fate within it—but Roderick never really proves his genius. So a third instrument of his destruction has to be pro­ vided by Christina (and by melodrama). Her beauty weakens him. Her marriage defeats him—and her marriage is a melodramatic trick, as both Hma. Grandoni and Rowland p o in t o ut. Her presence in Engelberg (a coincidence permitted in melodrama) initiates the beginning of his end—for his asking for money to follow her to Interlochen precipi­ tates Rowland's outburst. His confession precipitates Roderick's sudden realization of how "grotesque," how "hideous" he has been. 77 But this is no tragic hero's moment of illumination, for as Roderick walks away towards his death, Rowland reflects quite rightly that Roderick displayed no "hint of simple sorrow for pain inflicted" (£12)• James would say in the Preface to Roderick Hudson that relations stop nowhere and the problem of the a r t i s t is to draw the circle p| within which they shall appear to do so* So now James must put an end to Roderick—*although the results of Rowland's in itial gesture in bringing Roderick abroad would continue to reverberate for Rowland's lifetime* Handily, James has brought his party to mountain country, so that during a vivid Alpine storm—with old Mrs. Hudson crying at home "Ity boy, my boy, where's ny boy?"—Roderick fallB to his death. The melodrama here is hard to talcs, but it would have been less so i f Roderick's decline had been b etter ju stified * I t would have even perhaps have been less so if there were a villain in the story to place the blame on* But James's attempt to make Christina a villainass comes too late* Rowland sees "something sinister" in her after he meets her at the Swiss church, and he reflects "she had an­ nounced with su fficie n t distinctness th a t she had said goodbye to scruples" (1*97) * But after all it is too late to blame her. Bie novel is dissatisfying in the end because although we have been sub­ jected to the sense of c ris is and. p e ril associated with melodrama, the source of the evil has never been clearly demonstrated to us* In The American (1877), the moral co n flic t is no longer ab­ stract—vre can see the source of evil* We have a bold melodramatic plot—in this case we have all the trappings* all the cold, dark imagery associated with the two buildings in which the Bellegardes reside; a duel, plus the coincidence of the duel and the breaking of the engagement taking place on the same day; Valentin's hinting at a dark secret on his deathbed; the deathbed letter written by the old man murdered by- his wife; a family secret, a family crime, even a moat and a Carnal!to convent* In this novel the evil is centered in the inaccessible Belle garde family* The nature of the evil is mys­ terious, inscrutable, and in the end uncertain, but what the plot leads to, what Newman's exposure to i t leads to, is the opportunity fo r Newman to repudiate revenge. Hie melodrama thus functions in this way--it offers a backdrop against which Newman can exhibit his moral growth. In Rpy Harvey Pearce's statem ents on melodrama in h is in tro ­ duction to The American, he claims th a t The American is a melodrama because Newman's view of life is melodramatic—but that his instinct fo r humor e x ists along with h is in s tin c t fo r melodrama* And th is humor, th is good nature, allow him to transcend melodrama in the end* F u rth er, Pearce says th a t James exhibits humor through h is tone (in the under- or overstated dialogues), and in his method of "going be­ hind" Newman, disavowing responsibility for Newman's story and clear- ing himself of responsibility for the melodrama. In Roderick Hud­ son, in their last conversation, Roderick had said to Rowland, "It's like something in a bad novel," In The American, Newman calls the duel a "scene," "a wretched theatrical affair," Later, outside the convent, he thinks of his situation and decides that "it was like a page tom out of a romance, with no context in his own experience." Once more in The American, as Mrs • Bread tells her story about old 7 9 Bellogardo'a death, she pauses and the narrator says, "The most ar­ tistic of romancers could not have been more effective. Neuman made almost the motion of turning a page of a 'detective story.1" Hiose references (and there are more of them in She American and sim ila r ones in Portrait) are strange Involutions, the author's calling at­ tention to the novel as novel at the same time that he calls atten­ tion to the improbabilities at hand, asking the reader to believe in them anyway. Pearce seems to suggest that remarks like these keep us detached, reminding us that the experience is Newman's and not ours, and hence making the melodrama acceptable because we—and James—are detached. But 1 am not sure that we are very detached—or that James wanted us to be. We often respond to his melodrama even as we recog­ nize it as that, even when it is blatant and almost offensive, as in p arts of Hie American. I would suggest that James, who had fe lt the appeal of melodrama himself, could calculate his effects, that he had decided to examine moral problems and mental states in a setting in which good was pitted against evil (Newman against the Be lie gardes), and that he fully intended to catch the reader up in his moral and melodramatic stories. Using the tension, the excitement and suspense, the emo­ tional implications of melodrama, he could hold the reader's atten­ tion so that he could administer moral shocks,®^ so that he could illuminate moral situations to an audience already trained in sus­ pending disbelief. James puts us off guard. He gives us types but then makes them more than types. He gives us melodramatic trappings and laughs at them—but then reverses the expectations of melodrama 80 by giving us unhappy endings. These f i r s t two novels, Roderick Hudson. and The American depend heavily on melodrama, but they defy our con­ ception of the genre; they unsettle our expectations. And at this second le v e l the melodrama seems to be James's rather than Newman's, The melodrama begins d elib erately enough, but fin a lly i t is more per­ vasive than its author knew. Using the simplifications of melodrama, he can demonstrate moral contrasts and construct "a world of irrecon- 00 cdlable opposites’'0 —good versus evil, American innocence versus European corruption. Now melodrama becomes more than ju s t trappings— i t becomes a world view. Although in the end she considers James's melodramatic bent a recessive rather than a dominant trait,E lizab eth Stevenson in The Crooked Corridor offers an in terestin g catalogue of James's melodra­ matic tendencies. She lists (a) excessive intervention, (b) unusual mystery, (c) coincidental or fortuitous occurrence, (d) instrumenta­ tion of a gross thing, and (e) arbitrary violence. Regarding ex­ cessive intervention, Stevenson points out how in so many of James's fictions, fairy godmothers or fathers intervene—Rowland for Roderick, the Touchetts for Isabel, Christina Light for Hyacinth, Olive for Verena Tarrant, But she justifies James's use of them by claiming that in the end the godmother figure can only do so much—cannot, after all, rescue the hero once he has gone his way. Under the category "unusual mystery," Stevenson considers the mysterious parentage of Christina light in Roderick Hudson, of Pansy in The Portrait, and of Hyacinth in The Princess Casamassima, The detective-3tory element exists in all James's work, demonstrating his love of nystery and 81 ambiguity* (We might add to her lis t the mystery of MJlly's illness or of Kate Croy's father's crime in The Wings of the Dove*) As for coincidence or fortuitous occurrence, Stevenson notes "the boldness of the unforeseen occasion, the daring of the unex­ pected meeting, the suddenness of the disclosure of a secret—all evidences of melodrama. ..." More specifically Bhe lists Roder­ ick's death, the fire in The Spoils of Poynton, the too strong im- plaufcibility throughout The American. (Susan Stringham and Mrs. Lowder having been girlhood friends in The Wings of the Dove is simi­ larly implausible.) By instrumentation of a gross or material object in the fate of James's characters, Stevenson has in mind the le tte r in The American and the bowl in The Golden Bowl. But she notes that Newman and Mag­ gie are already "predisposed to a certain action before the fateful object makes its appearance." In her final category, arbitrary vio­ lence, Stevenson lists the suicides in Watch and Ward and The Prin­ cess Casamassima, the deaths of Daisy M iller, Miles in The Turn of the Screw, Morgan Moreen in "The Pupil," Roderick Hudson, and Juliana in The Aapom Papers. The fire in Spoils and the scuffle over Verona in The Bostonians are likewise examples of Jamesian violence. Stevenson concludes, "Melodrama then transcends its own ordinary purpose of excitement and shock and color. It transports the reader by those gifts into another Bphere of concentration and value. • • , I t acts to enhance complicated meanings with vivid enactment,"^ I dwell this long on Stevenson's scheme to give the reader another critic's notion of what melodramatic trappings are and what 82 they accomplish. Her categories are useful ones and her conclusion is sound—but only as far as it goes. Dismissing James's melodrama­ tic tendencies as a recessive trait, and seeing those tendencies manifested only In trappings, she fails to see that Jamesian melo­ drama exists at at least two levels. She has dealt only with the first, trappings associated with plot or incident. But The Portrait of a Lady u tiliz e s and demonstrates a second le v e l of melodrama— here melodrama becomes f a r more than trappings, i t becomes a mode of vision and an ideology, Which is not to say that the trappings are not there as well. Portrait has its ghost, its rather sinister convent, its English manor houses and cold Italian dwellings, (Osmond's villa, for example, has "heavy lids, but no eyes," "jealous apertures" and a "cold ante­ room,") The novel has its secret adulterous relationship and its illegitimate child. It has its gothic landscapes (i,e,, Roman ruins) and its imagery. In gothic novels the moon is frequently used to en­ hance setting, and a memorable use of the moon occurs in Portrait, As D, Unrue demonstrates, "Because of her own innocence and the de­ ceit of others, Isabel has not been able to see the true nature of her husband, Gilbert Osmond, 'She had seen only half his nature then, as one saw the disk of the moon when it was partly masked by the shadow of the earth. She saw the f u ll moon now—she saw the whole man.' Inexorable time and natural process inevitably reveal tru th .

In addition to ghosts, gothic landscapes and images, and other sensational trappings, Portrait has a full-blown stock melodramatic 83 villain in Gilbert Osmond and a more subtle but equally treacherous one in Mine. Marie, In moving into characterization in a novel which is primarily a study of character, we see a hallmark of melodrama, the lining up of the characters as foils, the good versus the bad, "the open opposition of a noble character and a narrow ono."^ Not that Isabel is all good, James is quick to show in the early sec- 93 tions of the novel that she "doesn't take suggestions"' that in her romanticism, self-aggrandizing, and desire for difficulties so that she can prove heroic (I, 69)» she is too proud, too fond of her own ways. She wants to be free even to commit some atrocity if the fancy takes her, she says (1, 229-30), She is a dreamer and a romantic too fond of admiration (I, 310) • But these faults are more dangerous to her than to others—and they are faults which are all too human, Osmond, on the other hand, is "a figure of unrelieved malignity , • . scarcely a believable human being, In treating melodrama in Portrait, one could concen­ trate on the exterior melodramatic plotting and situation, or on the dramatic and sensational scenic encounters between Isabel and other characters as she moves from innocence to experience. Further, one could examine the melodramatic factors in Isabel's own personality. But much has already been written about these aspects of the novel, and furthermore, each of these melodramatic elements is consciously used by James, In this brief study of the novel, I would like to call attention to Loo Levy's treatment of Osmond in his Versions of Melodrama, What James's characterization of Osmond illustrates is a point worth stressing given ay claim that James was often unconsciously melodramatic , th a t the Manichean lin in g up of his char­ acters demonstrates not just the single-mindedness of his characters, but the single-mindednesB of the younger James himself. As Levy says, "In Gilbert Osmond, we see most clearly the didactic bias of the novel's melodrama. . . . James is tom . . . between the impulse to excoriate the villain and his awareness of the necessities that mate him what he is. James subordinates his understanding of Osmond to the idea of unmitigated baseness, until Osmond's absurd and de­ generative cruelly destroys the credibility of Isabel's return, • . • James's inhumanity toward Osmond is as fixed as Osmond's toward Isabel. There is not a trace, in The Portrait, of the compassion present in the late novels, in which James, in a gesture of nearly religious love, seems to hdve forgiven the sins of all his char­ a c te r s ." ^ • Levy wiH later say that the flaws in The Portrait are calculated What The Portrait fails to provide is a sufficiently realistic moiio oif reaction on Isabel's part; but this is exactly the effect James wishes to maintain—that of a wid­ ened, irreparable breach, marked by calculated opportunism turned to scorn and hatred on one side, and a long-suffering, enduring virtue on the other. This is melodrama, for it is the display of a morality that abandons awareness of the in­ volutions in which good and evil entwine themselves in order to state more dramatically their necessary conflict, and in order to demonstrate the vision that the motive of dramatiza­ tion and simplification implies.9° Levy might w ell be rig h t, but I would lik e to suggest another possi­ bility—one that does not contradict Levy's so much as it approaches the same material from another angle. Perhaps the fact that Jamos in 1881 was willing to sacrifice verisimilitude for dramatic effect, was willing to exaggerate and simplify character to such an extent, was not as calculated as Levy suggests. Perhaps It Is still further proof of Janes's own inherent melodramatic bent. The melodrama would take different forms in the later novels, but here—as in Roderick Hudson and The American—Janes s t i l l maintained a somewhat sim plified view of moral conflict. Isabel has no choice—-she must be dutiful and return to Osmond. And Osmond remains a fiend. James cannot get past his unsatisfactory ending precisely because he is in so simpli­ fied a frame of mind himself. In Iflio Princess Casamassima (1886) James presents melodrama a t its most blatant. His hero is Hyacinth Robinson, poor and illegiti­ mate. Bi a grim and heart-rending scene the young boy is taken to a London prison to see h is dying French plebeian mother (ja ile d fo r having killed his unknown aristocratic English father) • The fairy­ ta le m otif continues when the Princess Casamassima (C hristina L ight, resu rrected from Roderick Hudson) now intervenes to play f a ir y god­ mother, to introduce the grown-up Hyacinth (raised in lower class squalor in Lomax Place by the devoted spinster Miss Pynsent) to high society. Through his work as a bookbinder, Hyacinth simultaneously comes into contact with various London revolutionaries (the plot is often melodramatically improbable and fraught with coincidences), and much of the novel is a study in types, stock characters who are nevertheless wonderfully vivid: Anastasius Vetch, gentle espouser of old-fashioned Radical philosophy; Eustaohe Foupin, instigator of more current anarchic notions; Paul Muniment, brilliant political theoretician; Lady Aurora Langrish, a socialist aristocrat who has abandoned her "olass"; Diedrich Hoffendahl, true anarchist and 8 6 assassin. Bio Princess becomes involved with the revolutionaries be­ cause she is bored and thinks radical politics might be amusing and exciting. In time Hyacinth is encouraged to commit himself to the revolutionaries, and he is eventually earmarked to assassinate an important visiting dignitary. In Hyacinth's blood, vie are made to believe, flow two strains— the plebeian and the aristocratic. Now environment works to lif t the impoverished bookbinder into a new political and social realm. Po­ litically Hyacinth catches the revolutionary fever, but when he is able to take a brief trip to Italy, he realizes how drawn he is to the culture and achievements of the aristo cracy . In h is famous l e t ­ ter to Christina from Venice, he writes: Bie monuments and treasures of art, the great palaces and properties, the conquests of learning and taste, the general fabric of civilisation as we know it, based if you will upon all the despotisms, the cruelties, the exclusions, the monopolies and the rapacities of the past, but thanks to which, all the same, the world is less of a 'bloody sell' and l if e more of a la rk —our friend Hoffendahl seems to me to hold them too cheap and to wish to su b stitu te fo r them some­ thing in which I can't somehow believe as I do in things with which the yearnings and the tears of generations have been mixed. You know how extraordinary I think our Hoffendahl— to speak only of him; but if there's one thing that's more clear about him than another, it's that he wouldn't have the least feeling for this incomparable, abominable old Venice. He would cut up the ceilings of the Veronese into strips, so that every one might have a little piece. I don't want every one to have a little piece of anything and I've a great horror of that kind of invidious jealousy which is at the bottom of the idea of a redistribution.?? Now torn by conflicting loyalties, Hyacinth decides to k ill himself rather than break his promise to assassinate the dignitary, even though he no longer believes in the political principles he had ear­ l i e r espoused. Meanwhile he has been toyed with by Paul Muniment, whose friendship he craved, and by the Princess, who was only inter­ ested in him as a specimen of the working class. As Levy points out, "In treating the question of Hyacinth Robinson’s ambivalence towards his commitments to revolution, The Princess returns to the ideological melodrama of The American and The P o rtra it of a Lady. Hyacinth is a figure of innocence like Christopher Newman and Isabel Archer, and like them he undergoes initiation into a destructive moral reality. Melodrama again characterizes the exclusion and de­ feat of the outsider, and deception and betrayal are again the means of his undoing. The ovU of Tho Princess is in the hardness and the triviality of the people Hyacinth loves."9® Each of Hyacinth's friends eventually withdraws from him, be­ trays him as he conducts affairs with someone else or finds inter­ ests elsewhere. Recognizing the impossibility of his ever achieving a finer aesthetic and social life, unable to resolve the conflict between art and politics, and recognizing the indifference of his "friends," Hyacinth shoots himself with the gun given to him for the assassination of the Duke. This bold melodramatic conclusion repre­ sents one of the few violent deaths in James's middle and late canon, where far more often the violence is emotional rather than physical. Talented, endearing, morally fine, Hyacinth nevertheless lacks the sense of selfhood which would have allowed him to bear tho be­ trayal of his friends. Without it, he dies in terrible isolation. As Levy shows, "Hyacinth's self-destruction stands, in its context, as the supreme gesture of a melodramatist finding an action of per­ fect equivalence and dramatic finality, proposing once more a 8 8

tragically scaled broach between innocent exploration and the bru­ tally denying facts of possession and privilege."^ VJhat this summary has not shown is how b rilliant a character James has created in Christina light. Despite her being a dangerous pretender and a "capricciosa," she is, James convinces us, ,,the most remarkable woman in Europe.” If she is in part responsible for Hyacinth's death even as she was for Roderick Hudson's, she neverthe­ less. is moving and sympathetic in her power and restlessness. Tho novel is demonstrative of James's groat skill in creating women—the healthy and feckless MLllicent, the gay and demented in valid Rose Muniment, and of course the Princess who helps to destroy Hyacinth. Her role as Angel of Destruction in the two novels is in itself melodramatic. She had said in Roderick Hudson, "I am corrupt, cor­ rupting, corruption." She had been consistently presented with devil/saint imagoxy in that novel. Novi she is still unconventional, insouciant, restless, ruthless, and fascinating. But she is kept from being a total villainess in that she is only one cause of Hyacinth's decline. Further, she is constantly spoken of in super­ latives and absolutes, and the one dominant image linked with her in Tho Princess is the image of light. "Why am I so sacrosanct and precious?" Christina asks Hyacinth a t one point. He says, "Simply because th e re 's no one in the world and has never been anyone in the world lik e you." Surely James, who clearly identified himself with Hyacinth at other points in the book, would not be above feeling something lik e th a t him self. He seems drawn to her at the same time that he condemns her. Above all, he seems to have understood her, including the degree, as Irving Howe says, to which ’’sheer sexual boredom can drive such a woman to both fantasy and frenzy.” She is that "woman of superior energies to whom society can offer neither secure place nor proper work.” She is not merely an idle seeker for ”koen emotion,'.1 but "a woman of des­ perate possibilities.”^® Yet she is as much driven by generous impulses as by boredom. Recognizing her contradictions, James seems both drawn to and repelled by her. He names his novel The Princess Casamassima because Christina was more to Hyacinth than he was to her, because her characterization became as important to James as Hyacinth's, because she enlivened every page on which she appeared, because she is the great triumph of the novel, and because here—as usual—a woman is the focus of James's moral criticism: a woman who, in her search for experience, causes death and denies art even while she makes partial amends with her beauty and vitality. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers frequently demon­ strated a fear for their virility, artistic or physical, in the face of the beautiful, dominant woman, the Bark Lady of fiction. In America Leslie F iedler would c a ll th is lite r a r y motif "Hie Revenge on Woman: From Lucy to L o lita .” 101 Mario Praz would examine the theme as it appeared in England and on the Continent and would call the Dark Lady the Fatal Woman, La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Praz says of her—and the parallels to Christina and Hyacinth are striking— "In accordance with this conception of the Fatal Woman, the lover is usually a youth, and maintains a passive attitude; he is obscure, and inferior either in condition or in physical exuberance to the 90 woman, who stands in tho same relation to him as do the female spid­ er, the praying mantis, &c., to their respective males: sexual can­ nibalism is her monopoly,"^®2 James's creation of Christina was tempered by the limitations imposed by his English audience, his own sense of taste and decorum, and his own artistic sense of emphasis. He could not treat sex openly. But I think that despite Christine's last name, and despite the "light imagery," Christina is James's version of the Fatal Woman— and ho is probing here the nature of passivity, dependence, and dom­ inance. When he treats Christina with loving ambivalence it might be because he realizes that the lives of Dark ladies never end happily. James treats the Princess with the absolutes and largeness of scope we associate with melodrama. But once again, both the characteriza­ tion and the novel transcend the limits of melodrama while they share in the emotional advantages of the genre. In The Spoils of Poynton (1897), James achieves a new control of his language and his scenic form. At the same time, his melodramatic impulse, far from abating, is strong enough to extend to the treat­ ment of "things" as well as people. To paraphrase the famous "com­ plex fate" remark, one of the dangers one must avoid is a "supersti­ tious valuation" of things, of spoils. In this novel, James satir­ ically focuses on English country estates representative of tura-of- the-centmy culture and affluence. He examines society as it exists at gracious Poynton and monstrously gauche Waterbath. As S. Gorley Putt says, "By the side of Tho Princess Casamassima and The Bostoni­ ans, the range of society here examined may be thought meagre. But i t 91 is as if Janes, in dissecting the rotting head of the smelly fish of late Victorian and Edwardian England, takes for granted tho proverb­ ial assumption that the rest of the body is hardly likely to be not­ able for its freshness. But James does more than dissect and satirize--he sympathizes as well. Ho sympathizes with Mrs. Gereth's situation: unjust British law allows Poynton to pass from her hands at the death of her husband to the hands of her son Owen and his tasteless fiancee, Mona Brigstock. Tho precious accumulations of a lifetime are taken from Mrs. Goreth—she loses the very roof over her head. Thus from tho start, Spoils is a sordid story of greed and injustice. But we soon lose our sympathy for Mrs. Geroth

(Putt calls her an English version of Madame M e r l e ) as she manipu­ lates her son and her young companion, Floda Vetch, in order to keep her possessions. We lose sympathy too as Jamas demonstrates how dan­ gerous is the assumption that one's moral and aesthetic values are id en tical (James w rites of Fleda, "Almost as much as Mrs. G ereth's her taste was her life, but her life waB somehow the larger for it.» l° £ ) In Spoils, then, James offers the melodramatic situation of a mother cruelly and unjustly dispossessed: "She had lived for a quarter of a century in such warm closeness with the beautiful that . . • life had become for her a kind of fool's paradise* She couldn't leave her own house without peril of exposure" (11). James uses melodramatic exaggeration for humor's sake at times, as when he de­ scribes Fleda's first reaction to the beauties of Poynton: she "dropped on a seat with a soft gasp and a roll of dilated oyes" (21)• And he has great fun In creating the predictable stock char­ acters of Mona Brigstock, the vapid, greedy fiancee, and Owen Gereth, the amiable but stupid son. (His mother once writes to him, "Go to see Jjled aJ, and tiy , fo r God's sake, to cultivate a glimmer of in ­ tellig en ceu £ LSftj.) But a t other times James uses melodrama very seriously, as when he derives from a certain scene all the tension and suspense he can. In a scene extending over three chapters, Owen comes unexpectedly to Fleda's father's house (a dreaiy place with "hideous crockery" fore­ shadowing Mrs. Condrip's house in The Wings of the Dove) • At length he comes to confess (though he never quite gets it out) that now he loves Fleda: "You ask me i f I d o n 't love ^Monaj, and I suppose i t 's natural enough you should. But you ask it at the very moment I'm half mad to say to you that there's only one person on the whole earth I really love, and that that person—" At this point the pair hears voices on tho landing and steps approaching. Owen grasps Fleda»s arm: "'You're surely able to guess,' he said with his voice dropped and her arm pressed as she had never known such a drop or such a pressure-^'you're surely able to guess the one person on earth I love?'" But the handle of the door turns, "Your mother!" says Fleda. But the "smutty maid" edges in and announces, "Mrs. Brigstock!" mother of the affianced Mona. The scene is silly with its dashes, exclamation points, and mounting tension. Yet in context, it works. James is able, melodramatically, to pile climax on climax in an ex­ hausting fifteen pages. Even beyond lurid situation, exaggerated descriptions, stock characters, and scenic tensions, however, James creates a more inher­ ent and subtle kind of melodrama of exaggerated moral refinement. Inventing an exaggerated major character such as Ik's. GerOth, with her passion for things, is like taking Gilbert Osmond (with his simi­ lar passion) and placing him in the foreground, making him the central character. It is a risky task to make such an exaggerated character bear so much weight, and what i t does is force Fleda, Mrs. Gereth's fo il, into her own kind of exaggeration—her supersubtie scruples over marrying Owen herself. Because Mrs. Geroth is such a massive char­ acter, Fleda is progressively isolated by the kinds of moral dis­ criminations she has to make to avoid becoming a thing herself. The polarizing of the two women is downright J&nichean, and Fleda*s iso­ latio n bears a ll the marks of true melodrama. We are reminded of Richard Chase's claim in The .American Hovel and It3 Traditions. He states that American novelists have excelled at knowing how to take advantage "of the abstractness of melodrama and its capacity to evoke ultima tos and absolutes, in order to dramatize theological, more, and less frequently political ideology. • • • And in jjnelodrama'sJ capacity to elicit in its peculiarly striking way the dark side of consciousness they have discovered new ways to evoke complex mental and emotional states and new dramatic contexts for psychological and moral analysis VJhat The Spoils of Poynton demonstrates once more is how sub­ tle ty and melodrama, fa r from being mutually exclusive, can work together, feeding one another, to make important moral distinctions as well as soma fairly silly ones* In the end, Fleda, in the James­ ian tradition, chooses renunciation for her lot, while one suspects that Mrs* Gereth, in a fin al (and highly melodramatic) gesture that would be typical of her, sets fire to Poynton, destroying her treas­ ures rather than letting a Brigstock have them*10® In examining these selected novels spanning James's early and middle years, I have tried to demonstrate the several ways he uses melodrama—consciously and unconsciously: as trappings associated with situation, plot, and setting; as a means of characterization, either in creating stock characters or in creating foils; as a way of expressing ideology; or as a way of isolating characters to examine their psychological states* The next three chapters continue the investigation* The chapter treating The Sacred Fount and The Am­ bassadors demonstrates that while tho unusually suspenseful and melodramatic dialogue fa ils in the former, the same delayed c la rifi­ cation technique is splendidly successful in the latter, leading both Strether and the reader to new moral and psychological truths. The chapter on The Wings of the Dove examines James's use of money and "weak specification" to create an unusually sin ister story of wide- scale betrayal* The fin al chapter on The Golden Bowl examines the role that Fanny Assingham, functioning as a stock character~the voice of society—plays in meting out rewards and punishments to the sur­ vivors of an adulterous relationship and in creating melodramatic tensions through her meddling and innuendo. FOOTNOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE

*%'• W, Dupee, Henry James (19^6 j rp t. New York: Dell—-American Man of Letters Series, 1965),' P- 23. ^Leon Edel, Henry James, The M aster: 1901-1916 (Hew York: IAppincott, 1972), V, Ii56-J>V. % del, V, U99• Gray's widow had sent them to Henry James, and Jamas then evidently destroyed them* ^Henry Jamas Letters, ed. Laon Edel, Vol, X, I8h3-l875 (Cam­ bridge , Mass.: feelknap tress of Harvard University Press, 197U)» xvi. Edel mentions a much later letter in which James describes the "huge bonfire in his garden which reduced to ashes his literary archive of forty years." 5lhe L etters of Henry Jamas, ed. Percy Lubbock (New York: Scribner's, i9ZC),xivli. %enry Jamas Letters, ed. Edel, I, adii. ^Dupee, p. 21. &Dupee, P* 6. ^Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (New York: Scribner's, 1913), p. In. ------l°Dupee, p. 18. i:LHenry Jamas, A Small Boy, p. U. 12 Henry James, A Small Boy, p . 8. ^Henry Jamas, A Small Boy, p. lu ^Henry Jamas, A Small Boy, p. 7£. l^Henry Jamas, A Small Boy, p. 76. l% enry Jamas, A Small Boy, p. 78. 17Henry James, A Small Boy, p. 81. 9 6 The sensation novel was popular from about i860 to 1875. Gothic elements, popular melodrama, and murder were domesticated, brought to England for the Victorian reader. See Richard D. Altick's Victorian Studies in Scarlet (Hew York: W. W. Norton, 1970), pp. 75-72E l?Altick, p. 71. 20Leon Edel, in tr o , to The Complete Plays of Henry James (Philadelphia and New Yorks IAppincabt, 19U9J, p. 21. 2lHenry James, A Small Boy, p. 161*. 22Henry James, A Small Boy, p. 108. 23Henry James, A Small Boy, p. 16!*. 2l*Edel, in tro , to The Complete Plays, pp. 2£-26. 2^Edel, in tro , to The Complete Plays, p. 25* 2%enry James, A Small Boy, p. 26l. 27Dupee, p. 31*. 2®Dupee, pp. U3—1*1*. 2^Dupee, p. 1*8. 39See Edel’s biography of James, I, 21*0-52, as he applies the Jacob and Esau theme to the brothers' rivalries. Henry, Alice, and William were all prone to psychosomatic and mental disorders, and William and Henry had strange psychosomatic effects on each other throughout th e ir liv e s . Edel shows th a t whenever they spent time together either in Europe or America, one or both of two things hap- ponad: Henry got sick, and William found things to do that minimized his exposure to Henry. 3lThe Letters of Henry James, od. Lubbock, I , 2l*. 32Hemy James s Autobiography, ed. Frederick W. Dupee (New York: 33Dupee, p. 65. 3%del I, p. 336. 3%del H , p. 21*. 36Dupee, p. 71. 97 37 'Hie Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. 0. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdoch (New York: A' Galaxy Book—Oxford University Press, 1961), pi 23. 38Edel H , p. 200. 39Edel H, p. 2Hi. ^°The Art of the Novel: C ritical Prefaces by Heniy James, in tro , hichard FT Blackmur (New York: Scribner's, 15Ju)» pp. i|2-lili. ^Dupee, p. 19. ^2The Diary of Alice James, ed. with an intro, by Leon Edel (New York: Dodd, i*iead and Co., l93iu Reprinted 1963), p« !*• ^Dupee, pp. 19-20. ^The Diary of Alice James, pp. 57-58. ffinie Diary of Alice James, p. 72. ^Dupeo, p. 8. k?The Diary of A lice Janes, p . 1*. ^^The Diary of Alice James, p. lw ^Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother (New York: Scribner's, 1911*)» p . 22ii. £^Van Vftrck Broolcs, The Pilgrimage of Henry James (New York: Dutton, 192^), p* 18• ^BfcooRs, p. 18. ^Edel I, pp. 56-57. ^ d el I, p. 52. % dol I, 50-51 ffiflie Diary of Alice Jame3, pp. 5-6. £% otebooks, p . 1|0. ^7Edel XT, 31*5-56. % del I, 55. % del IV, especially 315-16. 60EdeI V, U53. 6lEdel H , p. 301. 62Edel H , 359. The nan is Mr, Nadal, the minor diplomatic functionary, ^Henry Janes, Notes of a Son and Brother, in Autobiography, p . lO?. 6l)Edel I, 183. 6*Edel I, 183. ^Dupoo, p.

^ 7 H e n r y Janes« A Small Boy and Others, in Autobiography, pp. 7-8. Dupee, p. 15..' 6%del I, 65. 7®Henry Janes, A Small Boy and Others (Scribnor*s), pp. 19h-9$» 7-*-The Diary of Alice Janes, p. 218. 72Edel V, 1*92. ^Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James a t Work (Londons Hogarth Press, 193U), p. 32. 7^Richard D. Altick, Lives and Letters s A History of Literary Biography in England and America (New Yorks Knopf, 196577 p. 32?. From John Auchan1 s P ilg rim 's V/ay (Boston, 19l*P), p. Ils9. 7**Leon Edel, intro. The Ghostly Tales of Henry JanBs (New Brunswick, New Jerseys Rutgers University l^ess, i9^b/, x. 7^Patricia Spacks in The Insistence of Horror. Quoted in Ifcrtha Banta1 s , ’’The House of the Seven Ushers AncT how !ihey Grew: A Look at Jamesian Gothic ism," Yale Review, 57 (October 1967), 56. 77Robert D. Hume, "Gothic Versus Romantics A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel," FMA, 81; (March 1969), 283. 7®Banta, p. 58.

7^Both Cornelia p. Kelley*s ihe Early Development of Henry James (Urbanas University of Illinois Press, 1930) and Richarcf Poirier’s 99 The Comic Sense of Henry James (New York: Oxford University Press, I960) offer studioo of James's literary influences and indebtedness•

Qn James wrote three essays about his avowed "Master"* the firs t in 1878 (in French Poets and Novelists) , his 1902 introduction to Balzac (in the Portable James), and his 190$ "The Lesson of Balzac" (in The Future of the Novel). Slpercy Adams, "Young Henry James and the Lesson of his Master Balzac," Revue de Iitte ra tu re Compares, 3$ (July-September 1961), h$8-67. ------Op Loo Levy, Versions of Melodrama: A Study of the F iction and Drama of Henry Janie's, l85$^L897 (B erk eley - and Los Angeles: Univer­ sity of California PreosT 19$?), p. 13. B^Henry James, Roderick Hudson, the New York Edition (New Yorks Scribner's, 1907), p. 223. ^Honry James, Preface to Roderick Hudson, in Blackmur's The Art of the Novel, p. $. ^Levy, p. 26. B^Roy Harvey Pearce, ed. with Matthew J. Bruccoli, Hhe American (Bostons Houghton M ifflin Riverside Edition, 1962), x i-x x i. Subse- quent quotations, however, are taken from the New York Edition (New Yorks Scribner's, 1907). Jacques Baraun, "James the Melodramatist," Kenyon Review $ (19h3), $12 —* ------®8Levy, p. 26. ^Elizabeth Stevenson, The Crooked Corridors A Study of Henry James (New Yorks Macmillan, 19U9), p. li|2. “ 9°Stevenson. The above study is condensed from pp. 136—2*2• ^Darlene H. Unrue, Henry James and Gothic Romance. Unpublished Ohio State University dissertation, 1971, pp. 67-6H. ^Henry James, Notebooks, p. 1$. 93page references are to Henry James's The P o rtra it of A Lady, the New York Edition (New Yorks Scribner's, I 9O8), I, 61. "* 9hLevy, p. 1*6. ^Levy, pp. h6-h7. 1 0 0 ^Levy, p. 1*8. 97Henry James, Hie Princess Casamassima» the New York Edition (New Yorks Scribner * s ,l9 0 b ;, !£i, 9®levy, p. 62. ^Lovy, p. 63. 100Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (Now Yorks Horizon Press, 1957)» p. H|2.

•^ L e s lie F ied ler, love and Death in the American Novel, new revised edition (New Yorks toeil--5elta I960;rpi. "iifcYj • •^M ario Praz, The Romantic Agony, second ed. (London and New Yorks Oxford University Press, i95i; rpt. 1970), pp. 215-16. ^ G o rle y P utt, Henry Jamess A Reader*s Guide (Ithaca: Cornel. University Press, 1966),i’P* 21*3* 10l*Putt, p. 21*5. •*-°^Honry James, The Spoils of Poynton, the New York Edition (New York: Scribner*8, 1908), p. 25. AH subsequent quotations are from this edition. In his Notebooks. James notes how the two love scenes be­ tween Owen and Fleda--the first at her father's house (Chapter 11*) and the second at her sister's (Chapter 16)--demonstrate a concentration Jamas learned from his playwriting apprenticeship (pp. 25lff )• ■^Richard Chase, Hie American Novel and I ts Traditions (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957)» p. ^9* l°8putt, p. 21*5. Putt surely seems right that the fire is no accidents "It is certainly no surprise to a James reader that James himself offers no clue to the cause of the fire which destroys everything that mother and son have wrangled about; but I find it strange that none of the critics of the novel mentioned in Professor Cargill's handbook, nor any other to the best of my* knowledge, has seriously questioned the cause of the 'accident.' Am I betraying a further sign of coarseness among English materialists when I confess that I nyself stir uneasily at the thought that Mrs. Gereth, quite literally, could not bear to think of a Brigs took thumbing 'her' treasures?" Chapter Four "HANGING FIRE"

"It could not but be exciting to talk, as we talked, on the basis of those suppressed processes and unavowed references which made the meaning of our meeting so different from its form,"^ Ihe Sacred Fount

In the oblique dialogues of James's late novels, dialogues in which the characters perpetually "hang fire" or take words from each other's mouths; in their instant perceptions of one another and in their unknowing failures of perception when they think they under­ stand but are deceived; in their uncanny arrivals at the mot juste, James's characters provide an elegance and economy almost always lacking in real-life confrontations, confrontations in which, more often than not, one person fails to be another's straight man* In real life we are the victims, too, of what the French call "avoir I'esprit de l'escalier"—thinking too late of the good retort. But James's characters unfailingly deliver the right lines—are models for us as we secretly plan the dialogues for our private conversa­ tions* I t is a c ritic a l commonplace to say that Hemingway's charac­ ters do not talk like anyone we know in real life* But on the printed page the dialogue works* So too in James. His dialogue, as well as his plottings and his imagery, convey a heightened reality*

1 0 1 1 0 2 Yet the realities created are curiously private and subjective ones. The characters in the late novels confront the ordinary with extraordinary sensibilities. They create reality with their unique consciousnesses. They impose their melodramatic visions on "real­ ity," thus producing uniquo manifestations of the human mind at work at "providing" theories* And, of course, they often err. Their periods of reflection are, as one might expect, confused and sub­ jective ruminations. But when they venture outside of themselves to speak to others, their remarks made in conversation are often equally distorted and distorting. Further, the dialogues do not always cor­ rect errors. Often they deceive and mislead both the reader and the characters themselves. These important dialogues (increasingly lengthy in late James) are linked, as will be shown, not only to melodrama but to James's frequent theme of spectatorshlp* The Sacred Fount (1901) and The Ambassadors (published in 1903 but w itten before Pie Wings of the Dove, published in 1902) share some common ground. Both abound in melodramatic dialogue which per­ petuates suspense and ambiguity. Both involve passive spectator heroes engaged in unraveling a mystery concerning the true nature of some personal relationships, either adulterous or vampiristic (in

The Sacred Fount one partner seems to be draining youth and energy from her spouse while a previously stupid gentleman may be siphoning intelligence from his clever lover). Clearly, both situations— vampirism and adultery—are sensationalistic and melodramatic. Fur­ ther, the theme of spectatorship itself has curious melodramatic potentiality—and for two reasons. The danger for the spectators in 103 the novels (the Nameless Narrator and Strether) is that seeing can often exaggerate what is seen. That is, what is seen, while i t might seem natural enough if one were doing it, seems larger than life to the outsider. To use a not irrelevant example, adultery might seem more gross to the spectator than to the participants. Not only can what is seen, then, be exaggerated in a melodramatic way, but watch­ ing itself can become a vampiristlc or parasitical activity. The Narrator and Strether are certainly not the first of James's detached spectators. While some (like the Narrator) seem to take special prurient pleasure in their observations, others of James's fictional spectators—variously called "isolate," "outsider," "avid eye," "watcher from afar"—failing to participate actively in life themselves, find their greatest pleasure in the observation of the lives of others, a kind of non-sexual voyeurism. Of the spectator figures in the early and middle works, Ralph Touchett is perhaps the most isolated and the most meticulous observer of another's life. He does not live vicariously through Isabel Archer, but his curiosity about her life virtually keeps him alive. Passive himself duo to what he calls "circumstances" (his advanced pulmonary disease), Ralph is cynical, ironic, detached. He has a "secret hoard of indiffer­ ence" which he carefully cultivates. A victim of what he calls "mere spectatorship at the game of life," Ralph teUs Isabel: "I keep a band of music in my ante-room. . . . It has orders to play without stopping; it renders me two excellent services* It keeps the sounds of the world from reaching the private apartments, and i t makes the 2 world think that dancing's going on within." But Ralph's American 10U cousin holds out the promise of now entertainment to him* She w ill become fo r him a ch aracter in a play, a work of a r t , an ed ific e which he can examine* Even at the end of the novel, Ralph's genuine love and sympathy for Isabel are outweighed by his overpowering curiosity: "Her mask had dropped for an instant, but she had put it on again, to Ralph's infinite disappointment," Only when he learns Isabel's true story, only after she confesses her misery, can he die, his mother saying of his life , "It has not been a successful JoneJ Because of James's frequent use of the spectator figure in his fiction, it is tempting to draw parallels between his work and his life* Eideed, he did see himself as detached spectator or "observant stranger" (his term for himself), and Percy Lubbock, recalling James's e a rly years in London so c ie ty , remembers th a t James was "in satia b le for anything that others could give him from their personal lives." It was as if he "felt that other people could hardly be trusted with their own experiences,"3 Because the younger James bears a resem­ blance to the young and curious Ralph Touche tt, i t is tempting to link the author, now in his m id-fifties, to the Narrator in The Sa­ cred Fount and to Strether in Hie Ambassadors, More than one critic has suggested that The Sacred Fount is, consciously or unconsciously, James's autobiographical investigation of the novelist's struggle with his conscience as he "uses" people for his art,^ or as he fights to avoid overreaching himself and blurring the distinction between life and art,-* As for The Ambassadors, one recalls that in his story "The Middle Y ears," w ritten seven years before Hie Ambassadors * James had'.expressed great sympathy for an aging protagonist who longed for 1 0 $

"another go," an "extension," a chance to benefit from all his former mistakes.^ In using the story of Howells' message to Jonathan Sturgos in the P aris garden as the germ fo r The Ambassadors, James could give another aging protagonist his second chance by offering him a new kind of life through seeing. The importance of "seeing" is something that James dealt with as early as The Portrait of a lady, if we are to believe the later James of the Prefaces. Isabel would be led to an awareness of the major fact of her existence, the manipulation of her life by Osmond and Mme. Merle, through a visual impression, her observation of the drawing-room scene in which a too-familiar Osmond sat while Mme. Marie stood looking into his eyes. Later that night Isabel would sit by her fire until nearly dawn, "under the spoil of recognitions on which she finds the last sharpness suddenly wait. It is a represen­ tation simply of her motionlessly seeing. . . . "7 Now in The Sacred Fount, James w ill go on to demonstrate n o t only seeing, but the dangers and follies of "seeing" when the central consciousness is inadequate to his task, while in The Ambassadors. Strother's great recognition of "truth" will successfully be prompted by visual impression, another scene of too-groat familiarity, the sight of a handsome couple too much at ease in a rowboat. In the Preface to -this novel James would again discuss seeing. At the heart of the novel is Strother's question of whether there Would be time to make up for what he had missed, time to correct his false impressions and somehow repair the injury done his character: "The answer to which is that he now at all events sees; so that the 106 business of my tale and the march of my action, not to say the prec­ ious moral of everything, is just njy demonstration of this process of vision •ll® The tangential spectator-figure, one Mho, like Ralph, functions as our ficelle in The Portrait, has been brought to the foreground of the novel to become the central consciousness, to create another ldnd of portrait. His consciousness becomes our medium as ho demonstrates his growth through his dialogues. Now hanging fire (the general pattern of delayed clarification) is technically linked to the melo­ dramatic substance! vampirism and adultery—what is seen, which is in turn linked to the melodrama of spo eta tor ship, the seeing itself. Then in this linked process several combinations are possible, all calculated to produce melodramatic tensions: both spectator and reader can be misled by a situation; or the spectator can deliber­ ately mislead either another character or the reader; or the spec­ tator can be misled by one of the other characters; or James can mis­ lead the spectator as well as the reader. Most of this misleading or postponing or obfuscating is conducted in the dialogues, Examination of dialogue in the late novels is much needed In a treatment of Jamesian melodrama. James*s general novelistic method put emphasis on scene (dramatization) rather than on picture (de­ scription): "the whole thing £L.e., the novelj has visibly, from the first, to get itself done in dramatic or at least in scenic conditions— though scenic conditions which are as near an approach to the dramatic as the novel may permit itself and which have this in common with the latter, that they move in the light of alternation.After his 107 experience in writing for the theatre in the early 1890*8, James put s till greater emphasis on dialogue—so that The Awkward Age, for ex­ ample , is nearly all dialogue. The Sacred Fount and The Ambassadors, then, represent a move back to a more equitable combination or altera­ tion, although he still uses more dialogue than he had before the theatre experience. And the dialogue now is especially important in creating innuendo, suggestiveness, and the ambiguity so representa­ tive of the last novels. (Generally we think of melodrama as clear- cut or simplistic rather than ambiguous, but it should be noted that as this ambiguity becomes an important suspense-creating factor in the late novels, i t fosters melodrama rather than being antithetical to it.) The dialogue both entertains and moves us quickly along as we listen to articulate people engaged in conversation which happily forwards the action (or seems to). At the same time, we get direct rather than reported speech (of which there is sometimes too much in James), and we get necessary and important contrast to the difficult and often slow-moving passages of cerebration and speculation. The contrast between picture and scene is a welcome one. Further, we hear from other characters both verifications and denials of the no­ tions of the central consciousness, which help produce ambiguity and tension, both of which create the delayed clarification allowing us to Bhare in the sto ry . F in ally , we are privy to the im portant con­ trast between the life of the mind and the "real" life of shared r e a lity , as the spokesman steps forward to in te ra c t with others. The Nameless N arrator (from now on I sh a ll re fe r to him as Nar­ rator) and Lambert Strether, hero of James *s next novel, are comparable 1 0 8 central consciousnesses in a basic way: each sets for himself the task of ferreting out, discovering the nature of, an adulterous re­ lationship. Critic Bernard Richards draws several other comparisons between Narrator and Strether and between The Sacred Fount and The AmbassadorsWhile the point of view is different (The Sacred Fount is first person while The Ambassadors has Strether as central consciousness recreated in the third person), the effect is remark­ ably similar—because while in Ihe Ambassadors the narrator could clarify facts for us, he does not. Thus we still have to rely almost as much on Strether's perceptions as we do on those of the Narrator. The pattern of delayed clarification is similar in both novels. As for the heroes, both are bounded by their subjectivity, both are contemplative rather than active, both are non-creative artists timid of lif e , both pretend to a knowledge of lif e . Both, says Rich­ ards, are guilty of "making w illful assumptions about lif e , and trusting too much in the truth of these assumptions before they have really had time to test them." Both, he continues, are alienated from their circles ("It is significant that Strether does not make any new friendships during the course of the novel that will continue when he had returned to America. • • "). Further, Richards sees both as guilty of emotional cannibalism, Narrator as he sucks life from Ifcy Server, Strether as he treats Maria Gostrey as a fount. And both, above all, are artistes manques. men who could have been creative artists, given other circumstances. Both have trained eyes and aesthetic sensibilities—but neither can deal well with real lifet ,rWhat Strether and the Narrator of The 109 Sacred Fount gain from treating life in the artistic fashion that they do is not only a satisfying sense of distance from lifey but also an Illusion that treating life in this way gives them some sort of con­ trol over it. Suroly Richards is right when he says that neither hero is of­ fered as a pattern of virtue. But he has been so impressed with the sim ilarities he discovered that he has failed to make important dis­ criminations. When he says, for example* "Strether is probably not as ignoble" as the Narrator* he fails to recognize Strether's enor­ mous moral superiority. And when he claims that Strether manipulates poople as a protective device against being manipulated himself* he is suroly forgetting how frequently Strether is manipulated by that Parisian circle of "friends." Several important differences illus­ trate Strether's superiority—most important of which are his growing compassion and the growing power of his vision. As will be demon­ strated* both men do have trained eyes* but only Strether will learn truly to sea. Each will use talk (conversation, dialogue) for their major means of growth in knowledge* but ultim ately the N arrator's ta lk will leave him miserably deficient and lacking in "tone*" whereas Strether will have learned much about the nature of truth and moral relativism. The major task of this chapter is to demonstrate, by examining patterns of dialogue in the two novels* that the Narrator* in his effort at clarification, destroys his chance for clarification. Delayed clarification is made up of two parts; (1) a continuing sense of something being delayed; and (2) at the same time* a sense of progressive revelation—increments of revelation. The suspense of 1 1 0 withholding continues through the novel, but a counterpoint or coun- termovement of progressive revelation provides increasing power to see. "Hanging fire" is a particular form or formula for delaying clarification in the dialogues. Hanging fire is indirection and suggestion rather than clarification—one part of the delayed clari­ fication technique. But for the technique to be effective, the -two parts or movements must function simultaneously—the reader cannot be delayed endlessly. Yet in The Sacred Fount one JLs delayed endlessly, whereas in The Ambassadors, the dialogues create a process of progres­ sive revelation for Strether, whose efforts at clarification are fi­ nally successful and richly rewarding. Finally he sees. In The Sacred Fount, the melodramatic elements are created by the sinister assumptions in the dialogue. Since we are not given an adequate sense of the real adulterous situation, since it is never certain there is anything to be discovered, the reader comes to feel the Narrator is improvising the very thing he is looking for. Fur­ ther, he Improvises the very process of looking. Thus his spectator- ship itself can become sinister, vampiristic, and melodramatic. From the s ta rt the Narrator seems guilty of the Unpardonable

Sin, the "improper intervention in the life of another jwhich ] is virtually the only sin that interosted James,"•L2 The narrator has two theories, the first that Mrs. Brissenden, the youthful looking woman whose "clock has simply stopped," is draining her younger hus­ band (who looks years older than she) of his vitality. Reflecting on this apparent vampirism, the Narrator arrives at a second theory (and he cunningly conspires with Mrs. Biiss to prove it although he tells I l l her nothing of hia theory about her and her husband). He has noticed that Gilbert Long (they are all guests at Matcham, an English manor house), formerly boring and decidedly u n in tellig en t, seems to have ''improved*' enormously. I t occurs to the N arrator th a t, lik e Mrs, Briss, Long too must be drinking at someone else *s sacred fount. Now the task of the Narrator and Mrs. Briss is to find out who i t is Long is draining as he becomes more and more charming. 3h is early dialogue reveals much about the Narrator's character. He is defensive—"fatuous fool as you may find me" (3h). He directs her thoughts and feeds her lines—"I felt a little like a teacher encour­ aging an apt pupil" (35) • The two nominate and soon dismiss various women as candidates for being Long's lover, but when Mrs. Briss hits on May Server, the very one the Narrator suspects himself, he feels a sharp disappointment. Mrs. Briss is enthusiastically playing his game by now, and we see the Narrator's great skill in generating ex­ citement through talk. "We have her . . . wo have herj it's she I" exclaims Mrs, Briss. The two have brought each other to this point in fourteen pages. But the Narrator is displeased—he does not want May to be Long's fount, for he likes her too much himself. Despite his own uncontrollable curiosity, he becomes upset about Mrs. Briss's detective work involving May. Whan she senses he is upset, her re­ proach is a valid one: "If you wished to satisfy me bo easily you shouldn't have made such a point of working me up" (7U). She tells him, "I all the more resent your making me a scene on the extraor­ dinary ground that I've observed as well as yourself" (76). 1 1 2

Tha Narrator deserves her criticism. He is angry at the very prowess he had encouraged. He himself had been more than willing to engage in some "discreet and honorable detective work" with his friend Obert, detective work "confined to psychologic evidence" (65- 66) and cantering on May Server. One notes that Obert is as excited here as Mrs, Briss had been earlier--again we see the Narrator’s power to generate cu rio sity and enthusiasm with v irtu a lly no evidence to support his speculations. Now Mrs. Briss has become as arch and speculative as the Narrator, and she perceives it: "It’s catching. You've made me sublime. You found me dense. You've affected me quite as Mrs. Server has affected Mr. Long" (61). Despite her current enthusiasm, Mrs. Briss will later repudiate the Narrator completely. The one who speaks to him most at Matchem, she perhaps most comes to see his fraudulence. And he is an extraor­ dinarily unreliable narrator and conversationalist, as his dialogue proves. The careful reader is able to trap him in inconsistencies and downright l ie s . At times he merely stretches the tru th by making false (but fatuous) claims~»Ah . . . I know everything!" (110) he says to intimidate the gentle Briss. Sometimes, for sheer delight, he deliberately creates false impressions, as when he leads Obert to believe his midnight rendezvous is with May rather than with Mrs. Briss (235) • Once he daringly fabricates an entire conversation, putting in to quotation marks a long speech he imagines May Server delivers to him, though she says nothing of the kind ( 111). At least twice in the novel, the Narrator lie 3 outright as he constructs his own idea of the situation at Matcham. He irresponsibly 113 tolls May that Brissenden seems to be in love with hor, which as far as one can tell, is a total lie told only to goad her (lltf). But while one could, argue th a t perhaps the N arrator re a lly believed Briss loved Itiy, his second lie cannot be explained away. Near the book's conclusion (298), when Mrs. Briss asks him if anyone else has verified his observations regarding long, the Narrator responds, "Ah, X don't know what anyone has noticed, I haven't , • . ventured—as you know— to ask anyone." A maddening lie to the reader who has witnessed his tendency to ask whomever walks into his ken. The Narrator is clearly discreet only when he chooses to be, close-mouthed not out of respect for another's privacy, but because he does not want his theories dis­ proved or discarded, "Then who in the world are these objects of your solicitude?" Lady John asks him at one point with exasperation. "I'm afraid I can't tell you," he answers. At which she "not unnat­ urally" scoffs (179). The Narrator continues to deceive in ways more subtle than di­ rect lies and misleading statements. His simple sentence, "I parted with him, some way from here, some time ago" (llil), is meant to be vague with its repetition of the word "some," But beyond that repe­ tition, the Narrator deliberately allows May to think that the ante­ cedent of "he" is Gilbert Long, when in fact the man in question is Briss, Here James creates a difficult passage in his final discus­ sion with Mrs. Briss when both of them refuse to define the word "everything"; stripped down for the purpose of examination, the dia­ logue reads as follows, with Mrs, Briss beginning: n il "X don't believe—if you want to know the reason—that you'ro really sincere," "Not sincere—I?" "Not properly Honest. I mean in giving up." "Giving up what?" "Why, everything." "Everything? Is it a question . . . of that?" "You would i f you were honest." "Everything?" "Everything." "But is that quite the readiness I've professed?" "If it isn’t then, what is?" "Why* isn’t it simply a matter rather of the renunciation of a confidence?" "In your sense and your truth? • • • "Well, what is that but everything?" "Perhaps, • • • perhaps. . . . We'll take it then for everything, and i t ’s as so talcing it that I renounce. I keep nothing at all. . . . Now do you believe I'm honest?" •Well—yes, i f you say so." Even more annoying than this generally senseless and ambiguous sparring is the Narrator's tendency to throw questions back on the questioner: Hay asks him, "What is it that has happened to you?" and ho answers laughing, "Oh • . . what is i t th a t has happened to you?" (135) At other times the Narrator indulges in overt verbal bribery as when the artist Obert joins him in some excessively coy conversation. Obert begins. "You mean you’l l come and smoke with me? Do then come." "What, if I do . . . will you give me?" "I'm afraid I can promise you nothing more that I deal in than a bad cigarette." “ "And what then . . . will you take from me?" 'W ell, I'm afraid I can’t take any more—" "Of the sort of stuff • • • you've already had? Sorry stuff, perhaps—a poor thing but mine own I Such as i t is , I only ask to keep it for ryself, and that isn 't what I meant. I meant what flower w ill you gather, what havoc w ill you play—?" "Well?" "Among superstitions that I, after all, cherish. Mon siege est fait—a great glittering crystal palace. How many panes w iil you reward me fo r amiably s ittin g up with you by smashing?" "How on earth can I te ll what you're talking about?" iiS

Tho reader echoes Obert's final question* The Narrator’s realm is so private and subjective, his vision so suspect, that we cannot share his "crystal palace" of thought. Later, still speaking with Obert about their vampire theory of the Brissenden marriage, the Nar­ rator begins: "But what is it exactly . . . that you call the 'light of day'?" "VJhat do you—?" "You t e l l ms • • • f i r s t ." "If you really haven't found it for yourself, you know, I scarce see what you can have found." "Oh, don't be afraid-greater things than yours 1" like two boys, they play their game of onoupmanship, hurling puerile challenges (You tell me first. No, you tell met) in front of the in­ creasingly incredulous reader* It is true, of course, that some people at Matcham (like Mrs. Briss and Obert) agreed to play the Narrator's snoop game and seem at times to support his theories. But as time passes, our doubts about the N arrator's r e lia b ility only increase. C learly, he has overween­ ing feelings of superiority. He reflects to himself, "The state of my conscience was that I knew too much—that no one had really any business to know what I knew” (161). In another passage he thinks, "I alone was magnificently and absurdly aware—everyone else was be- nightedly out of it. So I reflected that there would be almost nothing I mightn't with safety mention to iry present subject of practice as an acknowledgment th a t I was meddlesome" (177-78). Further, he brags aloud to May about "ny extraordinary interest in ry fellow-creatures • I have more than most men. I've never really seen anyone with half so much" (11*7) • But he fails to see that his "extraordinary interest" has become exploitative and vampiristic. He is jealous and competitive too, as has been demonstrated in the pas­ sages in which he is unhappy because Mrs. Briss seems to have become as passionate and clever an observer as himself. Some guests a t Matcham do not see the Narrator as a happy per­ son (123), others there are afraid of him (especially Hay Server £Llli]), and still others tell Him off. Lady John is particularly blunt. "I don't listen. It's none of ny business," she tells the Narrator. "Is that a way of gently expressing • • • that it's also none of mine?" "It might be . . . if I had, as you appear to, the imagina­ tion of atrocity" (172-73). Again she tells him, "Give up, for a quiet life, the attempt to be a providence. You can't be a provi­ dence and not be a bore. A real providence knows; whereas you . . . have to find out—and to find out even by asking 'the likes o f me" (176). After hie lengthy conversation with Lady John, tho Narrator has another with Obert, who retracts his earlier statements of support for the Narrator's vampire theories in a dialogue continuing for thirty-two pages. Next, in the last long dialogue of the novel (it spans three chapters and eighty-one pages), Mrs. Briss denounces him as well, at the very moment when the Narrator is most sure of his theory, most certain he has gained "the kingdom of thought" {2$$). But Mrs. Briss now claims that Long has not improved. Some critics (including the Nameless Narrator) have held that she recants to con­ ceal the fact that she is Long's lover, that she is transferring to him the energy drained from her quickly aging husband. But the 117 reader is not convinced—because the Narrator's fragile construct collapses utterly when i t is attacked by* Grace Brissenden. She claims she does not know what he is talking about. She tells him, "You see too much" (261), and "You ta lk too much!" She says, "X mean you're carried away—you're abused by a fine fancy; so that, with your art of putting things, one doesn't know where one is—nor, if you'll allow me to say so, do I quite think you always do. Of course I don't deny you're awfully clever. But you build up" (262). Now tho Narrator wanders about the room, sniffs, tries to recol­ lect himself as he engages in what he thinks of as the most interest­ ing conversation of his life. Mrs. Briss's tone as she speaks is al­ ternately sincere, ironic, fearful. But finally she is only blunt— "I think you're crazy." He can only wail! It is certainly true that she played his game—was crazy with him. And in fact she s till is clearly playing it now when she posits new theories about the adul­ terous relations at Matcham. But she has nevertheless succeeded in making the Narrator feel, as he says, a thousand years old (318). And she has succeeded in making the reader view the Narrator in a most negative way. As Garrigan summarizes in her excellent thesis on The Sacred Fount, the Narrator's predatory motives, so apparent in this last long dialogue of the novel, "result from his absurd faith in the power of the imagination to grasp accurately the real world and in turn dictate what it shall become. To the narrator, unlike ordinary human beings, there is no tension between fantasy and reality, subjective and objective; the two realms beautifully coalesce and flawlessly interact. And it is this interaction, forced by his 1 1 8 dangerous, foolhardy juggling of imaginary visions and real situa­ tions , that makes the narrator the actual vampire in The Sacred Fount. "13

Tho Narrator has been the source of obfuscation even as he at­ tempts clarification. The vampiristic potential of spectatorship visible in Ralph is full blovm in tho Narrator. Spectatorship is it­ self tho melodrama, an exaggeration of what he sees. There is little or no objective correlative for the Narrator's imaginings. The char­ acter is melodramatic while the situation is either innocent or neu­ t r a l . In The Ambassadors, however, the chief character iB innocent and tho situation is melodramatic. Strother might have the tendency to exaggerate, to bring melodramatic expectations to Paris, but the re­ lationship he has come to investigate is adulterous. The Narrator of The Sacred Fount had projected melodrama onto his situation, but in The Ambassadors melodramatic spectator and melodramatic situation penetrate one another. Strether's spectatorship, then, is more like Isabel's than like Ralph's or the Narrator's. Both Strether and Isabel come to recog­ nize an adulterous situation through a long and much less vampiristic process. Both shed their initial naive melodramatic expectations— but only to be initiated into a deeper and richer melodramatic situa­ tion. The immediate horror experienced in seeing the adulterous couple in the rowboat or in realizing that line. Merle and Osmond are lovers is transmuted into something else—a maturity, an enriched and more realistic appraisal of human relationships. Thus melodrama in 119 these novels provides a means of maturing, and the maturation process usually ends in renunciation. This process is especially made visible in the dialogues of the novels. It is not surprising that delayed clarification is used ex­ tensively in Tho Sacred Fount as well as in The AmbaBBadors i both protagonists are looking to discover tho reality beyond appearances. But the results are different because in The Ambassadors Strether is not only richly responsive to his situation, but there is actually something to see—the shifting nature of tho "virtuous relationship." Strether faces those same dangers inherent in spectatorship faced by the Narrator, but Strether moves beyond his exaggerated melodramatic expectations to perceive the dignity inherent in tho equally melodra­ matic but realistic adulterous situation. The Namoloss N arra to r's v illa in y makes way f o r Lambert S tre th e r and his similar but more dthical investigation of private relation­ ships, and technically as well as thematically the earlier novel pre­ pares for tho later. The dialogue, tho innuendo, the hanging fire in The Sacred Fount is peculiar, convoluted, extreme. But it prepares for a much more subtle usage in The Ambassadors —where suddenly dra­ matization is effective, plausible, and realistic at the sama time that it functions melodramatically to create curiosity, suspense, tension, complexity, and ambiguity. In The Ambassadors it functions for the purpose of delaying truth rather than permanently withholding it—for in The Sacred Fount we never learn what the truth in fact is. 1 2 0

Just as "SQQing" is linked to talking in The Sacred Fount, so too in The Ambassadors. Strethor's progress in seeing can be wit­ nessed in his conversations • The dialoguos, like those in The Sacred Fount, contain sinister assumptions, although from the start the reader feels that Strother is more naive and benign than the Narra­ tor, and that Strother's sinister assumptions have more basis in ro- ality. After all, ho has been told that Chad is involved with an older French woman—he did not fabricate the original adulterous claim. Then too, people repeatedly lie to him, rather than his lying to them, as the Narrator did. He must find out the truth of the charge, and so once more a pattern of delayed clarification is em­ ployed to create tension, to heighten the melodrama, to suggest the oxcitement inherent in Strotherfs mental and visual quest.

The picture-scene alternation remains James *s chief device for demonstrating Strother fs growth in this quest. The carefully con­ structed scenes are meant both to involve the reader in a detective- novel kind of delayed clarification and to show that "seeing" is a talent acquired slowly, if at all. The Narrator in The Sacred Fount is perfect proof of one who failed to learn to seo, Strother, how­ ever, will succeed. Strethor is taught to see certain things by various characters, and what each teaches him is revealed in those conversations, those scenes for which James said the pictorial or narrative sections of his book were discriminated preparation .*®-*1 In his Preface to The Ambassadors James admits there are places where the distinction between picture and scone is not clear. And he somewhat qualifies his remark about the greater importance of 1 2 1 scone when he alludes to Strother's first encounter with Chad or to I&mie's "hour of suspense in the hotel salon": "To report at all closely and completely of what 'passes* on a given occasion is in- ovitably to become more or less scenic. . . . " ** James believes the book gains a dramatic intensity through the equal play of the oppositions of picture and scene. Nevertheless, in working to achieve "the Btuff of drama," James did place greater importance on the scenes, and he even cre­ ated special characters to make the scenes possible. Hero, as in The Sacred Fount, the characters are unusually sensitive to shades of moaning, to conversational nuances th a t would be lo s t on ordinary people. Unto P aris society, where the need fo r good manners compli­ cates and intensifies the conversational drama, comes a middle-aged man with enough imagination to further complicate the "drama of dis­ crimination" at the root of the novel. Strethor's "whole analytic fancy would bo led . . . a wonderful dance," James wrote in the Preface. Because of the point of view of the novel, Strother is present at every conversation, the dialogue keeping the reader awaro of ex­ actly how much Strother knows or protends to know at a given point. An unusually direct and ingenuous man, Strether pretends very little , and the conversations are generally honost gauges of his progress in learning answers to the questions that brought him to Paris. Some­ times the reader perceives a truth before Strether does, enjoying a complicity with the narrator. More often, the reader (that is, the 1 2 2 person reading the novel for the first tine) is forced to keep pace with S tre th e r, knowing only what he knows and sharing h is delusions or misapprehensions. The conversations throughout the novel are usually between two people and usually they are centered around Strother asking the other person, in confidence, for his judgment or impression. Of course, all human conversations are made up in part of questions and answers, but dialogue in The Ambassadors consists of little else, Strother rarely talks to servants, waiters, policemen. His conversation is confined to a very small group of people whom ho sees frequently. Polite small talk is almost completely eliminated. Yet there is little direct discourse about books, plays, ideas, religion, culture, politics (we are told outright by little Bilham that politics are not discussed in Glorianl's circle). The dialogue in the novel is almost always about the issue most pressing to Strether, the nature of the relationship between Chad and lime, do Vionnot. The characters move to this topic almost at once, although once there they talk about it ambiguously and obliquely, Ifce major agent created especially for the intimate quostion- and-answer dialogues is Maria Gostrey, who, "pro-ongaged at a high salary, but waits in the draughty wing with her shawl and her smelling-salts. “ Thanks to her function as ficolle, “we have treated sconically, and sconically alone, the whole lumpish question of Strother's 'past, 1 which has seon us more happily on the way than anything else could have done."1^ Maria, along with the sullen Way- marsh, acts as Strother's confidante for the first two books of the novel. And Maria has a history of boldness. On their first walk she had noted, "You're doing something that you think not right. Now in the long (twelve-page) scone in which she drat*s Strother's "past" from him, Maria learns why he has come to Europe and what he has to lose if his mission fails. More important, she draws from him his moral attitudes. He is, despite our reading earlier about his "double consciousness" (X, $) and his "candour of fancy" (I, $2), a pompous and narrow man. The woman in Chad's life is clearly "base, venal— out of the streets "5 Chad "has darkened his mother's admirable life," Strother says "with austerity" (X, ld>-ii 6). In a recent article entitled "Talking in James," Ruth B. Yeazell demonstrates how dialogue in early James (she quotes Mrs. Tristram and Newman in The American) usually consists of short, complete, de­ clarative sontonces "whoso vocabulary is relatively direct and con­ crete."^ The speakers tend to respond to one another in a straight­ forward manner: they neither qualify one another's remarks nor build on one another's formulations. "Neither echoing nor expanding each other's language, those friends keep their verbal and imaginative dis­ tance." Yet by the time he comes to write The Ambassadors. James has created a new siyle of dialogue: "Adultery, theft, deception, be­ trayal, even the fact of mortality itself—all go unspoken and un­ named." Although they have known each other for loss than twenty- four hours, Maria Gostrey and Strether are alroady "verbal collabor­ ators joined in "remorseless analysis." They speak in fragments, "extending and completing one another's thoughts as if they were not so much separate persons as parts of a single self." The task of izk their many conversations is to "educate" Strother, just as his talks with little Bilham and Miss Barrace and the other characters are to educate him about the re a l meaning of the word "v irtu e." For indeed Strother comes to see that tho relationship between Chad and Mme. do Vionnst is virtuous. In theso conversations abstract words abound— "wonderful," "beautiful," "prodigious," "extraordinary," "splendid." As Yoazell says, those words "arise so often in Jamesian speech that they seem to constitute a secret code—an esoteric vocabulary under­ stood only by tho members of a closod social world." Yet Strother's conversationists must bo vague and deceptive to keep him in Paris, to keep him "temporarily passive," so th a t ho might bo educated gradually. According to Yeazell, James's late novels suggest that "talk may not so much reveal truth as create it." Like l&ria, Waymarsh helps to reveal Strother's character— and his ignorance—in their dialogues, "Does he liv e there with a woman?" "I d o n 't know." "Has he taken her off with him?" "'And will he bring her back?' Strether fell into the enquiry. But he wound it up as before, "X don't know'" (I, 106). When Jferia arrives at Paris, Strother continues to roveal what ho does not know. But he demonstrates a now oase as ho discusses Chad. When Maria asks, " I s n 't there any one with him then?" he answers, "How do X know: And what do I care?" She laughs, but his insouciance is immediately qualified: "He saw now how he meant i t as a joke. She saw, however, still other things, though in an instant she had hidden them. "You've got at no facts at all?'" (I, 122) 1 2 $

Except for his new nonchalance, Strether does not demonstrate much, change, yet we soon learn in one of the long narrative sections that rises out of a single line of dialogue (as in The Sacred Fount a common way for James to intermingle scene and picture) that Strether experiences a quickening of his perceptions. Miss Gostroy says of l i t t l e Bilham, "Oh h e fs a l l rig h t—he*s one of us I" Then "Strether knew that he knew almost immediately what she meant, and took i t as still another sign that he had got his job in hand. This was the more grateful to him that he could think of the intelligence now serving him as an acquisition positively now. He wouldn't have known even the day before what she meant—that is if she meant, what he assumed, that they wore intense Americans together" (X, 12$). Near tho end of Book Three an important one-page scene occurs in which both confidants of Strether.'s "early" period (a period which w ill come to a close momentarily when Chad makes his firs t appearance in tho theatre box) sit with Strether and discuss his "wonderful con­ sciousness." The scene begins typically with Strother asking an omi­ nous question: "Is it then a conspiracy?" (I, 133) By this time Strether and Maria are so attuned to one another that either their sentences need not be completed or they complete ono another's. "Do you mean he i s —?" "They had arranged—?" Within hearing of this cryptic and Intuitive talk, Waymarsh sits "massive," When told that he has helped to float Strether to whore he is, ho responds, "And where the devil is he?" This scono works to foreshadow the future roles of Strether's first two ficelles. A sullen Waymarsh will soon turn against Strother's project completely and will no longer bo taken into his confidence. An intuitive Maria Dos trey will continue to be a devoted and unusually perceptive interpreter of events, abandoning her role as ficelle only when Strether can grow without her. The scene also foreshadows Strethor's typical pattern during dialogues. He will continue to demonstrate ignorance in the scenes (despite his rapid moral and aesthetic development demonstrated in tho narrative, pic­ torial sections) because in his conversations he will repeatedly re­ turn to the question of the "virtuous attachment." Although warned of a plot, a conspiracy that must include little Bilham and Miss Barrace as well as Chad and Mme. de Vionnet, Strether persists in asking questions of them and expecting honest replies. That he should reveal his uncertainties and naivete to Maria i 3 as i t should be, but Strother demonstrates his ignorance to everyone. He asks of Miss Barrace, "Does Madame de Vionnet do that? I mean really show for what she is?" (I, 208) And despite Miss Barrace's meaningless answer ("She's wonderful"), he will later ask her, speak­ ing again of the Countess, "Will she ever divorce?" (I, 265) He asks Chad of Marie de Vionnet, "Is her life without reproach?" (I, 239) He asks the Countess herself, "Is your daughter in love with our friend?" (I, 2$h) Speaking of the relationship between Chad and Mme. de Vionnet he tells Miss Barrace, "It's innocent. I see the whole thing" (I, 266). He tells little Bilham, "It is virtuous" (I, 279). 127 Continuously, repeatedly deceived, Strether assures Bilham that he believed him even the first time he asked if the attachment were vir­ tuous. "It would have been odious and unmannerly—as well as quite perverse if I hadn't. What interest have you in de­ ceiving me?” The young man ca st about. "What in te re s t have I?" "Yes. Chad might have. But you?" '•Ah, ah, ahi" l i t t l e Bilham exclaimed ( I , 280) • And lest the reader suspect that Strethor's ingenuousness here is only a ploy, a device to shame Bilham into admitting deceit, the nar­ rative voice hastens to add: "It might, on repetition, as a mystifi­ cation, have irritated our friend a little , but he knew, once more, as we have seen, where he was, and his being proof against everything was only another attestation that he meant to stay there" (I, 280). While Strether boldly continues to ask all the questions he needs the answers to ("He had grown used by th is time to thinking of himself as brazen"), his illumination is greatly delayed—either be­ cause people deliberately lie to him (as do Chad and little Bilham); or because they fail to contradict him when he is wrong; or because they axe mistaken themselves, as Maria momentarily is when she says that Mme. de Vionnet has brought Chad up for her daughter (I, 232). By the end of the first half of the novel (a rough count shows approximately one hundred and twenty pages of picture and one hundred and sixty of scene), Strether has delivered his famous charge to Bilham to "Live all you canl" He has learned that Mme. de Vionnet cares more for Chad than for her. And he has learned that he himself cares more for her than he should—ho almost wishes she were "worse," "a different sort" (I, 233). He has even agreed to save her if he can, and he realizes ruefu lly th a t he seems "to have a l i f e only fo r other people" (I, 269). About the virtuous attachment he is still de­ ceived* But the next section of the book demonstrates how much Strether has changed his original attitudes despite his remaining deceived about the relation between Chad and Mme. de Vionnet. Maria has le ft Paris for more than throe weeks—so that she will not have to lie to him about Marie de Vionnet, we learn later. It is implied that If she had stayed in town she would have chosen to lie rather than to t e l l him the tru th , the knowledge of which would have denied him a l l fu rth er reason fo r staying. I t would have denied him the expanding and beneficent Influences of little Bilham, Mme. do Vionnet, and Paris itself. Aware that.she might lose him as a lover or husband if he does remain, Maria nevertheless gives him the greatest gift lover can give beloved or teacher pupil (and she is both Strother's lover and his teacher): the gift of Beeing for oneself. In her absence, Strether does learn to "toddle" on his own. Ho tolls her upon her return, "I came out to find nyself in presence of new facts—facts that have kept striking mo os less and less met by our old reasons" (II, 1|3)* And as Maria feared, their relationship has changed: "This tru th . . . had come up between them on the renewal of th e ir meetings. . . . He could toddle alone, and the difference that showed was extraordinary. . • . She fell Into her place as but one of hie tributariesj and there was a strange sweetness—a melancholy mildness that touched him—in hor acceptance of the altered order" 1 2 ?

Meanwhile Strether recognizes and enjoys his new savoir faire as he takes Mme, do Vionnet to breakfast: "There had perhaps never yet been for pilmj so unexpected a moment of pride—so fine, so odd a case, at any rate, as his finding himself thus able to offer to- a person in such a universal possession a new, a rare amusement" (H, 12), He considers how far he has come since the evening in London when he dined with Maria Gostrey before going to tho theatre (II, 13). Now ho will go even farther. Either, as Maria suggests, out of curiosity, or because ho will not leave Mmo. do Vionnet at this point, ho asks Chad to remain in Paris for a time. When Chad asks what he hopes to gain from tho delay, Strether indicates that ho hopes it will load to his "having a certitude that has been tested— th a t has passed through tho f ir e " (H , 3U-3!>). F u rth e r, he i s mean­ while having enough fun "to last £him| for tho rest of jhisj days." The latter quotation indicates that he knows he w ill be leaving even­ tually and that his vague future plans do not include either Mme. do Vionnot or Maria Gostrey. Tho formor passage on certitude demon­ strates that his progress towards accepting tho ambivalence of "truth" is not yet complete: ho knows ho has not yot passed through tho firo of a final decision regarding Chad's virtue or Mrs, New­ some's suitability as his wife. Perhaps this quotation on certitude prepares the reador for tho temporary reversal Strethor experiences when Sarah Pocoolc first arrives. Despite his earlier feeling that he had moved beyond Mrs. Nowsomo in tact and perception (I, 172*), he is now, at tho sight of hor daughter, to gasp at how ho might now have lost her (II, 72*). Yet Strether soon realizes that the Pococks aro "either stupid or wilful" (H , 80), and after observing Jim Pocock he reflects that should he marry Mrs. Newsome, "he should perhaps find his marriage had cost him his place " (II, 83). Strothorfs changing perceptions during this period are best demonstrated in two important scones in­ volving Sarah Pocock. Tho firs t is unusual becauso four people are presentj i t is the tense and skillfully wrought scene In which Mme. de Vionnet pays a visit to Sarah. Strether comes unaware that the Countess is already there. Waymarsh is inexplicably present. Pic­ ture and scene aro intermingled and Strother is remarkable not for what he says (for he says almost nothing), but for what he is able to perceive from tho conversation. The old Strether who dominated dia­ logues with his obtuse questions about the virtuous attachment is now as self-contained and intuitive as Maria Gostrey, tho confidante who first exposed him to the nuances of oblique Edwardian talk. Very early in the novel Strether had told Waymarsh, "You can't mako out over here what people do know," and throughout tho book the scones have worked to retard the action, to show Strethor's "gropings" ("His very gropings would figure among his most interesting mo­ tions.") ao strether observes this scene in which so much is at stales for Mme. de Vionnet, he is no longer groping. He sees at once that in greeting him familiarly, in attempting to please Sarah Pocock, the Countess "was giving him over to ruin": "She was all ldndness and ease, but she couldn't holp so giving himj she was ex­ quisite, and her being just as she was poured for Sarah a sudden rush of meaning into his own equivocations" (H , 92), Strether sends 131 a mental message to the Countess: "Ah don't be so charming to me! — for it makes us intimate, and after all what is between us when I've been so tremendously on my guard and have seen you but half a dozen times? (II, 9U) The formerly ingenuous Strether has learned dissem­ bling. He looks at Sarah "in a manner that he thought she might take as engaging." But Sarah is taken in by neither Strether nor Mme. de Vionnet. Both women are brutal in this scene. Nowhere in the book does James better display Mme. de Vionnet 1 s desperation than here where she almost begs for a chance to show off her daughter (who in her ex­ q u isite young French p u rity can only be a c re d it to her mother), and where she uses Strether with little regard for the man's feelings. She is insidious in bringing up Strether's relationship with teria, and even the taciturn Waymarsh harms Strether by adding that Maria no doubt loves Strether. "Ah but we all do that—we all love Strether," Madame de Vionnet replies. If he is quiet during this scene, Strether is especially vocal and eloquent in a later scene with Sarah in which he defends Mme. de Vionnet. Despite his continuing to be deceived about Chad and the Countess, he Bays true things, but to an unreceptive Mrs. Pocock: "Everything has come as a sort of indistinguishable part of everything e lse . Your coming out belonged clo sely to my having come before you, and my having come was a result of our general state of mind. Our general sta te of mind had proceeded, on i t s sid e, from our queer ig ­ norance, our queer misconceptions and confusions—from which, since, then, an inexorable tide of light seems to have floated us into our 132 perhaps s t i l l queerer knowledge" ( n , 200-201), But the queer knowl­ edge seems to be his alone. Sarah w ill share none of i t , and her tone throughout the conversation is strident, defensive, affronted. The scene provides dramatic irony for the reader in two ways. Sarah is more correct about the adulterous relationship than Strether is, yet all Strether says about Mme. de Vionnet is true and will continue to be true for him even when he learns of the adultery. As mentioned earlier, Strether*s progress towards accepting the ambivalence of truth is not yet complete. When S trether does discover the adultery by chance during his day in the country, James presents the revelation and its aftermath through picture rather than scene, in three chapters completely with­ out dialogue. Nothing could be gained by dramatising the painful tra in ride back to Paris, although the reader presumes th a t Strether played his part in the performance skillfully if unenthusiastically: "A performance i t had none the less quite handsomely remained, with the final fact about it that it was on the whole easier to keep up than to abandon" ( II , 263). In two final scenes Strether displays the conversational skill that has developed simultaneously with his powers of perception—and that has indeed become indistinguishable from it. In his last meet­ ing with Mne, de Vionnet he might begin, like the old Strether, with a question, but now he is all enlightened charm. She can do nothing more to him; he is invulnerable to her. "May I ask, delighted as I've been to come, if you've wished to say something special?" (II, 280-81) He perceives her helplessness, her self-condemnation, her 133 fear for her life. He thinks of the "passion, nature, abysmal, piti­ ful," which she represents for him. He realizes that in a vague way she is offering herself to him now that she suspects she will lose Chad* He is aware she has used him all along only to keep Chad. "But she was as much as ever the finest and subtlest creature, the happiest apparition, it had been given him, in all his years, to meet. • • " (II, 286). Their last words to one another illustrate the degree of Strether's new illumination and its concomitant urban­ ity. She says, "What's cheerful for me is that we might, you and I, have been friends. . . . You see how, as I say, I want everything. I've wanted you too." He can respond honestly, ruefully, almost whimsically* "'Ah but you've had me!' he declared, at the door, with an emphasis that made an end." Mne. de Vionnet, this happiest of apparitions, helps to illus­ trate light imagery, a fictional device James has employed to illum­ inate Strether's question. Paradoxically, James has inverted the tra­ ditional values of light and dark. In James, experience is usually conveyed with dark images (Isabel Osmond had found th a t experience led her into a "dark, narrow alley, with a dead wall at the end. • . . i t was as if Osmond deliberately, almost malignantly, had put the lights out one by one"). But in The Ambassadors, experience is ac­ companied by successive increases of lig h t .20 Jn The Ambassadors most of the action takes place outside, in the daytime, in the dazzling light of Paris, in gardens, while tak­ ing walks. The four major scenes between Lambert Strether and Mne. de Vionnet demonstrate how James uses light imagery to guide both Strether and the reader to a deepening moral awareness. In the first scene, their meeting at Qloriani's takes place outside and Strether is aware of Mme. de Vionnet*a fairness and brightness. When she next appears, at Notre Dame, she kneels within the light of a shrine, and although her dress is black, a wine color seem3 to gleam faintly through the dark fabric. At the third and most important meeting, the river scene, Mne. de Vionnet is now wholly in the light, com­ p le te ly revealed to S tre th e r. His moment of supreme illu m in atio n , his realization of the true nature of the "virtuous attachment," takes place in the brightest light of the novel. The next day, at their last meeting, lime, de Vionnet, the revealed adulteress, has greeted Strether wearing a white dress.

However revealing picture is, and however important the inter­ mingling of picture and scene, it is nonetheless significant that the final pages of the novel are given over to conversation. As Strether meets with Maria Gostrey, their dialogue reveals the extent of Strether's new powers of vision. He porceives that Chad will give up Mne. de Vionnet, and he recognizes the fu ll infamy of Chad's abandoning her. He realizes that he w ill not be returning to Mrs. Newsome: "She's the same. She's more than ever the same. But I do what I didn't before~I see her" (H, 323). This scene marks the last meeting of Strether and Maria and the conversation is brief. But Strether's goodbye prompts Maria to delicately offer herself and her way of life to him as an alternative to returning to America. "There's nothing, you know, I wouldn't do for you," she tells him, and he does know hut must return without having got anything for him­ self other than his "wonderful impressions." Ho has just said, "I have no ideas. I'm afraid of them. I've done with them." But ideas are precisely what he does take away with him, and paramount among them is the idea that he must be freed of women. Maria had earlier pointed out that no one owed more to woman than he, yet from the beginning of the novel Strether was uneasy about the debt., At the second-rate London play he had attended with Iferia, he had fe lt sympathy for the drama's victim," a pleasant weak good-looking man." Much later Strether expressed "a horror of being in question between women—was in fact already quite enough on his way to that. • . " (I, 273}* Now, his process of vision is completed, his moral percep­ tions greatly altered to include an awareness of the ambivalence of truth and virtue, his transition from mere observer to seer complete because he has learned to see at the highest pitch of awareness. Strether acknowledges his debt to Iferia, but at the same time he moves beyond her, back to loneliness and isolation perhaps, but back with a new urbanity and self-confidence and sympathy. Strether's language in his last scene is as arch, as subtle, as intuitive as Maria's. Even the deliberate fatuousness of his last line, "Then there we arej" rings the proper note of irony and acceptance. Yet there is something disturbing about Strether's tone here, and one recalls the final lines of The Sacred Fount, delivered as the Narrator recognizes his defeat when Mrs. Briss has the last word. He thinks: "I should certainly never again, on the spot, quite hang together, even though it wasn't really that I hadn't 136 three tines her method. What I too fatally lacked was her tone." If Strether has merely achieved the tone the Narrator "all too fatally lacked," Is not his achievement after all a shallow one? Yet despite the many recorded sim ilarities between the' men, it is clear that Strether has moved ahead because he has learned not only tone but knowledge and compassion. He has not become a vampire. He goes be­ yond fatuousness to secure self-confidence, makes some important de­ cisions about his l i f e , and, above a l l , sees. As explication of these two novels demonstrates, seeing is tied in with talking, the two processes inextricably linked in James's fiction. And talking, in turn, is bound up with melodrama. In his pioneering study The Method of Henry James (1918), Joseph Warren Beach noted how dialogue was James's way of giving a dramatic cast to the narrative, of doling out information in bits. He says, "In my own reading, there is no fiction of any sort in which suspense is so constantly sustained. You are literally always in suspense, or at least always curious, always clamoring for more light." In James the question is not so much What is going to happen? as What did happen? The Ambassadors is illu s tra tiv e : "From beginning to end of the story, we are occupied with just finding out what it is the author is hiding from us." For Beach, James "is like some public personage constantly beset by a swarm of reporters hungry for a bit of news, who does 'release,' bit by bit, such news as he sees fit." ^ James used similar methods of "release"--delayed clarification— in both The Sacred Fount and The Ambassadors. and if we need further proof that if anything James's melodramatic impulse is increasing rather than declining, we need only observe once more that the con­ versations are even more fragmented, a b stra c t, and ambiguous than in 22 his earlier novels. But if the method of delayed clarification was similar in both novels, James nevertheless achieved very different effects. In both novels we are "occupied with just finding out what it is the author is hiding from us," but the crucial difference is that in The Ambassadors we do find out. In Pie Sacred Fount James seems to have been playing some mad private joke. We never loam the true nature of tho relatio n sh ip s a t Mitcham. The ambiguity is never resolved. The layering of scene after scene of melodramatic tension seems f in a lly a cheap tric k . In The Ambassadors, however, melodrama has its dignity. Finally both novels are melodramatic in a more important way than in sheer scenic tension. Emerson said in "Nature," "The sensual man conforms thoughts to thingsj the poet conforms things to his thoughts," and tho late novels do create realities which are in­ tensely subjective. These late novels become poems in a sense, and the central consciousnesses are poets of sorts. Wo tentatively label them poets because they share James's poetic consciousness at least in parti more important, they are poets because they are heirs of Emersons "The world ex ists fo r you. . . . Build therefore your own w o rld . "These characters have—creating new reality with their unique consciousnesses. But while Strether achieves true self- reliance, the Narrator never goes beyond what Emerson's populace 138 could quite justifiably call "more antinorrLanism."^ Tho theological vein proves useful hero: the Narrator in his solipcism achieves only the "enthusiasm" of spectatorship, whereas Strether gains the "pas­ sion" of spectatorship. In the famous rowboat scene, S trether conforms things to his thoughts: he sees a greater reality than just an adulterous situa­ tion. He transforms the objectivity through a series of reversals— the adulteress wears white and is an angel, and tho boy Chad, whom they feared would be corrupted by the adulteress, is seen to have been corrupt all along. If the Narrator represents the shoddy side of melodrama—a l l "enthusiasm" and sonsationalism , S treth er demonstrates the redemption of molodrama~in transforming objective reality, Strether becomes an Emersonian poet. FOOTNOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR

^tenry James, The Sacred Fount (I901j rp t. New York: Scrib­ ner's, 1923), p. 272. All subsequent quotations are from this text. ^Henry James, The P o rtrait of A lady, Tho New York Edition (New York: Scribner's, 190fr), I,~*B27 ^Percy Lubbock, e d ., The L etters of Henry Jamas (New York, 1920), I , x v ii. ^ l. P. Blackmur, "The Sacred Fount,» Kenyon Review, IV (Autumn, 19h2), 328-52. ------^Landon C. Burns, "Henry James's Mysterious Fount," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, n (Winter, 1961), fees L. C. Knights's essay "Henry James and tho Trapped Spec­ tator" in his Explorations: Essays in Criticism Mainly on the Liter­ ature of the Seventeenth Century CNow York, i9U7) for an examination of the re la tio n between James's a r t and his lif e . ^The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James, ed, RicHardTT TSTaclanur (New York, 193hj, p« 57* #•> ®Blackmur, p. 308. ^Blackmur, pp. 89-90. l°Bernard Richards, "The Ambassadors and The Sacred Fount: the artiste manque",11 published in The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James ,~eh. John Goode (London: TSTthuen, 1972), pp. 220ff. l^RichardB, p. 239.

12j . a . Ward, The Imagination of Disaster: Evil in the Fiction of Henry James (Lincoln: university of Nebraska Press7TL95T)T"pP« 12-13.

139 11*0 ■^This passage is quoted from an admirable and exciting 1961* Ohio State University master’s thesis by Kristine 0. Garrigan, "The Imagination of Atrocity* A Study of Henry James's The Sacred Fount," p. 111. ^Blackmur, p. 323. •^Blackmur, p. 325.

•^Blackrmir, p. 323. ^Honry Jamas, The Ambassadors, the New York Edition (New York: Scribner's, 1905), 1, 161 l^Ruth B. Yeazell, "Talking in James," PMLA, 19, No. 1 (January, 1976), 66-77. 19Biaclanur, pp. 317-18.

2 Of or the treatment of light imagery in the following paragraph, I am indebted to Thomas Minnick's unpublished paper "'The light of Deepening Experience' in the l&jor Novels of Henry James" (Ohio State University, Summer, 1967). 21 Joseph Warren Beach, The Method of Henry James (Philadelphia: Albert Saifer, 1918 j enlarged ed. 195U). See nis' chapter entitled "Suspense." 22Yeazell, pp. 66- 67. 23»Nature," Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: "Houghton M ifflin Riverside Edition, I960), pp. 1*1* and 56. 2^"Self-Reliance," in Whicher, p. 160. Chapter Five THE WINGS GF THE DOVE

In his 1888 essay "The Art of Fiction,” Henry James speaks of the "importance of exactness—of truth of detail. One can speak best from one’s own taste, and I may therefore venture to say that the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme v irtu e of a novel. . . . "■** As a r e a lis t, James continued to value and to utilize "solidity of specification" even in his last novels, but increasingly in the 1890’s a strain that can only be called counter-realist appears in his speech and in his writing. In his oritical biography Henry James, F. W, Dupee speaks of James's "dark view of things . . . his growing taste for the anomalous and 2 the grotesque," his "elemental . . . latent horror, of what he de- scribed as 'the thing hideously behind.'" James’s tales of the 1890's show him "to have been increasingly preoccupied with the queer, the futile, the terrible,Dupee speaks again of "the in- creasingly violent imagery of his prose,"^ the fact that his turning to dictating in the 1890's might have contributed to the "complica­ tion of his later s t y l e , t h a t his speaking style kept apace, with its "slow accumulation of detail, the widening sweep, the interjec­ tion of grotesque and emphatic images, the studied exaggerations. . . . His sentences, which have always carried "an abundance of suggestive detail," now simply carry more.® In culling these phrases U*2 and clauses from Dupee, I do not think I have wrenched them out of context. What I wanted was the sweeping evidence their accumulated force could provide that James's melodramatic impulse was s till strong and s till growing, that he was becoming more and more "sug­ gestive," using the suggestiveness to create new melodramatic ten­ sions in his work. The concept of suggestiveness becomes extremely important in approaching The Wings of the Dove because one is struck from the be­ ginning chapters by the surface implausibility of the plot, by a vagueness th a t only becomes explainable in a melodramatic way. At its most basic level, the plot is lurid and specific enough: a money-hungry pair conceive and carry out the exploitation and be­ trayal of a young, beautiful, wealthy, and dying woman. Yet this vulgar summary clearly misrepresents James's novel, so we must return to a second level—and here we find James's comments in the Prefaces most helpful. Considering how to treat Quint and Miss Jessel in his "sinister romance" The Turn of the Screw, James had asked him self, "What, in the last analysis, had I to give the sense of? Of their being, the haunting pair, capable, as the phrase is, of everything. . . . Only make the reader's general vision of evil intense enough, I said to myself . . . and his own experience, his own imagination, his own sympathy . . . and horror . . . will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications."^ This novelist who so prizes solidity of specification now prizes as 1U3 well a different kind of specification, which is in fact no specifi­ cation but rather an increasing degree of indirection and suggestive­ ness. That new strain is itself a sign of the continuing intensity of the melodramatic imagination. Released, then, from "weak specifications," James concentrates on suggestivenessi "The study is of a conceived 'tone,' the tone of suspected and felt trouble, of an inordinate and incalculable sort— the tone of tragic, yet of exquisite, mystification,"■**° James says that in conceiving his ghosts he ignored the copious psychical rec­ ords of cases of apparitions, because those recorded ghosts are after all not very expressive or dramatic or responsive. He was more in­ terested in the "impression of the dreadful" than in having his ap­ paritions "correct." Impression, indirection, and suggestiveneBs be­ come essential: "Portentous evil—how was I to say that, as an inten­ tion on the part of my demon-spirits, from the drop, tho comparative vulgarity, inevitably attending, throughout the whole range of pos­ sible brief illustration, the offered example, the imputed vice, the cited act, the limited deplorable presentable instance?"^ Here we can see even more clearly what James wants to avoid: the offered, the imputed, the cited, the limited deplorable presentable weak specifications. In their place he will employ the indirect, the im­ pressionistic, the mystifying, and the suggestive. Yet these remarks were made about The Turn of the Screw, and i t would seem unfair indeed to apply them to The Wings of the Dove if we did not find in the Wings Preface a similar vocabulary and the ex­ pressions of a similar theory. In that Preface, James frequently uses a portentous vocabulary. He tells how his subject Milly “stood there with secrets and compartments, with possible treacheries and tra p s. ..." He sees the characters who gravitate to Milly as "terrified and tempted and charmed." He sees Milly herself as "a young person so devoted and exposed, a creature with her security hanging so by a hair, [she] couldn't but fall somehow into some abysmal trap. ..." Her own lia b ili tie s "would be as n atu ral, these tragic, pathetic, ironic, these indeed for the most part sin­ ister, liabilities,to her living associates, as they could be to her­ self as prime subject."^ He continues, "If I like, as I have con­ fessed, the 'portentous' look, I was perhaps never to set so high a value on it as for all this prompt provision of forces unwittingly waiting to close round my eager heroine . . . as the result of her mere lifting of a latch, Discussing Book Five James says, "At my game, with renewed zest, of driving portents home, I have by this time all the choice of those that are to brush that surface with a dark wing." But more relevant even than his talk of portents is his discussion of how he notes and approves of his "author's instinct everywhere for the indirect pre­ sentation of his main image. I note how, again and again, I go but a little way with the direct—that is with the straight exhibition of Milly; it resorts for relief, this process, whenever It can, to some kinder, some merciful indirection: all as if to approach her cir­ cuitously, deal with her at second hand, as an unspotted princess is ever dealt with. . . . lUS Two things should be noted here. First, this indirection or circuitous treatment of Milly might keep her as an ‘'unspotted prin­ cess," but it also forces her into the painful mental isolation as­ sociated with Jamesian melodrama, an isolation further fostered by her being betrayed by almost everyone she knows. (Only Eugenio re ­ mains true, since their relationship i 3 overtly and from the s ta r t based on his services rendered in exchange for her money given.) Second, the indirection which James utilizes in his treatment of Milly is utilized as well throughout the book. That is, James will often deal with Kate indirectly (sometimes through subtle distancing imagery) or Kate and Densher will deal with each other circuitously, deal with the real issue "at second hand." The Wings of the Dove is a supremely melodramatic orchestration, and gains its richness from the different kinds of melodrama being employed, Hie first kind is blatant enough—trappings and extrava­ gant language and a good deal of overt sordidness. Here solidity of specification (exactness, tru th of d e ta il) is consciously employed to render realism. For a second kind of melodrama, James falls into the use of "weak specifications" despite himself. For some of the nov­ el's melodramatic tensions he must rely on the offered or imputed or cited act or instance. And in fact he needn't have felt apologetic for using weak specifications. A novel so lengthy and dense can bear the weight of all degrees of specification. Employing a th ird technique fo r achieving melodramatic effect, James does what he sets out for himself in the The Turn of the Screw and Wings Prefaces—he achieves effect without specification, through the use of the indirect, the impressionistic, and the suggestive. AH three kinds of melodrama help to create the pathos and the horror of the story of M illy Theale and her c irc le , and each type w ill be examined in turn. But i t is th is la s t usage, as demonstrated In the preceding paragraph, that is most interesting and most sinister. Sometimes the suggestiveness is so ambiguous and implausible th a t i t damages the novel. But at other times this' lack of specification creates the best of the sinister and the frightening elements of the work. James was as successful here as he was in The Turn of the Screws "Only make the reader*s general vision of evil intense enough . • • and his own experience, his own imagination, his own sympathy , . • and horror • . . will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars." Because he was successful, James allows the reader to participate, to share in the creative experience of witnessing to­ gether a nightmare. Solidity of specification exists in several forms in The Wings of the Dove. Sometimes it is simply directness of language. In a novel in which perceptions are so frequently excessively subjective and people are themselves in doubt about what they feel or intend, it comes as a great relief at various points in the novel to witness in a character a response to the situation which is similar to our own or to witness the stamp of d ire c t, unambiguous authorial commentary. At times we are so bewildered by, attracted to, and repelled by Kate*s and Densher's rationale for their actions, that we are grate­ ful for a verification of what is actually happening. For example, when even the obtuse Lord Mark begins to feel that Milly is 1U7 "threatened, haunted, blighted,"1^ we have a reassurance that the Croy-Densher scheme is as cunning, destructive, and insidious as we instinctively felt it was. And when at the end of a lengthy para­ graph of Densher's typical defensiveness, a paragraph containing protestations that a certain lie told to Milly (that Kate did not care for Densher although he was in love with her) was a "proper" lie , a "deeply, richly diplomatic" lie; when that paragraph is con­ cluded by the brief, direct statement, "So Milly was successfully deceived," the juxtaposition of the hedging dishonesty of "proper" and "richly diplomatic" (his trying to qualify what is still after all a lie ) with that splendid authorial directness brings us back to a conventional morality. We now have further evidence that Densher has simply been fooling himself about what is being asked of him (II, 68-69). Besides demonstrating itself in directness of language, solidity of specification is used to create a sense of place, an atmosphere or ambience, throughout tho novel. In the opening scene, Kate stands in her father's vulgar little sitting room with its "shabby sofa," its "sallow prints on the walls and • . . £a| lonely magazine, a year old, that combined, with a small lamp in colored glass and a knitted white centre-pieoe wanting in freshness, to enhance the effeat of the purplish cloth on the principal table. ..." James renders the room and its furnishings with exactness, with concrete detail. Even when he adds the abstract word "failure" to the concrete act of tast­ ing, he does not relinquish solidity of specification; Kate "tasted 1U8 the faint, flat emanation of things, the failure of fortune and of honour" (I, 3—1 j) * Kate moves Immediately from her father's house to her sister!s, where the two women are "In the presence of the crumpled tablecloth, the dispersed pinafores, the scraped dishes, the lingering odour of boiled food" (I, 36)* Marian lives in what Kate impatiently calls a "hole," wearing "garments and shoes that seemed steadily to grow looser and larger" (I, 1(3) - In this chapter as well as in the last, the solidity of specification renders what is most sordid and offen­ sive to Kate's sensibility. This exactness of d e ta il can be employed to render the s in is te r as w ell as the sordid* In the famous scene in which Densher is turned away from MUly's palace by Eugenio, James's description of Venice couples concrete detail with symbolic significance: the weather is a metaphor for the storm within Densher as he begins in earnest his ordeal of conscience. I t was a Venice a l l of e v il th a t had broken out fo r them alike, so that (Eugenio and Densherj were together in their anxiety, if they reality could have met on it; a Venice of cold, lashing rain from a low black sky, of wioked wind raging through narrow passes, of general arreBt and interruption, with the people engaged in all the water-life huddled, stranded and wageless, bored and cynical, under archways and bridges (H , 209). There were stretches of the gallery paved with squares of red marble, greasy now with the salt spray; and the whole place, in its huge elegance, the grace of its con­ ception and the beauty of its detail, was more than ever like a great drawing-room, the drawing-room of Europe, profaned and bewildered by some reverse of fortune (H , 261). Clearly, solidity of specification is used whenever Janies wants the truth of detail, whether he is interested in conveying a sense of horror or attempting to describe sunlight reflected on water. In other words, solidity of specification is in itself neutral. But weak specification and lack of specification are techniques dis­ tinctly associated (as the earlier remarks from the Prefaces demon­ strate) with conveying the sinister, the mystifying, the evil. Thus, while the first technique is not necessarily associated with melo­ drama (although in Wings i t surely is), the second and third ones must be. The three techniques utilized to achieve melodramatic ef­ fect represent a series of gradations from strong specification to "weak" specification, to no specification, with the degree of indi­ rection increasing in the third category. To review briefly, as James used "weak specifications" in dis­ cussing The Turn of the Screw, they are to be avoided because in at­ tempting to convey evil to one *s audience, something to be done only through indirection and suggestion, any specification would seem "weak." But as I mentioned, sometimes James had to utilize specifi­ cation that was somehow less than solid but more than merely sugges­ tive. In Wings his treatment of money and sex falls into this general middle category. James's use of money in The Wings of the Dove is relevant to melodrama in several subtle ways. In i t s establishm ent of contra­ dictions (money as both bond and agent of separation, Kate and Milly as foils), it demonstrates the old Manichean lineup of the forces of good and e v il. Yet since James is a most sophisticated melodrama ti a t , 1 $ 0 he allows the lines to merge after a while, replacing the Manichean distinctions with blendings and ambiguities* Finally—and here we can link thiB money section with James's melodramatic use of indi­ rection in the novel—money itself is already a form of indirection because money in a capitalist society is an abstraction for work, for family, for love, for self-worth* Thus any treatment of money is already at least one step removed from solidity of specification. In his Preface to Wings, James seeks to exonerate Kate (and Densher too) from evil intentions when he says that "all unconsciously and with the best faith in the world, all by mere force of the terms of their superior passion combined with their superior diplomacy, they are laying a trap for the great innocence to come." James seems naive and implausible here, for one wonders what their "best faith in the world" was placed in and how one could lay a trap and not know it* But we do have to grant that Kate's desire to be noble is demonstrated early in the novel when she asks to come back to live with her father rather than give herself up to Aunt Maud's way of life. One could argue that Kate knew her father would refuse her, that she took no personal risk in making the offer, but it could well be that, intelligent as she was, Kate knew full well she would be morally doomed when she entered Maud Lowder's world* Surely she knew she would be viewed as a commodity and auctioned to the hig h est bid­ der* Beyond th a t, she seems to have perceived th a t, entering th a t luxurious world and becoming used to its advantages, she would never again be strong enough to leave it* She foresees that if she enters Maud's dociety, she w ill be corrupted by it—and of course she is* 151 She is corrupted by her desire for, her typically Jamesian need for, money. 17 And with money (as well as Densher) as the common term between them, Kate becomes a p erfect f o il fo r Milly Theale—the worldly, healthy, robust Dark Lady pitted against the innocent, thin, pale, sickly, and wildly rich American Fair Maiden whose wealth, as Dupee claims, is presented "as being of a peculiarly American kind: vast beyond all common deserts or expectations, dazzlingly gratuitous, a T R windfall from the benign tree of American plenty. V Yet MLUy's wealth has a peculiar effect on her: it seems to enhance her physical vulnerability. It increases her passivity. At Mato ham, Lord lferk moves her through the roomsful of people seeming to suggest that they let the people "have the benefit of her" (I, 218) • She notes her own passivity here and realizes good naturedly that they might as well "have the benefit," that the easiest thing was to let Mark take care of her. Soon Milly realizes that Mrs. Lowder, too, "wished to take care of her—-and wasn*t it, a peu pres, what all the people with the kind eyes were wishing?" (I, 220), Earlier, Lord Mark had mentioned to Milly how interested he was in seeing what Mrs. Lowder "does with you." He is particularly inter­ ested because he perceives that he himself used to be the "best thing" Mrs. Lowder had—until now. Now Milly is the best (I, 156). Hie vocabulary here heightens the sense that these people are passive "things" to be used and owned—to be had and done to. Milly ac­ quiesces easily: "Well, she would do nothing at all; she was already doing it; more than that, she had already done it, and her chance 102 wag gone. She gave h erself up—she had the strangest sense, on the

spot, of so deciding. • • " (I, 158)* At this point in the novel, the reader has had only the slight­ est hint that Milly is seriously ill; the other characters (with the exception of Susan Stringham) know nothing about her sickness. Yet something beyond her illness makes her passive, makes others want to be protective: her wealth. Earlier she had reflected, "She couldn't dress (her wealthj away, nor walk i t away, nor read i t away, nor think it away; she could neither smile it away in any dreary absence nor blow it away in any softened sigh. She couldn't have lost it if she tried—that was what i t was to be really rich. It had to be the thing you were" (I, 121). The whimsy of the passage almost belies its brutal message—that Milly was, after all, only her wealth once she entered Maud Lowder*s London c irc le . What makes her so special to them is her amorphous giftedness, and her giftedness is a fragile construct made up of both her physical vulnerability and her money. Her limitless wealth is thus part of the giftedness—just as Kate Croy's lack of money somehow detracts from her "gifts." Money and identification with money are at the center of the novel. Milly is her money, Kate and Densher are made desperate by their need for money, and each can gain redemption only through will­ ingly giving up money—which Milly and Densher can fin a lly do, while Kate cannot. Perhaps that is because Kate had learned too well the exploitative nature of society: "• • . it is Kate from whom Milly is to learn about the way society works. Aunt Maud's patronage is the impress of wealth upon deprivation—her kindness merely making 153 of Kate a •sensible value* which is 'chalk narked for the auction."1^ We recall that circumstances have worked more against Kate than against w ily and Densher—she is more hardened than they. She has cone to recognize fu ll well what Mrs. Lowder explains to Densher: "I've been keeping (Kate's presence! for the comfort of my declining years. I*ve watched it longj I've been saving it up and letting it, as you say of investments, appreciate; and you nay judge whether, now it has begun to pay so, I'm likely to consent to treat for it with any but a high bidder. I can do the best with her, and I've ny idea of the best" (I, 82). One is reminded of his master Balzac by James's characterization of Kate. So completely does she understand that she—like Milly—is perceived in terms of her monetary value, that she must insist at the end of the novel on receiving the money fo r which she has allowed h erself to be corrupted. She is to ta lly consistent: at the novel's beginning she had perceived with hard- headed clarity that "the more one gave oneself the less of one was left" (I, 33). Reversing that trend, she refuses to give herself up to her sister's image of her. Later, she refuses to give herself up to Densher. Her coming to his rooms in Venice had not after all been a surrendering to him. Kate in the end has kept herself for herself: she is all her own. Marx's brief essay "The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society" (from The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1QMQ is remarkably relevant here. As was mentioned earlier, Kate Croy's lack of money has somehow detracted from her "gifts," But entering Mrs, Lowder's camp, she seems to be asking along with Marx, "Does not . . . money 15U • * • transform all iry incapacities into their contrary?” The answer is yes. "If money, ” says Marx, "is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, binding me and nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Gan it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, the universal agent of separation? It is the true agent of separation as well as the true binding agent—the • . • 90 galvano-chemical power of society” (italics his). The paradoxes inherent in this passage make it peculiarly relevant to James: money both binds and separates in The Wings of the Dove. At first Kate and Densher seem separated by th e ir lack of i t . Then they are bound to ­ gether in their scheme to get it: speaking of the joy they feel in having "gained time,” Densher speaks early in the novel of the deep­ ness and closeness of "our being as wo are" (I, 97), Finally though they are separated by money: "We shall never be again as wo were!” Milly too has discovered the contradictory "advantages” of money. It was for her too the "universal agent of separation" as i t dehuman­ ized her in others 1 eyes, as she was reduced to its value, as she was forced into total isolation by her mere possession of it since it rendered her incapable of being loved for herself. Aunt Maud, Kate, Densher, even Susan Stringham in her romantic view of Milly, all re­ duced her to the product of her wealth. Marx does not exaggerate about money's potential. It "transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence into idiocy."1^ 1$ $ Like those that treat money, the novel's most sexually explicit scenes are also somewhat removed from solidity of specification. In. the Notebooks, James had anticipated how difficult i t would be to handle the sexual aspects of Kate and Densher's relationship (and how 22 easy i t would have been had he been writing for a French audience) • In one of the novel's most highly melodramatic and specified scenes, Densher demands "proof" of Kate's commitment to hlms " I'll tell any lie you want, any your idea requires, if you'll only come to me" (II, 200). During this highly charged scene, the couple has stood in crowded St* fo rk 's Square, he grasping her arm. Before she can an­ swer him, she sees the other members of their party returning from one of the shops. She tells him guardedly, "Please take your hand out of my arm." The moment of tension is terminated by a sentence so simple and direct i t sounds as if i t were written by Hemingway rather than by James: "So they went to them side by sid e, and i t was a ll right" (H, 201). This chapter is followed by an equally tense scene, a party given in folly's palace, folly, for once, is in white rather than black, and Kate, whom Densher views continually at distances through­ out the evening, seems wanting in lustre to him (II, 216). But they are well aware of each other, and by the end of another tense scene (in which he specifically agrees to court folly and propose marriage), Kate in turn has agreed to coma to his rooms to offer him sexual proof of her commitment to him and to their scheme. But just as one begins to think that this novel is nothing more than a series of scenes of duplicity, melodramatically conceived, we turn, the page, anticipating the next scene—sure to be the most sex­ ually explicit of a 11-,-only to learn that Kate has coma and gone. She is back in England. Picture replaces scene, and only through in­ direction, through weak specification—the imputed act—does Densher recount the event. 'What had came to pass within his walls lingered there as an obsession importunate to all his senses; it lived again, as a cluster of pleasant memories, at every hour and in every ob­ ject; it made everything but itself irrelevant and tasteless. It remained, in a word, a conscious, watchful presence, active on its own side, forever to be reckoned with, in face of which the effort at detachment was scarcely less futile than frivol­ ous. Kate had come to him. • • (II, 235)* The scene was one he relived each time he returned to his rooms: "The door had but to open for him to be with it again and for it to be all there; so intensely there that, as we say, no other act was possible to him than the renewed act, almost the hallucination, of intimacy. . . . He remained thus, in his own theatre, in his single person, perpetual orchestra to the ordered drama, the confirmed 'run* playing low and slow, moreover, in the regular way, for the situa­ tions of most importance" (II, 237). As critic John Goode percep­ tively notices: "It is a pornographic way to relate to one's sex life: the act, by its very intensity, has become distanced and stylized (ordered), and Densher has become a voyeur of his own p ast."2^

Clearly there is a close connection between money and sex in James's novel. His treatment of sex is in some ways only an echo of his treatment of money—for in this novel money becomes a counter for love. Further, after Kate comas there, Densher's rooms become a counter for love—the lovemaking itself is not there because Kate is not there • And Kate is not there because she is holding out for M illy1 s money, Densher had thought a fte r th e ir f i r s t months of wait­ ing that he could wait no longer. His physical desire for her was growing too strongs "Their mistake was to have believed that they could hold out—-hold out, that is, not against Aunt Maud, but against an impatience that, prolonged, made a man ill. He had known more than ever, on their separating in the court of the station, how ill a man, and even a woman, could be with it, , • (IX, 6-7), S till, each had continued to wait for s till more time—until Densher forced Kate to coma to him in Venice, When she does, i t is to bind him more closely to her scheme to get Miliy's money. For Kate that money is now a counter for Densher's love, James's treatment of money and sex seems to fall into what I have called a middle area of weak specification or lesser indirection. But several major elements of the novel clearly demonstrate the third and more clear-cut category, James's achievement of the sinister tone and intensity through no specification. The surface implausibility of Kate's initial plan to "gain time" is perhaps the first of James's uses of the "merely suggestive," (At least it is the one that strik es us f i r s t , ) What did she want time for? So th a t Densher would make a fortune in America? He d id n 't. So th at Aunt Maud would relent? She didn't. In a remark in the Notebooks, James deals with the issue of waiting—and what they hope to gain through waiting does not seem to be as important to him as the waiting itself: "If the young couple have at any rate, and for whatever reason, to wait l£B

(say for her, or for his, father's death) I get what is essential, Ecco, They are w a itin g ." ^ In this first of his notebook conceptions of the novel, Jamas makes Densher the instigator of the relation with Milly. When James comes back to his donnee four days later, he makes the reversal: Kate has the plan, and Densher "rather nystifiedly and bewllderedly assents. He 'reads her game* at last--sho doesn't formally communi­ cate it to him."^ Hie execution of the novel is remarkably faithful to the Notebooks' second conception: Densher does remain so bewil­ dered and vague th a t several weeks pass before he realizes he i s the villain-a s-suitor.

The effect of the waiting, the gaining time, is to create a restlessness in the reader, no doubt evoked by Kate's own restless­ ness. The waiting works—precisely because of its vagueness—as dramatic foreshadowing. And it hints at Kate's cunning, her watch­ fulness, her capacity to grasp at any opportunity for a solution to her need for money. Hie final effect of that waiting is to cast Kate in the role of villain-instigator, despite her own (and James's) pro testatio n s of her good f a ith . In their dialogues, Kate's lack of specificity from the start is redolent of something s in is te r, Densher seems d elib erately unwilling to perceive her meanings, it's true, but often she makes it hard for him to know what it is she does mean. She gives him a verbal run­ around. A scene stripped down to dialogue only might read like th is : 1$ 9

"You accused me just now of saying that Killy's in love with you. Well, if you come to that, I do say it. So there you are. ftiat'o the good she'll do us. It makes a basis for her seeing you—so that she'll help us to go on." "And what sort of a basis does it make for my seeing her?" "Oh I don't rrindl" "Don't mind my leading her on?" "Don't mind her leading you." "Well, she won't—so it's nothing not to mind. Gut how can that 'help' with what she knows?" "What she knows? That needn't prevent." "Prevent her loving us?" "Prevent her helping you. She's like that." "Making nothing of the fact that l! love another?" "Making everything. To console you." "But f o r what?" • "For not getting your other." "But how does she know—?" "That you won't get her? She doesn't; but on the other hand she doesn't know you w ill. Meanwhile she sees you baffled, for she knows of Aunt Maud's stand. That gives her the chance to be nice to you" (XX, 2k-2$). Each time Densher h altin g ly raises a moral issu e , Kate seems to c ir ­ cumvent the direct answer. As Ruth B. Yeazell says in analyzing -the scene in which, the above dialogue occurs, "By the time their conver­ sation ends and Densher • • • prepares to leave Lancaster Qate, Kate has succeeded in provisionally silencing his doubts; she dismisses his last question (whether they intend to make Milly believe that Kate actually hates Densher) as 'a gross way of putting it,' and she concludes with 'an air of having so put their possibilities before pA him th a t questions were id le and doubts p erv erse.'" I t seems impossible that Densher should not have understood, long before the parly in the Venetian palace, that he is to marry Milly, yet it seems he had not grasped that fact. Then "light broke, though not quite all at once." But Kate remains cryptic: "If you want things named you must name them." So he tries to name them. Again, 160

dialogue stripped of all qualifying narrative remarks shows this pro­

gression: "Since she's to die I ’m to marry her?" "To marry her." "So that when her death has taken place I shall in the n atu ra l course have money?" "You’l l in the n atu ra l course have money. We s h a ll in the natural course be free." "Oh, oh, ohI" "Yes, yes, yes. ..." "I’m to propose i t then—marriage—on the spot?" "Oh I can’t go into that with you, and from the moment you don’t wash your hands of ms I don’t think you ought to ask me. You must act as you like and as you can" (U , 225-26), As Yeazell points out, the world of James’s late novels is "one in which there are very few hard facts. . . . Xt is a measure of the fluidity of James’s world that we find it so difficult to know where we stand, either morally or epistemologically, "2^ Kate's father is certainly created in the early chapters with a s o lid ity of sp e cifica tio n , an exactness, th a t keeps him memorable a l­ though he is not intrinsic to the story. Kate had thought how "no relation with him could be so short or so superficial as not to be somehow to your hurt" (I, 6). Yet when he appears the first time he looks "exactly as much as usual—all pink and silver as to skin and hair, all straitness and starch as to figure and dress—the man in the world le a s t connected with anything unpleasant." We remember h is description and his talents: "He dealt out lies as he might the cards from the greasy old pack for the game of diplomacy to which you were to sit down with him" (I, 7). Mr. Croy himself is thus specified in a solid way. But his unnamed crime is an example, like the dialogue between Kate and Densher, of the third level, the merely 1 6 1 suggestive. That the unnamed crime s t i l l has the power to evoke the sinister is seen in the novel's olosing pages, when in a minor coming full circle, Kate reminds us once more of her sordid, vivid father and his new, unexplained terror. "His quietness is awful," Kate tells Densher. Her father is in terror "of somebody—of something" (II, 383)• Once again vagueness mystifies, and the impressionistic in James can be worked to melodramatic ends. Several other major elements of the novel clearly demonstrate this third and most clear-cut category, James's achievement of the sinister tone and intensity through 110 specification. Milly's ill­ ness falls into this category: i t remains unnamed throughout the novel. And in refusing to name it, James informs it with the sug­ gestive terror of something too horrid to name. Another related ex­ ample of mere splendid suggestiveness appears when Milly, after sev- oral dense pages of not being really sure (because of Sir Luke's per­ petual verbal indirection) of whether she is dying, suddenly has that fact confirmed for her by the look on Susan Stringham's face after Susan has privately talked with Strett (I, 301). A third related example is perhaps the most extreme presented in the novel, the lo g ic al outcome of a l l of James's attem pts a t in d i­ rection: the great indirection of Hilly's dying offstage. In the last scene in which Hilly appears, Densher has told her he is staying on in 7enice to write a book. Then he alters his reason with the ambiguous "I stay because I've got to" (II, 2b9). Finally he quali­ fies his remarks once moret "Isn't it enough, whatever may be one's other complications, to stay, after all, for you?" Milly says, 162

"Oh, you must judge" (H, 2h9-$0). These are the last words she speaks In the novel. When he next comes back to her palazzo, Densher is turned away by Eugenio. Lord Mark has coma back to Venice to t e l l Milly th a t Kate does indeed love Densher, that Id ly has been deceived by both Kate and Densher. Now she will be further deceived by Susan String- ham, who goes to Densher to ask him to continue his duplicity, to convince Milly with powerful lies that ho does love her. It is from Susan Stringham that we receive the suggestive but evocative state­ ment that Hilly had "turned her face to the wall" (II, 270). Die simple remark is all that is needed to vivify our imaginations. Milly had said earlier to Lord Mark that there was some romance in the idea that she would never again go down the palazzo stairs (II, lli7)• She never does. She dies there. Because Densher refuses to read the letter Milly sends to him, we are denied even her words on paper. We never enter her mind, never know if her motive is re­ venge when she gives Densher her fortune, never witness firsthand her preparation fo r death. Those la s t words she spoke to Densher--"Oh, you must judge"—stand as advice to the reader: we can only imagine the Dove in her final hours. Yeazell's remark that there are few hard facts in this Jamesian world reminds us again how the hard facts have been replaced by greater and lesser degrees of indirection and suggestiveness. The Idnds of things that are spocified in Dio Wings of the Dove are al­ ready melodramatic, like Kate's sordid father himself. Then the un­ specification of his crime cooperates to enhance and increase the melodramatic quality of the novel. Again and again the layers co operate and accrue to make this novel James *s most s inis tor ly sug gestive since The Turn of the Screw. FOOTNOTES FOR CHAPTER FIVE

■hlenry James, The Art of Fiction," in Henry Jama a; Selected Fiction, ed. with intro, by Laon Edel (New York* E. P. Dutton, T35JTTP. $9$. 2F . W. Dupee, Henry James (1956s rp t. New York: D ell—Delta American Men of Letters series, 196f>), p. 139. ^Dupee, p. 169# ^Dupee, p. 15>1. ^Dupee, p. 178. ^Dupee, p. 183. ?Dupee, p. 18*>. ®Dupee, p. 168. %enry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, intro. R. P. Blaclanur (New York: Scribner * s , 193k) $ p. 1751 text will sub­ sequently be referred to as "Blackmur" in the footnotes. *L0Blactamir, pp. 172-73. ^Blackmur, p. 175* 3-2Blackmur, pp. 289-293. •^Blackmur, p. 303. ^Blackmur, p. 306. •^Henry Jamas, The Wings of the Dove, New York e d itio n , XIX and XX (New York, Scribher' s, l9t)9T, it,ij?0. A ll subsequent page re f e r ­ ences are from this edition. •^Blackmur, p. 303. 17'In the Notebooks James demonstrates his own strong conviction that marriage is not for the poor: "From the moment a young man en­ gages himself he ought to have means: i f he hasn't he oughtn't to engage him self." The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. 0. Matthiessen and Kenneth Murdock (New York: Oxford U niversity Press, 196l), p. 171. 16U 16$ •» O Dupee, in his afterword to the New American library edition of The Wings of the Dove (Signet C lassic, 1961;), p. 322. John Goode, e d ., "The pervasive mystery of sty le : The Wings of the Dove," The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James (London: ^ t E ^ n 7 T? 7 2) 7 p . “ 2 T £;------2% arl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Ifenuscripts of 18UU, ed. with intro. bylUrlc J.' Strui'lc",' translated !by Martin mllTgan (New York: In ternational Publishers, 1961;), p. 167. 2% arx, p. 169. 22Henry James, Notebooks, p. 170. 23ooode, p. 289. 2%enry James, Notebooks, p. 171. 2%enry James, Notebooks, p. 172. 2%uth B. Yeazell, ’'Talking in Jamas,” FMEA, 91» No. 1 (January 1976) , p. 73. ------27Yeazell, p. 7iu Chapter Six THE GOLDEN BOWL

In each of his novels, Henry Janes uses various melodramatic de­ vices, as Jacques Barzun says, to "nerve men to face life " and to "keep the reader going."'1' One pervasive way in which James increases the tensions of his novels is to see his characters and their lives (as he saw his own life too) with a particularly vivid imagination of disaster and a strong sense of the presence of Evil in the world. Further, James often concentrates—as in The American—on such Gothic trappings as castles, duels, and seclusion within convents to produce excitement and suspense. S till more often, he cultivates a basically melodramatic situation—like adultery, with its im plicit deceptions and betrayals. That situation often leads to still another melodra­ matic technique highly valued by James—the isolation of the major character so that the author can examine and duplicate for the reader the distressed mental states of his by now solitary and be­ trayed protagonists. Further, James increasingly employs a height­ ened language of suspense and adventure to maintain melodramatic ten­ sions. He uses each of these devices or approaches in each of his novels, for each novel demands setting, plot (or situation), language, characterization, and moral stance. But certain works exemplify 166 167 certain of his techniques or modes better than others, and the novels of the Last Phase lend themselves to our concentrating on each tech­ nique in special ways. The Sacred Fount and The Ambassadors have been treated here as companion piecesy and each has been examined for its languagef especially its dialogue, as the dialogue is used to heighten the social and moral intrigues of the novels. In the chap­ ter on The Wings of the Dove, James's use of degrees of specification was closely studied to demonstrate once more how his technique con­ sciously contributed to melodramatic effect. Now in The Oolden Bowl, a ll of James's techniques for melodrama­ tic effect are again utilized, and in this chapter we examine once again the isolation of the betrayed protagonist and the moral rela­ tivism that significantly alters Jamesian melodrama from the usual melodrama dominated by a morality of absolutes. In The Oolden Bowl, the major exterior action of the novel is almost played out in the first volume. That is, the Prince and Charlotte act upon their lust and boredom and become lovers again, and Fanny Assingham actively plants suspicions in Maggie's mind through her own ruminations and fears. In volume two, Io s b happens on the surface. But various conspiracies of silence are forming—the protagonist is being iso­ lated and the aotion is moving inward, becoming increasingly cerebral as Maggie takes over as central consciousness. Then the anguish, the violence of her mental pain, the nightmare images and visions are a ll internalized for her and for the reader, while on the surface every­ thing continues calm and peaceful in those characters' elegant lives. 168 So one of the chief melodramatic devices used In the second volume of James's last completed novel is once again that of isolating the cen­ tral character so that he might examine her mental state—while at the same time making some of the most important moral statements of his lengthy career, statements that are ambiguous, ironic, certainly morally relativistic. As for the melodramatic adulterous situation, James has made use of i t before, though never, X think, with such sympathy and success, so that i t Justifies our further examination In a new way In this chapter. Further, although the role of the ficelle has been noted before, James utilizes her more extensively in this novel than In any 6ther as he creates the semi-sympathetic, well-intentioned, guilty, shrill, desperate, and powerful Fanny Assingham to heighten the melo­ drama of the novel through her innuendo, her pasBion for intrigue, and her role as a stock character representing society's conventional attitude towards marriage. As Frederick Crews suggests in his The Tragedy of Manners: Moral Drama in the later Novels of Henry James, the subject of The Golden Bowl is power: "Each of the characters is seeking control over the others, or resisting their control, or deliberately acquies­ cing in it. Each has the matter of social dominance in the front of his consciousness. The four main characters represent four distinct kinds of power, and the motion of the book is a gradual shift in em- phasis from the power of one character to that of another." Maggie, of course, is the one who proves most powerful in the end, but I 1 6 9 should like to demonstrate how Fanny Assingham plays an important part in helping Maggie come to power in a bloodless coup, one In which Charlotte Stant Verver is both overthrown and eventually de­ ported. In the first chapter of Tho Oolden Bowl, the Prince asks his fiancee, "You do believe I'm not a hypocrite? You recognize that I d o n 't l i e nor dissemble nor deceive?" Maggie answers him with a lengthy metaphor that affirms her belief in him at the sama time that it avoids even a consideration of the possibility of the alternative. The Prince perceives "on the spot that any serious discussion of ver­ acity, of loyalty, or rather of the want of them, practically took her unprepared, as if it were quite new to her. He had noticed it before; it was the English, the American sign that duplicity, like 'love,' had to be joked about. It couldn't be 'gone into.'"3 At the end of the novel, in the penultimate chapter, the Prince makes a statement that reinforces his opening one; "If ever a man since the beginning of time acted in good faith—I" (3d, 3i>0) By this time he has lied and deceived, has been a hypocrite and an adulterer. And the woman he addresses (they have been married for about five years) has altered perhaps even more than her husband. She has learned about her husband's d u p lic ity , and even more impor­ tant, about her own capacity for it. She has become a skilled and d iscip lin ed l i a r , a consummate hypocrite.

So in this last novel of the Last Phase, we find Jamesian melo­ drama once mores a story based on adultery, duplicity, victimiza­ tion, revenge, and once again—but with a twist—renunciation. 1 7 0

In The Ambassadors. Strother returns to America a victim of Mrs • Newsome's revenge as w ell as a victim of a su b tler revenge adminis­ tered by himself—a denial of a conventional happiness as the price

i he decides he must pay for his Parisian experience and enlightenment. In The Wings of the Dove the notion of revenge is as subtly handled. Milly may or may not have left Kate and Densher her fortune as an act of revenge, and Densher may or may not have forced Kate to choose be­ tween him and the money (knowing she would take the money) as an act of rovenge. But in The Golden Bowl the ambiguity is resolved, and because of the point of view employed in the second part of the novel, the reader is witness to Maggie's growing skill at manipulation, de­ ception, and the ultimate extraction of a terrible revenge from her mother-in-law and formerly beloved friend Charlotte Stant Vorver. As for James's treatment of renunciation, he provides a varia­ tion on his favorite theme. The heroine renounces not her husband but her father. She recognizes the injustice of what she must do, believing their renunciation of one another is undeserved, "not caused by our fault," believing she and her father are "lost to each other really more than Amerigo and Charlotte are. • • " (H , 333). But Maggie never even momentarily considers leaving or renounc­ ing the Prince. He might leave her—the choice is his. But from the moment of her first suspicions of his affair with Charlotte, Maggie knows she w ill never leave him. Her conduct is unique for a James heroine. Rather than nobility and failure and renunciation, she will choose a line of action which includes abject grovelling, conspiracy 1 7 1 and deceit, admitted injustices, and a final "glorious" victory over her antagonists* That her victory is at best pyrrhic is the great irony of the novel, an irony which, despite a ll her new tricks and knowledge of e v il, Haggle does not perceive* Haggle's change has been a vast one, nothing less than an open­ ing of her senses, as Fanny says, "to what's called Evil—with a very big Es for the first time in her life* To the discovery of it, to the knowledge of it, to the crude experience of it" (I, 385)• Far more difficult to discern is the Prince's degree of change. There are his opening and closing statements already noted—his assurance to his fiancee that he is not a hypocrite and his later assurance to Haggle four years later that he acted in good faith* In between, his actions aro puzzling, passive, and ultimately, it seems to me, repre- honsible* But perhaps the Prince was more deluded about himself than he was a deliberate liar* Fanny Assingham, the fic e lle whose sig n ifican t ro le w ill be d is­ cussed in detail later, opines (though all of her opinions are sus­ pect because of her need to defend her own role in arranging the mar­ riage between Charlotte Stant and Adam Verver) that the Prince and Charlotte started out in good faith: "Ihere were beautiful inten­ tions all round* The Prince's and Charlotte's were beautiful—of th a t I had my faith * They were—I 'd go to the stake." Fanny be­ liev es th a t Amerigo tru ste d Charlotte to be strong, while Charlotte felt gratitude to the Prince "for not having put a spoke in her wheel" (I, 282) as she strives for financial and Bocial security 172 within marriage* But the reader has little evidence of the pair's beautiful intentions beyond the telegram Amerigo sent Charlotte at the

V time of her engagement and her subsequent reaction to it* "A la guerre comma a la guerre then," he had written* "We must lead our lives as we see them; but X am charmed with your courage and almost surprised at my own" (I, 290). Hie message is, and remains, ambiguous to Charlotte, but she and the Prince never allude to i t when they meet again. Her marriage to Verver takes place, and the four settle down to a kind of menage *a quatre. And with Maggie and her father now free to spend as much time as they like together, their spouses are left to their own duties and pleasures* For the Prince time is a troublesome problem: "Less of it was required for the state of being married than he had on the whole ex- pocted; less, strangely, for the state of being married even as he was married. • • • He was living, he had been living these four or five years, on Hr. Verver's services. • . » (I, 291-92). Ifeggie has remained fo r him "a l i t t l e American wife" whom he doesn't understand, despite Fanny Assingham's tutelage. He feels resentment that his wife and her father "adore together ny boy" (I, 293), excluding him from the boy's education. Amerigo is a bored man, useless as a father, ignored as a husband, essentially jobless. Colonel Assing- ham says rightly of him: "The man's in a position in which he has nothing in life to do" (I, 278). 173

C harlotte's l i f e is equally u n fu lfillin g , despite her competence and glitter in assuming the social responsibilities her husband and his daughter increasingly eschew* She shops, attends functions, and learns she will never have a child (the reason is unclear), although she would have liked one (X, 307) • Charlotte claims she gets so much from the marriage she cannot stint in return* Yet she perceives that her husband and step-daughter have created her into a Personage (X, 306), forgetting that she needs care and love* On one particular day she has gone out and corns back home three different times, and Maggie and her father never hear or notice her coming and going, never ques­ tion her absence, never care* As time passes and she realizes she will never replace Maggie in Adam's affection, and won't even estab­ lish a very important place there herself (although he is all admir­ ing of her and finds her "wonderful”), Charlotte in her boredom and dissatisfaction spends more and more time with the Prince. Often they are thrown together for social functions, but many times Char­ lotte aggressively soeks out his presence. Amerigo remains throughout the novel disturbingly passive* On the rainy March day Bhe first comes to redeclaro her love for him, he watches Charlotte getting out of her carriage* He, "controlling him self, would do nothing," but "he yet intensely hoped" ( I, 29£-96). She reminds him th a t they are "immensely alone" (X, 308). She seeB them as "two well-meaning creatures" thrust together in an extraor­ dinary situation. "What else can we do, vihat in all the world else?" she aslcs (X, 303)* But he does not answer, simply asks her where she 17U has been that day. Again the passivity, but their further discussion of their marriages, and Charlotte's fierce and quite sincere pride in their protecting their "sposi" and keeping them happy, moves the Prince to acknowledge the possibility for a situation in which he and Charlotte can keep their spouses "beatifically" happy while simul­ taneously creating a meaningful reality for themselves. When they finally come to touch each other after these years of physical sepa­ ration, they grasp hands in a pledge that he calls "sacred" (I, 312). The simplicity of their spouses w ill demand a "conscious care" of literally every hour of their lives, but they believe they can pull it off, and they violently and passionately seal their pledge. Here once more James has utilized adultery as a chief situation for creating melodramatic tensions. Occasionally critics have at­ tempted to deny that the relation between Charlotte and the Prince was ever consummated, but a passage in James's Notebooks v e rifie s his intentions when he writes, "Everything about it (the plot of The Golden Bowl] qualifies it for Harper except . . . the adulterine element in the subject. But may it not be simply a question of handling that?"*1 James had been handling the adulterous theme in his fiction for a great many years, first in his short stories and eventually in his novels. In his first novels, Watch and Ward and Roderick Hudson, there are sexual tensions and sexual choices to be made, but there is no adultery. The same is true in The American, at least for the major characters. In A Portrait of A lady we have James's first full-scale treatment of adultery# James has come to see the melodramatic ele­ ments implicit in the adulterous situation, and in Portrait he milks that situation for all it is worth, Osmond's 6ff-and-on courtship of Isabel constitutes one of the dullest—and relatively briefest—sec­ tions of the book. The early years of their marriage are treated even more briefly, and the birth and death of their son are scarcely mentioned. Quickly Jamas carries the reader through those dull years of marriage to the point at which he can once more introduce the old suitors and create at least the potential for adultery on Isabel's p a rt. She rejects the notion, of course, but meanwhile Osmond's own adulterous relationship with Hme. Nerle is revealed to the reader and to Isabel, and that revelation creates the moBt fascinating scenes in the book as Isabel recalls, in her Vigil, for example, how Osmond sat while Mne. Merle stood, or as the Countess Gemini gets her revenge on her brother when she confirms for Isabel her fears about her husband and her friend Mme. Marie. In his love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont has exam­ ined European literature of the last eight centuries to demonstrate that love and death—love that meets impossible opposition—is the Western author's and the Western reader's favorite themes Love and death, a fatal love—in these phrases is summed up, if not the whole of poetry, at least whatever is popular, whatever is universally moving in European literature, alike as regards the oldest legends and the sweetest songs. Happy love has no history, Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself. What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights iB neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couplej not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. And passion means suffering. There we have the fundamental fa c t.o 176 As he traces the Tristran ryth of love and passion that must load to death, Rougemont makes clear that "there can be no love story unless love meets with opposition.T he opposition is usu­ ally fatal# But how, in nineteenth-century Victorian England (and America), in an era in which love legitimately ended only in mar­ riage, could an author deal with'his upper-class characters in a way that was satisfactory both to them and to their middle-class readers? As Rougemont says, "Passion and marriage are essentially irreconcil­ able# Their origins and their ends make them mutually exclusive. Their co-existence in our midst constantly raises insoluble problems, and the strife thereby engendered constitutes a persistent danger for every one of our social safeguards#"® Elsewhere he continues, I t has got to bo admitted that passion wrecks the very notion of marriage at a time when there is being attempted the feat" oT trying to ground1 marriage’In values elaborated byTEe morals of passion# o'f courseTt would be going too far to suggostHEhat a majority of people today are prey to Tristran*s frenzy# Few are capable of the thirst that would cause them to drink the love-potion, and s till fewer are being elected to succumb to the archetypal anguish. But they are a l l , or nearly all, dreaming about it, or else have mused upon it# And however worn and faded the mark of the original myth, it s t i l l hugs the se cret of the anxiety th a t is nowadays d is­ turbing married couples# The contemporary mind recoils from nothing so much as from the notion of a limitation deliber­ a te ly accepted; and nothing pleases th is mind more than the mirage of infinite transcendence which the reminiscent im­ press of the myth keeps up#? When Rougemont speaks of the contemporary mind, he is addressing a mid-twentieth-century audience, one that, while less restricted than James*s original reading audience, s till responds to the challenges and excitement of passion, s till is fascinated with and even identi­ fies with the "archetypal anguish#" James seems to have always 177 known what Rougemont knows: th a t happy marriage makes fo r a dull story, that in literature, marriage and passion are incompatible* It seems unlikely, given the penultimate scene in Portrait, Goodwood’s kiss and Isabel’s troubled but nevertheless passionate response, that Osmond and Isabel ever knew passion, even in the earliest days of their marriage. When James presents that kiss, it is the first scene in the book in which people actually touch. And throughout his lit­ erary career James would seldom offer sexual passion to his readers in scenic form—usually the mental agitation after the fact (or be­ fore the fact) is presented to us as a substitute or as a metaphor for the passion. But clearly the passion is present, and James would agree with Rougemont—and no doubt with Tolstoi, who began his Anna Karenina with the statement, '’Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” James knew that the adulterous activities of his "bleeding participants”’1'0 would make good copy. A fter P o rtra it James would create an en tire book based on the adulterous Christina Light in The Princess Cassimassima, although more often than not the reader forgets she is married at all. By the time of What Ifeisie Knew, James is bolder in his treatm ent of adultery and divorce, but at the same time that he utilizes the adulterous situation for both his theme and his plot, he comas down harder on the participants as he demonstrates the effect of their sordid lives on the child Maisie. In The Sacred Fount, James continues his study of adultery. In this novel no sex or passion is ever witnessed. Only the mental agitation of the narrator creates the sexual tensions for himself and for the reader. Ultimately, no one much cares about the adulteries (real or imagined) in The Sacred Fount because the cast of characters is so unattractive. It is not simply that a detached narrator is telling of the sexual relations of others—in other words, it is not that, for us to be compelled, we must hear the story through one of the participants, as in The Golden Bowl, Hie semi-detached first- person narrator was effective in Daisy Miller and the reflections of Strether would be effective again in Th®. Ambassadors. The adulterous romance was not Strothers', but he is so interesting, personal, and . human th a t the reader immediately id e n tifie s with him, becoming am­ bassador and detective as he does. But the nameless narrator of The Sacred Fount is unappealing, compulsive, obsessed, nosy, inhumane— and the people whose story he is investigating and recounting are clearly as neurotic as he is. The Ambassadors, with its deception of Strether about the nature of the "virtuous relation," makes much of Mme, de Vionnet's adulter­ ous situation (although neither Strether nor James condemns her). And in The Wings of the Dove, although the adultery is not literal since Densher and Kate are not leg ally married, they have pledged them­ selves to one another and they "feel" married. Regardless of the legalities, the situation works like an adulterous one in the novel since it creates the same deceptions and intrigues. Now in The Qolden Bowl, James presents his most complex and lengthy treatment of adultery. The point of view is favorable since the adulterous husband and the betrayed wife are given equal time as central consciousnesses. Yet Maggie is the more important figure in the novel, and the adulterous situation is created more for her sake than for the Prince's, That is, the Prince did not opt for passion to fu lfill his life. He gives every indication he would have been satisfied with an egalitarian marriage which gave him importance as a husband and father. But in his passivity and boredom he agrees that an affair might help. Thus, for him adultery is a second choice. For Charlotte it is also a second choice, although she attaches more importance to i t than does the Prince, She too might have been sat­ isfied with a happy marriage, but she now seeks in adultery more than Amarigo does, imagining that it will fu lfill her unhappy life. Yet the reader never enters Charlotte's consciousness, and despite the lim ited sympathy James demonstrates towards h er, he has not cre­ ated the novel or the adulterous situation for her sake, James might have done so—to examine the mental sta te of a f e ­ male character caught up in Rougemont's "archetypal anguish." That he did not is indicative, I believe, of the ambivalence of his moral stance: i t would be harder fo r James to deal with great sympathy with the adventuress-adulteress than with the betrayed but limited wife. Hence he created the adulterous situation for Aggie's sake, so that he might (for greater drama) investigate the anguish of the betrayed, after ho had just demonstrated, in the first volume, the emotions of the betrayer. 2fre adulterous situation had been 1 8 0 established to create agitation for the Sacred Fount narrator and bewilderment for Strether* But in The Golden Bowlt it is established to create Maggie's torment. The Prince seems never to be completely tormented. Charlotte certainly is, but for the reasons just men­ tioned, she is rejected as a central consciousness. Adam Verver might be tormented, but if he is as perfectly controlled and emotion­ less as he seems, then we cannot feel too badly about his being cuckolded. (The word cuckolded seems much too vulgar to use about a James character, yet it is important for us to be brought back sharply to the fact that Verver is a betrayed husband, a fact we tend to forget or diminish, either because we find ourselves so much more in contact with—if not in sympathy with—Maggie, or because Adam himself never seems to mind very much that his wife is being unfaithful to him.) While the cerebration so closely connected with sex had been s i l i y in The Sacred Fount and even somewhat p lay fu lly handled in The Ambassadors. here i t is very serious • Both Maggie and Char­ lotte fs mental health and future happiness are at stake. Once more, at the heart of Jamesian melodrama are mental tension and anguish arising from adulterous deceptions. Once more James demonstrates his excellence at rendering distressed mental states. In choosing as his chief consciousness the most innocent character, the one least prepared for duplicity, he is accepting a challenge he had rejected in Hie Wings of the Dove, where he leaves the consciousness of K illy prior to the time she discovers she has been betrayed by Densher and K ate. 1 8 1

Maggie*o Innocence has i t s charm, but one of James's major tasks is to demonstrate the cruel limitations of innocence in an adult* James's contemporary, friend, and pupil Edith Wharton would later treat the same theme in (Die Age of innocence (1920) solely from the viewpoint of the husband, Newland Archer* At the very time that Nowland has decided to leave his dull and excessively limited young wife for the fascinating and sophisticated Ellen CCLenska, Ellen sud­ denly and inexplicably decides to leave for Europe* Bewildered, stunned, Newland plans to divorce his wife and follow Ellen abroad* As he is about to tell his wife so, she insists on making her own announcement first, and she blushingly tells him she is pregnant. |[Have you told any one else?" he asks Only Mama and your mother* • • • That is—and Ellen* You kriow I told you we'd had a long talk one afternoon—and how dear she was to me." "But that was a fortnight ago, wasn't it? I thought you said you weren't sure till today," Her colour burned deeper, but she held his gaze* "No; I wasn't sure then—but I told her I was. And you see I was rightl" she exclaimed, her blue eyes wet with v i c t o r y . ^ EUen had decided, then, to go abroad as soon as she had learned of May's pregnancy, and May's lying, or at the very least jumping the gun, had worked to eliminate her rival. Twenty-six years later, with May now dead, Newland reflects on her character during their life together* She had been "generous, faithful, unwearied; but so lack­ ing in imagination, so incapable of growth, that the world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself without her ever be­ ing conscious of the change. This hard bright blindness had kept her 12 immediate horizon apparently unaltered," Newland reflects, 182

"Sonothing he knew he had miesed: the flower of life." But when h is wife died he honestly mourned h er: "Ih eir long years together had shown him that I t did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of a duly: lapsing from that, 13 i t became a mere battLo of ugly ap p etites," Dwelling as I have on what Edith VIharton did with the theme of dangerous innocence is one way of seeing what James might have done but did not* 3h VIharton's marital study the husband remains the contral consciousness as well as the most sympathetic character, !Die a ffa ir between the lovers is never consummated, and the wife is l i t ­ tle more than a minor character, despite her influence being, at that one crucial turning-point, all-powerful. Believing her husband and EUen to be lovers, she told the one lie of her life to keep her husband. Succeeding, she was forever grateful to him for his sacri­ fic e , In James*s study of a similar—alboit more complicated—situation, the affair between the lovers is a long-standing one, and the deceived wife becomes a major character and center of consciousness who also rosorts to lies (but several) to win back her husband. Similar to May in her naivete', generosity, and faithfulness, lfcggie nevertheless has an Important element May lacked—an imagination. The Golden Bowl is, in essence, a study—at times almost clinical—of the workings of that imagination as it sheds its innocence. At one point in the first volume, the Prince considers the difficulties of his daily life with Ifeggie and reflects that "her imagination was clearly never ruffled 183 by the sense of any anomaly*" For Amerigo, Maggie and her father "knew • • • absolutely nothing on earth worth speaking of—whether b eau tifu lly or cynically, * * • Hioy were good children, bless their hearts, and the children of good children* • • " (I, 333-3li), But Maggie has, after all, the capacity to "grow up," especially as Fanny Asslngham helps her to do so* Her Imagination is fin a lly ruffled—and by the anomaly of her husband!s condescension and even­ tual adultery* In some ways, then, James and Wharton reach similar conclusions about the state of marriage* Hie unmarried James wrote from long-time observation! VJharton, divorced a fte r a tw enty-eight- year marriage to an Increasingly neurasthonic man, wrote out of pain­ f u l personal experience* Each seems to have decided th a t marriage ought to be inviolable—even when it is a dull duly, even when the spouse is a condescending adulterer or a person completely incapable of growth* Each author shows the high price which has to be paid fo r the marriages Newland misses the "flower of life," and James—de­ spite many critics1 interpretations—fails to provide a happy ending for The Golden Bowl, The great irony of the novel is that Maggie has paid a higher price than even she, after her almost crushing an­ guish, is aware of* She Is, at the end of the book, far less limited than May Archer, but there is reason to think that her marriage too might go on to bo little more than a dull duty* Further, Maggie has behaved in certain cruel and amoral ways— with Fanny's aid and encouragement* While Fanny Asslngham is not the social equal of the novel's four major characters, she nevertheless recognizes how important social respectability is--and she prides herself on being a moral force, the very voice of conventional mor­ ality, She is conventional society, not the amoral society of

* Matcham where her lustre was so "obscured" (H , 211), but rather the society prevalent at Fawns, the society whose values she illustrates: "Here was a house, she triumphantly caused i t to be noted, in which she bristled with values that some of them might serve, by her amused willingness to share • • • among her fellow guests, such of the dimly disconcerted, as had lost the key to their own" (n , 112), On the one hand James is having fun at Fanny's expense, but he admits that she too is "amused," that is, that she has a high degree of self- awareness, And her amusement does not belie her general high sense of moral seriousness. Again a reference to Wharton's The Age of Innocence proves illustrative. When New York's elite society of the 1690's belioveB that Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska are having an affair, it moves in to protect the victimized and outraged wife while i t eliminates the Countess Olenska: "There were certain things th a t had to be done—and one of these, in the old New York cods, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the trib e ,

In The Golden Bowl, Fanny Asslngham represents th a t same society which believes th a t the victimized wife must be defended and supported at all costs. Further, Fanny—representing society—believes that Maggie is justified in using any means to reclaim her erring husband, Maggie demonstrates some tr a its (her seeming mercy and se lf-sa c rific e ) 185 1 5 which suggest to some critics that she is a Christ figure* But it is in te re stin g th a t Fanny never ju s tifie s Maggie*s actions in the name of Christ—i t would never croBS her thoroughgoing skeptic *s mind* Fanny perceives, quite rightly, that whatever Maggie does, she does it not in the name of Christ but out of desperate pragmatism. Be­ cause Fanny helps her in doing it, she is equally culpable. Each character in the novel represents a different degree of desperation. And Fanny's morality and her desperation are of great import in fur­ thering action, creating melodramatic tension, and making a moral comment. Fanny* as in the most b la ta n t of melodramas, is the stereo­ typed representative of society and its conventions. And while it is sometimes difficult for the reader to determine the degree of James*s condemnation of Maggie, i t is perhaps easier to gauge his judgment of Fanny. The next step is to suggest that since the moral positions of Iteggie and Fanny are identical, we can gauge James's judgment of Maggie hy his judgment of Fanny. His own moral position is neither of theirs. He is looking over their shoulders, and ultimately—and ambiguously—he both condemns and sympathises with each of them. "When James reviewed The Golden Bowl before writing its Preface for the New York edition, ho was especially pleased that he had pre­ sented the story both through Maggie's and the Prince's eyes. He recalls how usually he had preferred to let the story be told by a minor agent, perhaps an ''unwarranted participant, the impersonal au­ thor's concrete deputy or delegate, a convenient substitute or 1 8 6 apologist. . . . 11 But he is convinced that his decision for The Golden Bowl was the rig h t ona. His plan thus consists of showing "Maggie Verver at firs t through her suitorfs and her husband's ex­ hibit ory vision of heri and of them showing the Prince, with at least an equal intensity, through his wife's. . . . It is the prince who opens the door to half our light upon Maggie, just as i t is she who opens it to half our light upon himself; the rest of our impression, in e ith e r case, coining stra ig h t from the very motion with which th a t act is performed. James does acknowledge, however, that, especially in the first volume, Fanny Asslngham sometimes shares the ro le of re g iste r: "the Prince, in the volume over which he nominally presides, is repre­ sented as in comprehensive cognition only of those aspects as to which Mrs. Assingham doesn't functionally—perhaps too o fficio u sly , as the reader may sometimes feel i t —supersede him."^ 5^0 words are especially revealing here. "Functionally" suggests how impor­ ta n t Fanny's previous role as matchmaker has been in establishing both marriages; i t further suggests her "function" as tutor for the Prince (as she attempts to teach him about his w ife's "American ways"), motivator for Itiggie (as she allows Maggie to become aware of her husband's infidelity), and ficelle for them both. Hors is an important role in the novel. She supplies background information, forwards present action, and greatly increases melodramatic tension within the novel. But another word in James's remark is significant here, the word "officiously." For a3 important aB her role is, Fanny Asslngham has received little thanks for it from readers and critics. The Prince and Charlotte feel both gratitude (for her matchmaking) and pity (for her having to witness the adulterous situation she has herself inadvertently set up). Maggie frequently refers to Fanny and her husband Bob as the "dear" Assinghams. But one critic, S. Oorley Putt hates them both. He labels Fanny "dreadful," "domineer­ ing," "intolerable" as .a matchmaker, and in general "officiously dis­ approving." He dislikes Bob Assingham equally and criticizes the couple for their "gruesome presence," their "nagging style," their "ghastly bedtime colloquies," and their "tireless voyeur specula­ tions . . . the nature and presentations of which are equally uncon­ vincing. Surely ho must have disapproved of the role of the Assinghams in a recent telovision version of The Golden Bowl. In March and April of 1973, a six-episode adaptation of The Golden Bowl was shown on American telovision, a National Educational Television production dramatised by Jack Pulman for Masterpiece Theatre. In his pre-performance sormonettes, the show's host A listair Cooke said that /Bob Assingham represents James himself. In the novel, Bob Assingham has a smaller role. He is never a ficelle (except for Fanny), and has no importance except through Fanny. Nor is he the tollor of the tale in the way that the old man Douglas in The Turn of the Screw introduces the manuscript written by the governess who was his friend. But that is precisely what Assingham does in the tele­ vision production—he introduces each episode complete with back­ ground information, foreshadowings and warnings, and knowing shakes of his head. In episode two he speaks to us from the privacy and quiet of his club and jocularly states that here at least we are away from Fanny, with her noise and her eternal muaings. we were indeed to identify James fs attitude towards the characters and their situation with Assingham's attitude, we would, I think, take the novel far less seriously than we tend to do* But television's Assingham does create a sense of conspiracy, and he does his part in making the production a b r illia n t one, larg ely because the sto ry of The Golden Bowl lends itself so well to being stripped bare of the ''picture'1 so that only the ‘'scene" remains* That the story does not suffer on television suggests that James was ultimately as fine a dramatist as he dreamed of being* And to see the story stripped bare of "picture" is to see a new way of in terp retin g the melodrama in the work* The viewer also sees, by comparing the liberties of the director with the original text, now emphases* For i f the ro le Bob Assingham plays in the T*V* production is a t once d iffe re n t from, more important, and more humorous than his role in the novel, the fact nevertheless calls attention to both Assinghams and th e ir positions in the novel in a new way. One sees, for example, how frequently they are used—in both sections of the novel, but especially in volume one—to create melodramatic tensions. Indeed Fanny's great scene in which she dashes the golden bowl to the floor is one of the most explicitly melodramatic in the novel* (It is a scene in which she demonstrates further the significances of her name* Having already shown herself to be in some ways a fool—Fanny, ass—she now reveals she is a ham as well*) Fanny and Bob are the only supporting characters in this drama that has four stars* In a position of power because of what she knows of the characters1 past lives, Fanny cannot resist pulling strings and even playing god. She is a benign and well-intentioned god, but she lacks skill in creating destinies for these four friends. She had been instrumental in arranging Maggie's marriage to the Prince. A few years later she was instrumental in arranging Char­ lotte's marriage to Adam. Throughout the novel she functions as a standard Jamesian ficelle. But her task is far more complex than Mrs. Tristram's in The American or Susan Stringham's in The Wings of the Dove. Further, her sense of responsibility for the outcome of her friends' lives is far greater, and the stress, confusion, and guilt she must endure as she sees them through their crises almost undoes h er. As an agent of melodrama she functions in the novel in three ways. She contributes greatly to the conspiracy aspects of the novel as she incites the characters, especially Maggie, to ac­ tion through her subtle suggestivensss. Further, she offers a tense yet comic story of her own as she rushes in to report to Bob the latest installment in the Verver drama.

Early in volume one, the day upon which his marriage to Maggie has been formally arranged, the Prince suddenly realizes he wishes to see his "fairy godmother," Fanny Assinghairio She had, of course, "made" his marriage by introducing him to Maggie. Further, she had in him "abysses of confidence" (I, 21). He in turn has confidence in 1 9 0 her—to the point that, admitting to the lack of a moral sense, he asks her to warn him if he ever seems to be in the wrong (X, 30). The remark acts as a foreshadowing; it also gives Fanny leave to meddle—-she has been invited to do so* Fanny thinks she has had her last adventure in helping to arrange the Prince's marriage (I, 27), but she likes complications—"They're quite my element" (I, I>3) —and she will find herself gravely involved in complications before long, as she begins to suspect when Charlotte Stant returns to Europe for the wedding of Maggie and the Prince* In these first scenes in which she appears, we learn a great deal about Fanny Assingham* Her physical appearance is both amusing and interesting: "She wore yellow and purple because she thought it b e tte r , as she said , w hile ona was about i t , to look lik e the Queen of Sheba than like a revendeuse: she put pearls in her hair and crimson and gold in her teagown for the same reason: it was her theory that nature itself had overdressed her and that her only course was to drown, as it was hopeless to try to chasten, the over­ dressing" (I, 3 )4)* We learn that her matchmaking and meddling in­ stincts are coupled with a too strong sense of responsibility for her actions—she has an even stronger sense of self-importance. We learn that she can be wrong. She claims, for example, that Charlotte and the Prince were never lovers—that there had not been time (I, 71), yet there is strong evidence to suggest she is mistaken*^ Further, she says that her young friend Maggie must never know evil, although later she w ill see her error and indeed help in Maggie's education into a world in which evil exists concomitantly with good. We learn 1 9 1 too that Fanny believes most emphatically that marriage solves most problems. Bob has accused her of being herself in love with the Prince: "You couldn’t marry him, any more than Charlotte could—that is not to yourself. But you could to somebody else—i t was always the Prince, and it is always, thank heaven, marriage. And these are the things, God grant, that it will always be" (I, 81-82). What this last exchange suggests so strongly is Fanny's devotion to the idea of marriage as a sacred institution. She begins to demonstrate that despite her exotic appearance and her rather odd social position, she is at heart a stock character with a set of stock values when it comes to the marital state and its preservation. Now she pledges herself to finding a husband for Charlotte—"It will be . . . the great thing X can do" (I, 85).

Fanny now bows out of the novel for several pages, but when she re-enters, it is to see with single-minded clarity that Adam Verver needs a wife. She has been used by Maggie and Adam to entertain Amerigo, to "keep him quiet" when the father and daughter rant to spend time alone. (Bie image of the Prince as a "domesticated lamb tied up with a pink ribbon" jx , l6l] is one of James's most pointed ironies demonstrating Maggie's lack of regard for her husband.) Now Fanny encourages Adam to consider Charlotte as a wife for himself~ because Charlotte is "the real thing"' (I, 195). Maggie has herself suggested that her father marry, so that he be less "alone." But it is Fanny who suggests that the wife be Charlotte, and Adam finds him­ self influenced by Fanny, wanting to put to the test, "for pleasant verification, what Fanny Assingham had said at the last about the 192 difference such a girl could make" (X, 201). Her further influence is demonstrated when Adam once again recalls Fanny, that ''suggestive woman herself" (I, 203), and finds himself liking her suggestion more and more. Shortly Adam makes his great "discovery"—he realizes he must marry Charlotte and dedicate his life to showing Maggie that she had not forsaken him by marrying her Prince (X, 203). Her work done, Fanny does not appear again for some time. When she does, two years have passed, and the Assinghams meet Charlotte and the Prince, oach representing their spouses—who are at home together— at a formal party for an important ambassador. Charlotte specifically wants Fanny to see them together, "the sooner the better" (I, 2$0) t

She wants to have her case "out," feoling, evidently, that it will help for Fanny to see what has come to pass, what their marriages are like, and why they are on the verge of an affair. Further, she be­ lieves Fanny half-expects things to happens "Besides, didn't Fanny at bottom half-oxpeot, absolutely at the bottom half-want things?— so that she'd be disappointed if, after what must just have occurred for her, she didn't get something to put between the teeth of her so re stle ss rumination, th a t cu ltiv atio n of the fe a r, of which our young woman had already had glimpses, that she might have 'gone too far' in her irrepressible interest in other lives" (I, 1J>3-!?1|). Charlotte is both playful and desperate during this lengthy party scene. Haughty, even cruel in her conversation with Fanny, she is —amid much ambiguity and hanging fire—really expressing her rage, jealousy, and despair to the woman who arranged her marriage. She cannot help blaming Fanny a little for the marriage, and what she is really saying to Fanny between the lines is that she is not to be criticized, that Maggie and Adam force the Prince and her into these positions, into these public places, deliberately leaving their spouses alone so that they can be alone: "She flfcggiej likes him best alone. And it's the way . . . in which he best likes her" (I, 255). Charlotte is revealing her resentment, but Fanny, in her fear over what she sees developing, cannot show much sympathy. Charlotte accuses Fanny of throwing her over, forsaking her at the very hour she mosts needs a friend's loyalty. And indeed Fanny is rejecting Charlotte at this point, although she will not realize it until later. The women are never friends again after this evening. Fanny's real terror is mounting since she believes she is responsible for their now relationship. "She's not the least little bit • • . your mother- in-law," Fanny almost wails to the Prince (X, 266). Angry and fright­ ened, she feels "mere blind terror" as she returns home with the Colonel, who in his easy-going way mentions that he expected such a turn of events all along. Fanny rather quickly sees that it is Jfeggie who will need her help since the other two have lot her down. Those who view Fanny os on incorrigible busybody can point to this scene for evidence: it might appear that since the Prince and Charlotte no longer "need" her, she will have to move into Maggie's camp. But Fanny's sympathizers might just as easily say that she is merely trying now to correct a situation she feels responsible for. At any rate, she seems sincerely horrified by Charlotte's actions and in­ tentions, and Fanny blames her far more than she blames her beloved Prince. Even Bob recognizes her bias: "Wien you've made up your 19U mind it's all poor Charlotte?" Bob's advice is typically passives "Leave them alone. T hey'll manage" (I, 28$); and Fanny is momentar­ ily helpless—a condition in which she never remains for long. In the following weeks Fanny frequently turns up at Eaton Square (home of Charlotte and Adam, the place where Maggie and the Principino spend their days), but not at all at Portland Place—"her latest view of her utility seeming to be that it had found in Eaton Square its most urgent field" (I, 31$) • She does not often see the Prince (since ho and Charlotte are busy meeting at Portland Place), but once, when she does see him, she cannot resist urging him not to go to lfetcham (an English country house) if Maggie doesn't. He does go, of course, and with Charlotte—their sposi having chosen to stay home together. Not originally invited, Fanny has somehow managed to be asked, and once at Matcham, she seems more cordial to the Prince than she has been in some time. She is also, however, depressed because she is socially out of place—"In Cadogan Place she could always at the worst be picturesque • • . whereas at Matcham she should never be anything but horrible" (I, 337). Her misery is the price she must pay for insisting on going along as warden, yet the Prince pities her and is deliberately kind to her there. Fanny knows it and responds with sympathy—so that now the Prince tells Charlotte Fanny has come round to seeing their position. But Charlotte has had no fear of what Fanny might do. As Charlotte says, the three of them "hang essentially to- gother" (I, 31*3). After all, "she can't go to £Xdam and Maggie] and say 'It's very awkward of course, you poor dear things, but I was frivolously mistaken'" (I, 3hl). Charlotte is convinced that Fanny 1 9$ is "helpless" and "fixed." The scene is a crucial one in light of Fanny's role in the rest of the novel, for Charlotte has underestim­ ated Fanny's powers. Charlotte believes that Fanny is condemned by her position to certain modes of action (modes protecting Charlotte and the ^rince), but in fact Fanny, who long ago had defined morality as "high intelligence" (I, 88), goes far beyond the point at which Charlotte has "fixed" her as she comes so subtly to Maggie's aid. After brooding away the afternoon (the afternoon of her leave- taking from ffatchem, Charlotte and the Prince having refused to come back on the train with her), Fanny now tells Bob she believes there is nothing between the Prince and Charlotte. Either she is cunningly talcing a new tack, or she is guilty of supreme rationalization. In subsequent pages of dialogue with Bob, Fanny proves herself right in all her perceptions about the pair at the same time that she is wrong in her conclusion—for indeed they are now lovers, recommitted to one another in Gloucester on this very day. But Fanny has de­ cided they are "wonderful," and for a while she sustains her faith in their innocence. She does know, however, that she does not want to protect them. She recognizes in herself that she "perpetrates" crimes—and now she breaks down, crying, " I'v e worked fo r them all!" (I, 377) Her crying acknowledges, I think, that by the end of the chapter she can no longer believe her own lie that there is "nothing" between Charlotte and Amerigo. Indeed, the lie would be especially difficult to maintain after what Fanny had seen at Eaton Square that day. Going there to tell 196

Maggie th a t Amerigo and Charlotte would be coming in on a la te r train, Fanny had seen with the eyes of Charlotte and the Prince things she had not seen before about Maggie's blindness and lim ita­ tions. Further, she perceived that for the first time in her life, Maggie had doubted her vision of her wonderful little world. Fanny foresees that Maggie will not blame anyone else--not even Fanny— for what has happened: "She'll carry the whole weight of us" (X, 381). Fanny realizes th a t her own task is lim ited, th a t Maggie must now handle the situation, and Fanny predicts Maggie's triumph. Mag­ gie will be awakened to Evil, to the real world, and only these truths will make her decide to live—to live for her father! With great in tellig en ce, Fanny sees th a t Maggie, a t f i r s t , w ill liv e fo r the wrong reasons. When she says of Maggie and Adam, "Yes. . . . To be so abjectly innocent—that is to be victims of fate" (I, 392), Fanny underlines the essence of Jamesian melodrama. She refle c ts on her tendency to in terfere: "One was no doubt a meddlesome fool; one always is, to think one sees people's lives for them better than they see them for themselves. But one's excuse here . . . was that these people clearly didn't see them for themselves—didn't see them at all" (X, 388). Now in the "grimness of her lucidity" (I, 390), Fanny perceives that Maggie accepts Charlotte, that Charlotte could bo behaving worse than she i s , th at ( I, 391) Adam could have married someone "the Prince would really have cared for." We tend to think that Fanny is wrong here, that given the Gloucester chapter, we have Just been witness to how much the Prince does care for Charlotte. 197

But Fanny proves rig h t in the end: the Prince w ill not value what was so easily cone by (I, 399)• Fanny sees Maggie is beginning to perceive her mistakes: "I like the idea of Maggie audacious and im­ pudent—learning to be so to gloss things over. She could—she even w ill, yet, I believe—learn it, for that sacred purpose, consummately, diabolically. For from the moment the dear man should see it's all rouge—I11 (I, 397) One thing is clear to Fanny: just as Maggie must protect the "dear man" her father, the Assinghams must protect frfeggie by seeming not to know that anything is going on. They will deliber­ ately act like "absolute idiots," if need be. In doing so they will be helping Maggie—because she w ill want to look like an even bigger fo o l. Reviewing James's technique in The Golden Bowl, his friend Edith Wharton b itte rly attacked the Assinghams in her 1925 Th®. Writing of Fiction. She discredits the couple by ironically likening them to a "so rt of Greek Chorus to the tragedy of 'The Golden Bowl'": This insufferable and incredible couple spend their days in espionage and delation, and their evenings in exchanging the reports of their eaves'-dropping with a minuteness and pre­ cision worthy of Scotland Yard, The utter improbability of such conduct on the part of a dull-witted and frivolous couple in the rush of London society shows that the author created them fo r the sole purpose of revealing d etails which he could not otherwise communicate without lapsing into the character of the mid-Victorian novelist chatting with his readers. . . . The Assinghams are forced into £the current of the storyj for the sole purpose of acting as spies and eaves' droppers•20

Perhaps Wharton should not have made th a t "Greek Chorus" re ­ mark so slig h tin g ly because, in fa c t, Fanny does function in some of the ways a Greek chorus did—not only by providing necessary background information, but by making important prophecies. It has been demonstrated how occasionally Fanny was wrong in her estimations (when she presumed, for example, that Charlotte and Amerigo had not been lovers before his marriage), but if we examine the number of her accurate predictions, we see she has an excellent record. She foresaw that the Prince did not love Charlotte. She foresaw that Maggie would take the blame for the affair onto herself. She foresaw th a t Jfeggie would derive the strength she needed to triumph from the notion that her father must never know of his wife's treachery and his daughter's unhappy knowledge. Fanny anticipates Maggie's motives and actions at almost every point. Thus Wharton's perception th a t James created the Assinghams "for the sole purpose of revealing details which he could not otherwise communicate" is clearly wrong-headed. Fanny is commentator, prophet, confidante. Further, in a way that a summary of the action does not easily demonstrate, Fanny constantly forwards the action in dialogues in which she participates. One must look at an entire scene to gauge her contribution, but almost any scene she is in proves my point. In the scene culminating in Charlotte and the Prince's meeting again in Fanny's drawing room, meeting for the firs t time since they decided, because they were poor, to give one another up, Fanny has created much suspense and anticipation before Charlotte actually enters. She does so through her thoughtful and probing questions and comments and through her many innuendoes. After Charlotte leaves, Fanny con­ tinues to suggest the potential for disaster in one of her late-night hand-wringing scenes with Bob, Again in the lengthy scene at the 19 9 Foreign Office party, Fanny's role in forwarding action and revealing Charlotte's current state of mind is an important one. In the scenes in which she reports to Bob, she i s , i t is tru e, sometimes both comic and pathetic. But her story gains a dignity of it 3 own as she, the ficelle of the novel, turns to her own ficelle or "subconfidant , 11 her bemused but fond husband. And in these scenes too, her fertile imag­ ination offers a guide for the reader: Fanny's speculations are those of the audience. Sister Mary Corona Sharp has written a sympathetic,account of Fanny Assingham in her perceptive study, The Confidante in Henry James. She demonstrates that in The Qolden Bowl, James has made his most complex use of the confidante. Fanny is important to the stru c­ ture of the novel as she reveals necessary information and furthers action. She is also important "in the role her intelligence is made to play," James "employs the altogether common human motive of curiosity, and transmutes it into something rare and fine, namely the movement of one intelligence toward others in an effort at total com- o*t prehension." Hence Fanny aids the reader in helping to filter and communicate the "higher" consciousnesses of the illustrious Four to the reader. She is their "external reflector." But in addition to her role as dramatizer and presager of dangers, she is also her own dramatized frustrated-woman character. While Sharp goes far beyond Edith Wharton in her evaluation of Fanny Assingham's importance to the novel, she stops short, I believe, of a complete appreciation of Fanny's role. I do not want to risk the danger of making a minor character into a major character by dwelling unduly on*Fanny's importance, nor do I wish to claim that she is Maggie's moral superior. But too much has been made of the opposite stance, the notion th at ^feggie becomes Fanny's moral super­ ior as she moves beyond Fanny's moral tutelage. A new look at Fanny's role in the second volume of the novel should demonstrate th a t Ifcggie never "goes beyond" Fanny—th e ir moral stances remain id e n tic a l. Each compromises and ratio n alizes fo r the same reasons. Each perceives the basic adulterous situ a tio n in the same way, and with their alternating silences and lies, each works towards the same end. Each assumes the same hostile stance towards Charlotte, as well as the same sense th at Amerigo is a precious object to be treasured and saved at any cost. Each even uses the word "wonderful" in the same way as a favorite label for the erring lovers. And finally, each says similar and important things about the condition of women. James's judgment of Maggiecannot be examined without our looking too at his judgment of Fanny Assingham.

Fanny does not appear at once in volume two, but she is in Maggie's mind as Maggie recalls Fanny's old judgment that she and her father didn't live at all. She begins to wonder if it had been true. Now another judgment of Fanny's~one Maggie knows nothing about—sooms to verify itself as Maggie begins increasingly to blame herself for whatever is occurring between the Prince and Charlotte. Maggie has a strik in g vision: she imagines a fam ily coach pulled by Amerigo and

Charlotte whdle she and her father s it together inside, holding the 201

Principino up to tho windows to see and be seen (II, 23-2!j). Now her suspicions grow quickly, and in small but significant ways Maggie be­ gins to alter her behavior. For one thing, she entertains the Mate ham crowd, the very group she had previously oechewed. And the entire company--especially Fanny Assingham, who is glad to be in­ cluded in their circle again—conspires to make Maggie a great social success. Fanny redeems herself for her poor show at thtchara, and is grateful for tho chance to do so* But she is grateful too for her chance to aid Maggie. She proves indispensable, for now she is in­ v ite d to spend some time a t Fawns, Adam's country house. Maggie finds she needs Fanny there to "mitigate the intensity of her con­ sciousness of Charlotte" (II, 97). Fanny has been generally ignored by the four since the time of the Easter party at Matcham, but now Maggie percoivoo that she can once moro turn to this "ancient ally" without arousing anyone's sus­ picions. With her characteristic amorality (Maggie believes again and again that people exist solely for her use of them), Maggie be­ gins to see Fanny's worth anewi That Mrs. Assingham existed substantially or could some­ how be made prevailingly to exist for her private benefit was tho finest flower Ifcggie had plucked from among the suggestions sown, like abundant seed, on the occasion of the entertainment offered in Portland Place to the Matcham company. Mrs. Assingham had that night, rebounding from dejection, bristled with bravery and sympathy; she had then absolutely, she had perhaps reclcLessly, for herself, betrayed the deeper and darker consciousness—an impression i t would now be late for her inconsistently to attempt to undo. I t was with a wonder­ ful air of giving out all these truths that the Princess at present approached her again; making doubtless at first a sufficient scruple of lotting her know what in especial she asked of her, yet not a b it ashamed, as she in fact quite 202

expressly declared, of Fanny's discerned foreboding of the strange uses she might perhaps have for her. Quite from the first really Maggie said extraordinary things to her, such as "You can help me, you know, iry dear, when nobody else can"; such bb "I almost wish, upon iry word, that you had something the matter with you, that you had lost your health or your money or your reputation (forgive me, love I) so that I might be with you as much as X want, or keep you with me, without exciting comment, without exciting any other remark than that such kindnesses are 'like* me." We have each our own way of making up fo r our unselfishness, and Maggie, who had no small self at all as against her husband or her father and only a weak and uncertain one as against her stepmother, would verily at this crisis have seen Mrs. Assingham!s personal life or liberty sacrificed without a pang (II, 100-101). I have quoted so much of thin lengthy paragraph, complete with its authorial comment, to demonstrate that for the entirety of this sec­ ond volume, Fanny Assingham w ill be committed to helping Maggie—and that she has very little choice (although every good intention) in doing so. Fanny, like the Prince and Charlotte, seems almost afraid of Maggie and of what she might do next. Soon Maggie reveals her vulnerability, however, and asks Fanny directly what awfulness exists between Charlotte and Amerigo. ,rYou imagine, poor child, that the wretches are in love? Is that it?" Fanny asks (H, 109). Maggie never questions why Fanny hod used tho word "wretches"—possibly be­ cause at this point she does not want to know the truth. Receiving this cue, Fanny lies point blank, lies through her toeth, as she rapidly trio s to determine what 1-feggie already knows. She continues to lie "with her head vary high" (II, 119). It is a rich dramatic scene as these two women try to deceive one another. It is all the more dramatic when they both break down and begin to cry over the "impossibility" of the affair (II, 120). 203

Maggie, meanwhile, consciously continues to "use" her friends "She had in particular the extravagant, positively at moments the amused, sense of using her friond to the top-most notch, accompanied with the high luxury of not having to explain" (II, lli5)« She need not explain because Fanny is more than grateful for a chance to make amends. Shortly a fte r, Fanny gives a dinner-one of the few times Fanny entertains the others at Cadogan Place—and Maggie gratefully uses the setting to show off new dimensions of personality. Now tho action moveB more quickly. Only days later, Maggie urgently sends for Fanny, who senses a crisis and fears that her lies have been for nothing: "It would be all in vain to have crouched so long by the f ir e ; tho glass would have been smashed, the icy a ir would f i l l tho place" (II, 1^1). Arriving at Portland Place, Fanny immediately learns three things—that lteggie has discovered the golden bowl and its history; that Fanny herself is not to be condemned; and that she will have to aid ffeggie in handling her new knowledge. But fo r now they continue to lie for one another. Fanny offers advice—that Iteggie leave Charlotte to Adam, Next, Fanny cunningly points out that the Prince has never been as interested in Maggie as he is today. Now Fanny crashes the bowl to the floor. It is an extraordinary gesture, one showing more self-confidence than Fanny has demonstrated a t any point in the novel. Fanny is pleased, immediately convinced she has done the right thing, and Maggie in turn sees Fanny as most her friend in that moment she broke the bowl (II, 182), Their interdependent rela­ tionship has reached its highest point. The appearance of the golden bowl has verified to Maggie, through the shopkeeper's story, that her husband had a relationship with Charlotte prior to his marriage to her. Now Maggie begins to talk to her husband, voicing the suspicions she has held for many months. Amarigo chooses to lie his way out of the scene, but Ifcg- gie's silence to him is broken, and because it is, Fanny's function becomes limited. Her use henceforth, Maggie thinks, "could only consist . . . in her quite conspicuously touching at no point what- over—assuredly at least with Maggie—the matter they had discussed" (H, 208). Jama 3 has some fun with her as Fanny moves into her new ro le: "... she diffused restlessly nothing but peace—an extrava­ gant expressive aggressive peace, not incongruous after all with the solid calm of tho place; a kind of helmeted trident- 3 haking pax Britannica" (XX, 20?).

Yet not too much time passes before Maggie once more turns to Fanny. She must confide after all, and her news is that the Prince is lying to Charlotte, saying nothing to her about what Maggie knows. Maggie is elated because in removing himself from his conspiracy with Charlotte, he is aligning himself, by the lie, in a new conspiracy 22 with Maggie. "Oh if you knew how you help me I" is Fanny's response to Maggie's latest news. It seems a strange response only until wo recall Fanny's capacity for candor as well as for complicity. She repeatedly suffers agonies of guilt and worry, only to experience, on these occasions when Maggie demonstrates her increasing strength, these moments of great relief which she cannot help voicing, Hiat 20$ she does so suggests In a most human way the kinds of tension the two women are under a t Fawns • In the days that follow, the two rarely discuss the "situation," and Maggie's point of view dominates the text. But lteggio pays trib­ ute to her friend by occasionally noting in lcey scenes, in the great card table scene, for example, that as Fanny, Charlotte, Adam, and Amerigo sat playing bridge, Fanny knew more about each "than either of them |c h a rlo tte and Amarigoj knew of e ith e r" (H , 232), And when, later, after Charlotte finds Maggie on the terrace and demands from her a kiss to prove th a t nothing "wrong" e x ists between them, and after the remaining members of the card-playing group inadvertently w itness the scene, Maggie presumes th a t Fanny would have "seen day­ light for herself" as she witnessed Charlotte and Maggie embracing on the terrace. Even when the two friends are silent about the subtle power play continuing a t Fawns, Maggio continues to presume that Fanny has g re a t powers of in tu itio n (II, 278). In his Hie Tragedy of Mannerst Frederick Crews has noted, "Cer­ tainly The Golden Bowl exhibits the height of James's interest in irystery, innuendo, and elaborate dramatic dialogue."23 As has been demonstrated, Fanny does much to further a ll three. And even more important, thiB in some ways eccentric woman continuos to be the voice of convention, the stock character, the society matron. Yet it is when Fanny is absent that Maggie's consciousness iB at its most melo­ dramatic and violent. Perhaps only when the central consciousness is totally alone (or as good as alone in that ffeggie is sometimes unable to use words to communicate with either husband or ficelle) can her Imagination of disaster be given free rein. Maggie, for most of volume two, is under almost unendurable mental p ressure. At Fawns she frequently finds herself imagining "terrible possibilities" i "There were always too many, and a l l of them things of e v il when one's nerves had at last done for one all that nerves could do; had left one in a darkness of prowling dangers that was like the predica­ ment of the night-watcher in a beast-haunted land who has no more means for a fire. She might, with such nerves, have supposed almost anything of one, ..." (II, 299-300). Even early in the volume, her imagination began to present her- with images of violence: "There passed across her vision ten times a day the gleam of a bare blade, and at this it was that she most shut her eyes, most know tho impulse to cheat herself with motion and sound" (H , 9-10). Sometimes i t seemed to Maggie that when she was both helpless and tormented, she went about with a metaphorical pocket-handkerchief stuffed in her mouth: "I keep it there • . , night and day, so as not to be heard too indecently moaning (II, 110). But despite the « mental anguish, Maggie continues to say or show nothing to the Prince—neither suspicion nor jealousy; "She was keeping her head for a reason, for a cause; and the labour of this detachment, with the labour of her forcing the pitch of i t down, held them together in the steel hoop of an intimacy compared with which artless passion would have been but a beating of tho air" (II, lU l). When we are told that Maggie is learning to become a "mistress of shades," we are being reminded that to share in James's religion of consciousness (a "re­ ligion" in itself melodramatic), to achieve such nuances in one's 207 relationships, one must aspire to hypocrisy and deception. "Their so occult manner" is the label James gives th eir mode of communication during these tense times. Maggie continues to think in violent terms. She reflects on tho nature of cages (H, 229), something she feels she knows intimately. Again she reflects on the horror "of finding evil seated all at its ease where she had only dreamed of good" (H , 237). She longs fo r the right to express simpler reactions—"tho rites of resentment, the rages of jealousy" (H, 236), But in her peculiar situation, revenge is "a wild eastern caravan, looming into view with crude colours in the sun, fierce pipes in the air, high spears against the sky, all a th rill, a natural joy to mingle with, but turning off short before it reached her and plunging into other defiles" (II, 237). To express outrage, ttiggie would have to give them a ll up—father, mother-in- law, and husband. So she maintains control, but her "nerves" con­ tinue to produce lurid images. Falsity appears as a "bad-faced stranger surprised in one of the thick-carpeted corridors of a house of q uiet on a Sunday afternoon" (H , 237). House images abound, no doubt because the action is limited to Fawns for much of this volume, and all the inhabitants are feeling its constrictions. But "they learned fairly to live in the perfunctory; they remained in it as many hours of the day as might be; it took on finally the likeness of some spacious central chamber in a haunted house, a great overarched and overglazed rotunda where gaiety might reign, but the doors of which opened into s in is te r circu lar passages" (H , 288). Tho strain is great, but as Maggie begins to perceive that the Prince and she are more and more in collusion against Charlotte, she is able to move increasingly out of her isolation. She -tarns back to Fanny, who has just suggested that she and the Colonel should perhaps leave Fawns, No, says Maggie, "see me through" (H , 302). And from that time onward she begins to spend less time in fantasy, more time in action. She and Fanny seem to take a terrible satisfaction in Charlotte fs growing bewilderment and pain. Fanny speculates—chill­ ingly—on Charlotte's future with Adam in America: "I see the long miles of ocean and the dreadful great country, State after State— which have never seemed to me so big or so terrible. I see them at last, day by day and step by step, at the far end—and I see them never come back. But never—simply. I see the extraordinary 1 in te r­ estin g1 place—which I'v e never been to , you know, and you have—and the exact degree in which she'll bo expected to be interested" (H, 303-0h)•

Soon a fte r, in the important scene in which Maggie follows Char­ lotte out to the garden, Maggie does seem to show some compassion: ’.'Maggie had coma out to her re a lly because she knew her doomed, doomed to a separation that was like a knife in her heart. • • . " (XI, 311). Charlotte's pride both saves and further dooms her in this scene. She is limited and dreadful in that she still has not per­ ceived the extent to which Maggie has changed. She is s till willing to see Maggie as a "poor little person." But toggle is far worse, for she, "in a secret responsive ecstasy," falls to wondering "if there w eren't some supreme abjection with which she might be 2 0 9 inspired•" She claims she has come out to the garden to aid Char­ lotte, but in reality she came to toy, to wound further. She had come "to grovel," that is, to keep up the deception that she is a fool, a betrayed wife. She perceives later that it is dreadful that Charlotte has been rejected "by the man who for so long had loved her" (II, 327). (It occurs to the reader that the Prince might love her still if he had not been "found out" and hence dishonored.) But when the Prince in a moment of rare sympathy wants to confess to Charlotte that Maggie knows the truth about their affair, Maggie will not let him. She justifies herself through the most tortuous logic. Amerigo wishes to "correct" Charlotte's false impression of Maggie's gullibility, but Miggie responds, "'Correct' her? Aren't you rather forgetting who she is?" After which, as James says, "while he quite stored for it, as i t was the very first clear majesty he had known her to use, she flung down her book and raised a warning hand" (H, 356). Maggie has indeed succeeded in, making Amerigo "think more of her," both qualitatively and quantitatively. She has been melodra­ matic, capricious, and cruel. She continues to surprise him—but again at Charlotte's expense. Maggie freely, teasingly, brings Charlotte's name into the conversations "But shan't you then so much as miss her a lit tle ? " ( II , 3i»6), and she urges Amerigo to find time to be alone with Charlotte before her departure. She seems so brave, wanting him to have his freedom. Yet she imperiously censors what he is to say to Charlotte, and she easily justifies it, Charlotte is expendable: "It's as if her unhappiness had been necessary to us— 2 1 0 as if we had needed her, at her own cost, to build us up and start us" (U , 3U6). In tho novel ’s famous penultimate sceno, tho Vorvors come to pay thoir farewell visit to Ifeggie and tho Prince. Alone for the last timo, Maggie and her fa th e r stand ap art and view the room and i t s important pieces: "The two noble persons seated in conversation and at tea fe ll thus into tho splendid effect and the general harmony: Mrs. Vorver and the Prince fairly 'placed* themselves, however un­ wittingly, as high expressions of the kind of human furniture required aesthetically by such a scono." Looking at them Adam remarks, ''You've got some good things" (II, 360). The "things" respond by sitting still—"to be thus appraised"—like "a pair of effigies of the contemporary great on one of the platforms of Madame Tussaud" (H, 360-61). Hie scone is utterly chilling. Adam still thinks people, like tilings, can be bought with money. Maggie has learned th a t one some­ times has to pay a s till higher price in emotional coinage. But hav­ ing paid that price, having secured her precious Prince, she once again looks upon him as an object. If one sees Maggie as James ' b Christ figure, if we believe she goes uncriticized by her author, then we must believe that James is as amoral as Adam, as ruthless as Maggie.

The Golden Bowl s till remains what Dupee called i t in 1951, the "large problem child among James's writings• F. 0. Matthiessen had believed that while Maggie occasionally demonstrated an unpleas­ ant side, glorying in both having her cake and eating it too, gaining 211 nd a knowledge of e v il while somehow keeping her innocence in ta c t, ^ still she remains the heroine of tho book. Dupee sees that the father and daughter have their weak and even sinister sides as well as their force and charm, but in the end it is Maggie's charm and nobility he stresses. For him, The Golden Bowl is JameB's chief chronicle of naked suffering—Maggie's suffering (Dupee is very hard on Charlotte 26 though he is sympathetic towards Amerigo). Ho believes Maggie "forges her triumph, such as it is, out of an original terror of life. • • • Maggie of all James's characters is the most vividly suscep­ tible to the presence of evil; she has a regular sensibility for it. And the evil is, after all, as Spender suggests, 'simply the evil of the modern world , 1 tho isolation of the sensitive and the loving, a condition for which 'their only compensation is that by the use of their intelligence, hy their ability to understand, to love and to suffer, they may to some extent a tone.'"2^ Hence, both Dupee and Spender see James as making a realistic, pragmatic, self-aware ap­ praisal of the modem condition. Thera is cortainly precedent, then, for seeing Maggie as less than noble, as other than a Christ fig u re . But no one cuts in to Maggie more b ru tally than Maxwell Geismar. "The accents of true suffering, of wounded passion, of thwarted de­ sire, of tormented jealousy—of all the depth emotions Which center around the various modes of human love—are entirely missing in The Golden Bowl. But the single, entwined passion of 'knowing,' and then of Maggie's mental power over the unfortunate lovers: this dominant and typical intellectual passion of Henry James's later fiction more 212 28 than compensates, apparently, for any other sense of personal loss," Geismar next links Ifeggie to James's other protagonists: "If the os­ tensible and conscious theme of The Golden Bowl was tho 'sentimental education* of a self-made American princess, according to James him­ self, it is really quite obvious that this noble and idyllic heroine also belongs directly in the line of Jamesian 'obsessed observers' who have gradually turned into interrogators, inquisitors, and finally complete spiritual manipulators."^

Surely Geismar is correct in his evaluation of Maggie, but he is wrong, I b eliev e, when he concludes th a t James was unaware of what he was doing. Years earlier, Matthiessen, while examining the famous scene in which Adam seems to lead Charlotte by a "long silken halter looped round her beautiful neck," remarked that James seems unaware of the cruelly in such a scene and such a halter, and that this ne­ glect of the cruelty is "nothing short of obscene Geismar goes a step further to say that tho neglect is not unconscious obscenity; 31 rather it is conscious sadisml But 1 believe that both critics do James a disservice. Surely he was aware of the cruelty inherent in tho scene, just as he was aware of Maggie's weaknesses throughout tho novel, Geismar has called the Four the "Unholy Quartet," and James too saw the sins and weaknesses of each of his major characters. Realizing, as J. A. Ward points out in Tflie Imagination of Disaster, that the common denomina­ tor of both the American and the European cultures is sin, James is as conscious of the flaws of Maggie and Adam as he is of those of 32 Charlotte and Amerigo.-' James realizes that the greatest sin of 213 the Prince and Charlotte is deceit—not adultery* And33 ho realizes too that no one in the novel is more guilty of deceit than Maggie* How, then, can she be exempt from his judgment? She is not, and in­ deed the emphasis on her suffering throughout the novel suggests that o I James saw Wiggle's suffering as just punishment for her sin* She has declared that the end justifies the means when she tells the Prince (XX, 3U6) that Charlotte's pain was necessary to their own happiness* Perhaps toggle remains unaware of the extent of her own cruelty. But James does not* And to demonstrate his awareness of her culpa­ bility, le t us return to Fanny Assingham and the role she plays in the novel. I have claimed that within the novel Fanny is the very voice of conventional morality, a person whoso whole being is directed to­ wards the preservation of the marital state. I have suggested fur­ ther that toggle's moral position is identical to Fanny's, despite her obviously greater strength and staying power. Both woman are pragmatic, compromising, deceptive. Both work in the name of pro­ serving a marriage. Both seem to perceive that their sex puts them a t a disadvantage they must correct. Faniy had remarked much earlier that men don't really care about women who have come to them too eas­ ily. "That's how, in nine cases out of ten, a woman is treated who has risked her life" (I, 399)* toggle says much the same thing in a speech with Amerigo la te in the novel; " I t 's te r r ib le ' —her memories prompted her to speak. *1 see i t 's always te rrib le fo r women'" (H , 3U9). The Prince gravely responds, "Everything's terrible, cara —in the heart of man*" But we recall that earlier passage in which Amerigo reckons he has gained more from women than he has ever lost 2Xli by then ( I , 3I?0). Hg has remained lucky--at the end of the novel, he alone of the major characters emerges totally unscathed. He has lost nothing he really cares about. He has gained a moro interesting w ife. He has remained exactly what he told Fanny Assingham he was— a man without a moral sense, Fanny Assingham has not played a large ro le in the la s t pages of the novel. Wo do not witness the scene in which Adam and Charlotte say goodbye to the Assinghams, But Fanny's last important appearance "on stage" is very telling, her action most representative, Jfeggie is all but victorious at this point, since Adam and Charlotte will soon be leaving the country. But Jfeggie and Fanny s t i l l wonder how much Adam knows about "how far" the lovers went. Their speculations are serious enough, but then Fanny remembers th a t she is not to know anything herself. Her final act, then, is to tell one more lie for Haggle's sakes "I've told you before that I know absolutely nothing," "Well—th a t's what I know," Maggie responds. The scene demonstrates perfectly the moral identification between the two women. Each has played the same game, according to her own values and perceptions about what a woman in allowed to do to keep her husband. Maggie, a nominal Catholic who wears always a silver cross around her neck, has nevertheless refused to confide in Father Mitchell; she had not confessed her plight because "she feared the very breath of a better wisdom, the jostle of the higher light, of heavenly help itself. • • » (H, 2?8). Surely the passage demon­ strated James's fu ll consciousness that what Maggie has done has been less than "Christian," Earlier, in volume one, Fanny had gloated 21* over tho idea that Maggie was learning to "gloss things over": "She could—she even w ill, yet, I believe—learn it, for that sacred purpose, consummately, diabolically" (I, 397)* Bringing these two passages together demonstrates once more the identical moral position of the two women* Further, it demonstrated James's attitude towards religion. In tho first passage, tho language ("the jostle of the higher light") subtly undercuts the religious aid the comfortable Father Mitchell could offer Maggie. In the second passage, the jux­ taposition of words like "sacred" purpose and "diabolically" shows James's fu ll awareness that for the two women, the religion of con­ sciousness and pragmatism is more important than doctrinaire Chris­ tianity. James might indeed take the same stance, humanist and skeptic that he was. But he is nevertheless aware that Maggie's ac­ tions are anything but Christ-like. James has demonstrated throughout the novel his implicit criticism of Maggie. He is aware, of course, that she had to change, had to convert her innocence into experience, had to learn that "to expect so much from a personal relationship in a world of falU ble and self­ ish human beings iB to court disaster perhaps even willfully. As S. Gorloy Putt demonstrates in his essay on The Golden Bowl, the "genteel masochism" Maggie displays by her willingness to play the fool in order to spare her father, becomes by the end of tho novel a kind of "sadistic satisfaction." Maggie engages in "exquisitely ef­ fective moral blackmail" in the scene immediately following Fanny's breaking of the golden bowl: "Amerigo is left almost as speechless, 216 throughout th is scone, as was Macbeth on hearing fo r the f i r s t time h is w ife’s plans fo r Duncan, And Maggie, immaculate in her injured innocence, is hardly more appealing, at this moment of the novel, than Lady l&cbeth was at that moment of tho play,"^ Putt believes that James offers small hints in chapter XXXII, hints that James was "slyly preparing the reader for a presentation of Maggie which, while on the surface all righteousness and forbearance, yet leaves room for an appreciation of her whole campaign of aggressive forgiveness as being in effect a vengeful stratagem against the woman who had dared to marry her father,"^ Many other passages and incidents demonstrate these same implicit criticisms: passages in which James*s language ‘undercuts Maggie, or passages in which, with her gloating and her desire for grovelling, her "secret responsive ecstasy," her insistence on her powers of forgiveness and forbearance (her urging of Amerigo to spend some few l a s t moments with Charlotte is one good example), Maggie undercuts herself. As Putt soys of Ifeggie's behavior, "It is not so much a matter of forgiveness, or redemption, as of sheer superior diplo­ macy,"^® Maggie is more in tere sted in Yankee se lf-relia n ce than in truly Christian behavior. Employing a standard melodramatic adulterous situation and the typical melodramatic devices of foreshadowing and innuendo; employing further a ficelle who represents the standard voice of morality, James was skillfully able to go beyond them to a more enlightened and human moral position. Pitying and understanding Maggie at the same time that he condemns her and the society that supports her, James makes in The Qolden Bowl a moral statement th at goes fa r beyond con­ ventional melodrama, a statement as complex and subtle as the mar­ riage relationship itself. James stands to one side of Haggle and Fanny Assingham and the moral stance they represent. He sympathizes with ilr motives (he too despised adultery) j ho sometimes even applauds Fanny's tutelage and Haggle's growth. But he recognizes, even when Maggie does not, th a t she has paid an enormous price—even beyond the price of pain— for her husband. James's ambiguity reprosents honest sympathy and appraisal rather than an easy way out. In tho last sentence of the novel, Maggie for pity and dread of the Prince's eyes buries her own in his breast. The passage is indeed an ambiguous one, but if it does mean that she pities and dreads Amerigo—pities him because of what sho has done to him and dreads him because of the price he w ill extract from her in the "dull duty" of their future life together, then perhaps Maggie is becoming aware after all of the price she has had to pay for her pyrrhic victory. On the surface, however, this final scene represents an achieve­ ment for both Maggie and Fanny. The marital bond has endured, and conventional morality has been reestablished. This last scene of James's la s t completed novel embodies the melodramatic as Hie v ir­ tuous and victorious wife stands embraced by her reformed husband. But that the novel is at once both all and more than this scene represents suggests once again the transcendent powers of melodrama. FOOTNOTES FOR CHAPTER SIX

^■Jacques Baraun, "James the Ifelodramatist," Kenyon Review $ (im)t $21 . p F red erick Crews, Hie Tragedy of Manners: Moral Drama in the Later NovelB of Henry James (New Haven: Yale University h ’eBS, 19%1), p. 85. ^Henry James, Hie Golden Bowl, the New York Edition (New York: Scribner*s, 1909), I, All subsequent page references are to thiB edition* l*The Notebooks of Henry James, ed, F. 0. Katthiessen and Kenneth Murdock (New York: 3alaxy-0xCorcl University Press, 1961), p. 188* ^Two James stories of adultery are particularly interesting. In the early (1861:) and clumsy "A Tragedy of Error," an unfaithful wife h ires a seaman to Id ll her husband* Mistakenly, he k ills her lover instead. In the more subtle 1871: "Madame de Mauvas," a hus­ band eventually kills himself because his rigid wife will not for­ give his infidelities. 6Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World (191:0 j rp t. New York: Pantheon-Random House, 19^6)7 p77]>. ^Rougemont, p, 235* ^Rougemont, p* 277* Rougemont, pp. 286- 87* 3-°James, The Golden Bowl, I , v i. Hfidith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920j rp t. New York: Hie Modern Idbrary-Ranclom House, 191$!, p. 31:6. l^Wharton, p. 3J>1. ^Wharton, p. 3!?0. ^Wharton, p. 337* l^Quantin Anderson and Frederick Crews both take this position* 218 219 1^James, Pie Golden Bowl, I, v-viii. •1*7James, The Golden Bowl, I* v i i - v i i i . ■^S. Gorley Putt, Henry Jamest A Reader’s Guide (Ithaca: Cornell University Pro os, 1966)',' pp. T6J-3B6. ^Their general intimacy when they are together certainly af­ fords some evidence. More particular evidence is found in the pas­ sage in which tho Prince catalogues her particular physical virtues when he sees her for the first time in Fanny’s drawing room: "he knew her narrow hands, he knew her long fingers . . . he knew her special beauty of movement and line when she turned her back, and the perfect working of a ll her main attachments, that of some wonderful finishod instrument, something intently made for exhibition, for a prize. He knew above all the extraordinary fineness of her flexible waist. . • " (I, p. U7)* 29Edith VJharton, Pie Writing of Fiction (Now York: Scribner's 192*), pp. 90-92. 2^Sister M. Corona Sharp, Pie Confidante in Henry James: Evolution and Moral Value of a_ Fictive Character (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), p". 223. 22Earlier in the novel, the Prince has mourned the lack of con­ spiracy and imagination necessary in dealing with his wife and fath e r-in -law : "One hod never to p lo t or to l i e fo r thorn; • . . one had never . . . to lie in wait with the dagger or to prepare insidi­ ously the cup" (I, p. 3l£). We are reminded again of how James's characters usually possess innate talents for melodrama. Screws, p. 83. 2%. V/. Dupee, Honry James (19*1; rp t. Now York: American Man of Letters Series-Delta, 196*), p. 22U. 2-*F. O. Ihtthiessen, Honry James: Pie Major Phase (New York: Galaxy-Oxford University Press, I253T, p. 101. ^Dupeo, p. 226. 27Dupee, pp. 232-33. 28l4axwell Geismar, Henry James and the Jacobites (1962; rpt. Now York: American Century S erles-H ill and Wang, 196*), pp. 320-21. 2^Goismar, p. 323. ^°Matthiessen, p. 100. 220

^Geismar, p. 327. A, Ward, The Imagination of Disaster; Evil in the Fiction of Henry Jamas (Idncolnl University of Nebraska P ress, 1951), p. 139.

3%ard, p. XU7 • % a r d , p. 1^2.

3^John Roland Dove, "Bib Tragic Sense in Henry James," Texas Studies in literature and Language, 2 (Autumn, I960), 307-08. 36 Putt, p. 377. 37putt, pp. 377-78. LIST OF REFERENCES I . PRIMARY WORKS

James, A lice. Tho Diary of Alice James. Ed, Leon Edel. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 193 U. James, Henry. The Ambassadors. The New York E dition, New York: S crib n er's, 1?Q?. . The American. The New York E dition. New York: S cribner's, 1907. . The Art of Fiction. Boston: DeWolfe and Fiske, 1885. . Hie Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. Intro. R, P. Biackmur. MewTork': Scribner's, 1935. ______• The Complete Plays of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel. Philadelphia: llppincoit7"l#*$

______• The Completo T s Iq b of Henry James. Ed. Loon Edel. ------ITvols. Philadelphia: Ilppdnooti, 1961-1961*. . French Poets and N ovelists. Now York: Macmillan, 1901;, . The Golden Bowl, The New York Edition. New York: Scribner's,"1909, . The Ghostly Tales of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel. New Brunswick, N. Jf.t Rutgers University Press, I 9I48.

. Henry James L etters. Ed. Leon Edel. Vol. I , 181*3-1875* Cambridge,Mass.: belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971*. . The L etters of Henry James. Ed. Percy Lubbock. 2 vols. hew York: kcribnarTs, 1920.

______• The Middle Years. Autobiography. Ed. F. W. Dupee, New ' lo rk : C riterion Books, l95&.

221 222

• The Notebooks of Henry Janes, Ed* F* 0* Matthiessen and Kenneth ^B. burdock. *TTe'w York: Oxford University Press, 19l*7« * Notes of £ Son and Brother. New York: Scribner's, 192k* » The Novels and Tales of Henry James. The New York Edition. 26 vols.TTew Yorks Scribner's, 1907-1917* * Hie P o rtra it of a lady. Hie New York E d itio n . New York: ^Scribner's, T 908". • Hie PrincesB Casamassima. The New York Edition. New York: “Scribners, lyuo.

. Roderick Hudson. Hie New York E d itio n . New York: Scribner's, 1907.

• Hie Sacred Fount. 1901 j rpt. New York: Scribner's. T $$3. • A Small Boy and Others. New York: Scribner's, 1913. . The Spoils of Poynton, A London l i f e , The Chaperon. The New" York fcditlohY New York:- S c rib n e r's, 190U. • Watch and Ward . . . And Other Tales. London: Macmillan, 192J. —

. The Wings of the Dove. The New York E d itio n . New York: Scribner rs ,"1909 •

H . CRITICISM, BIOGRAPHY, AND SURVEYS

Adams, Percy. ,rYoung Henry James and the Lesson of his Master Balzac." Revue de L itto ra tu re Compares, 3$ (July-September 1961), JiSti-bY. Altick, Richard D. lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biog­ raphy in England and' America. New York: Knopf, • Victorian Studies in Scarlet. New York: W, W, Norton. I57o.------Banta, Hariha. "The House of the Seven Ushers And How They Grew: A Look at Jamesian Gothicism." Yale Review, $7 (October 1967). 1970. 223 Barzun, JacqueB. "Henry James, Melodramatist," Konyon Review,. 5 (Autumn 19143) * 508-21. Beach, Joseph Warren. The Method of Henry James. 1918 j rpt. Philadelphia: Albert Saifer, TiShT Benson, E. F., ed. Letters to A. C. Benson and August Manod. Lon­ don: E lkin Mathews' ancT Ffarrot, 1930. Bentley, Eric. "Melodrama," Tragedy: Vision and Form. Ed. Robert W. Corrigan. San Francisco: Chandler, 1955* Bewley, Marius. The Complex F a te . New York: The Grove P ress, 1953. Blackall, Jean Frantz. Jamesian Ambiguity and The Sacred Fount. Ithaca, New York: Comoil University Proso, 1965. Blaclanur, R. P., ed. The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. New York: Scribner^s",’ T9T5T” « "The Sacred Fount." Kenyon Review, U (Autumn 19U2), 328-52. Booth, Michael• Hiss The Villain: Six English and American Melo­ dramas. New York: benjamin Blom, 19624. Bordewich, Fergus M. ,(Why Are College Kids in a Lather Over TV Soap Operas?" The New York Times, 20 October 197h» D, p. 31, c o ls. 1—8. Bosanquet, Iheodora, Henry James a t Work. London: Hogarth P ress, 193b. Brooks, Van Wyclc. The Pilgrimage of Henry James. New York: E. P. Dutton, 19251 Bums, Landon C. "Henry James*s Mysterious Fount." Texas Studies in literature and Language. 2 (Winter 1961), 526-28. Cargill, Oscar. The Novels of Henry James. New York: Macmillan, 1961, ------

Chaso, Richard. The American Novel and its Traditions. New York: Doubleday, Sl95Y» Corrigan, Robert W., ed. Tragedy: ViBion and Form. San Francisco:! Chandler, 1965. 2 2 k

Craws| Frederick C. Hie Tragedy of Manners: Moral Drama in the later Novels oF Henry James, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951?. Dove, John Roland, "The Tragic Sense in Henry Janes," Texas Studios in Literature and Language, 2 (Autumn I960), 303-3lh. Dupee, F. V/, Henty James, 1956; rpt. New York: Dell—Amorican Men of L etters S e rie s, 1965* . ."The Secret Life of Edward Windsor," Hie King of the Cafe. New York: Noonday P ress—Fa rra r, S traus and Giroux, T955. Edel, Loon. Henry Janes? Hie Conquest of London, 1870-1881. New York: Iippincott, 1952. . Honry Jamos; Hie Master, 1901-1916, New York: Iippincott, 19757 . Henry James: Hie Middle Years, 1882-1895• New York: Iippincott, 1962. ______• Henry Janes: Hie Treacherous Years, 1895-1901. New lork: Iippincott, 1959. . Henry James: The U ntried Y ears, 1863-1870. New York: iippincott, 19537

E lio t, T. S . "Hie Hawthorne Aspect" and "In Memory." Hie L ittle Review, $ (August 1918), lih-53. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Nature" and "SelfReliance." Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed, Stephen E, Whicher, Boston: Houghton M ifflin—liverside Edition, I960. Fiedler, Leslie A, Love and Death in the American Novel, I960; rev. ed., 1966. NovTYorlc: T5oU7^ly60. Garrigan, Kristine 0. "Hie Imagination of Atrocity: A Study of Henry James*s Hie Sacred Fount." Unpublished master's theBis, The Ohio State University, 156u. Goismar, Maxwell. Hemy James and the Jacobites. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 19637^ ------Goode, John, "Hie Pervasive Itystery of Style* Hie Wings of the Dove." Hie Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James. London: MotHueriT”1972. 225 Greene, Graham. "The Portrait of a Lady." The Lost Childhood and Other Essays. London: Eyre and Spottiswobd, 1951 • Grime ted, David, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture 1800-1850. Chicago and London: U niversity of Chicago Press,

HayB, H. R. "James as a S a tir is t." Hound and Horn. 7 (April-May 193h. Heilman, Robert, Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 19*58 • "Homage to Henry James •" Hound and Horn, 7 (April-May 1931+)> 361-562. Howe, Irving. Politics and the Novel, New York: Horizon Press, 1957. Hume, Robert D. "Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel." FMLA, 81+ (March 1969), 282-90. Kelly, Cornelia Pulsifer. The Early Development of Henry James. Urbana: University of rilinoisPress, 193*57 The Kenyon Review, 5 (Autumn 191+3$ the Henry James Number), 1+81-617. Knights, L. C. "Henry James and the Trapped Spectator." Explora­ tions: Essays in Criticism Mainjy on the literature of the Seventeenth CenEajcyl Wow York, 191+77 Krook, Dorothea. The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James. Cambridge: The U niversity Proas, 1962, Leavis, F. R. The Great T radition. 191+9; r p t. London: Chatto and Windus, i 960.

Levy, Leo B. Versions of Melodrama: A Study of the F ictio n and Drama or Henry JaroBs, 1065-10977 Universityof California ^ e s s ,"T9'55T^ Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. Loyburn, Ellen Douglas. Strange Alloy: The Relation of Comedy to Tragedy in the Fiction of Heray James, chapel H ill: Univer­ sity or Wortir'Carolina Press, 1968.

The L ittle Review, 5 (August 1918; the Henry James Niuriber), 1-6I+. 226 Lubbock, Percy, The Craft of Fiction. New York* Scribner's, 1921*

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Mackenzie, Manfred. "Ironic Melodrama in The Portrait of a Lady." Modem Fiction Studies, 12 (Spring 19&6), 7-21. — . "The Turn of the Screw: Jamesian Gothic." Essays in Criticism, 12 (January 1962), 3U—30. Mandel, Oscar. A D efinition of Tragedy, New York: New York Univer­ sity Press’, I 90I. Marx, Karl. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of I 8M1. Ed. Dirk d,' fetruik.' " New York: international' mblisKers, 196U. Matthiessen, F. 0. Henry James: The Major Phase. New York: Oxford University Press, lWJT" ______. The James Family: Licluding Selections from the Writings o f Herny James, Senior, William, Henry, and Alice Jamas. New York: Knopf,1957: ------;------Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. Norton Critical Edition. Ed, Harrison Hayford and Hershel Tarker• New York: W. W. Norton, 1967. Minnock, Thomas. "'The lig h t of Deepening Experience' in the Major Novels of Henry James." Unpublished paper, The Ohio State U niversity, Sumner, 1967* Nowoll-Smith, Simon, compiler. The Legend of the Master. London: Constable, 191:7. Porier, Richard. The Comic Sense of Henry Janes: A Study of the Early Novels. New York: OxFord "University Tires's, 1960• Praz, Mario, The Romantic Agony. Trans. Angus Davidson. 1933; rp t. London: Oxford University Press, 1970. Putt, S. Gorley. Henry James: A Reader's Guide. Ithaco, New York: Cornell University Press ,""1966. Rah il l , Frank. The World of Melodrama. Pennsylvania and London: Pennsylvania State Tfniversity Press, 1967. Renault, Mary. The Bull From the Sea. New York: Pantheon Books, 1962.

Richards, Bernard. 'JThe Ambassadors and The Sacred Fount: The a rtis te manqu&T^* The Air of RealiW I "New EssayTon Henry James. Ed. John Goode. London: Methuen, 1972, 227 Rosenberg, James L. "Melodrama," The Context and Craft of Drama. Ed. Robert W. Corrigan and James L. Rosenberg. San Francisco: Chandler, 196k• Rougemont, Denis de. Love in the Western World. 191*0$ rp t. New York: Pantheon—Random House, 1956. Soars, Sallie. The Negative Imagination: Form and Perspective in the Novels of Henry"james. Ithaca, New York: ' Cornell Unl^ varsity tress, I 960. Sharp, Sister M. Corona. The "Confidante 11 in Henry James: Evolution and Moral Value of a ffictive Character. Uotre flame, Indiana: University of hotFe"*Dame Press, 1%^. Spender, Stephen. 11 The School of Experience in the Early Novels . 11 Hound and Horn, 7 (April-May 193U). Stevenson, E lizabeth. The Crooked Corridors A Study of Henry James. New VorkY Mannri'l'lan, “

Unrue, Darlene H. Henry Jamas and Gothic Romance. Unpublished Ohio State University doctoral 'dissertation, 1971 • Ward, Joseph A. Tho Imagination of Disaster: Evil in the Fiction of Herny Jaones. Lincoln. Nebraska: University oi NfeVraska T?essV 1961,' ' Wegelin, Christof. 11 JamBsian Biography. 11 Nineteenth-Century Fic­ tion, 10 (December 1963), 283-87. Wharton, E dith. The Age of Hhnoconce. 1920$ rp t. New York: The Modem L ibrary, I9R8. . The Writing of Fiction. New York: Scribner's, 192^, W ills, Garry. Nixon Agonistes: The CrisiB of the Self-Made Man. Boston: hough ton M ifflin, 1970. Wilson, Edmund. "The Ambiguity of Henry James." The Triple Think­ ers. New York: Oxford University Press, 19h8. . "The Pilgrimage of Henry James." fReview.T The Now Republic (May 6, 192$ ). ** J Yeazell, Ruth B. "Talking in James." FMLA, 19 (January 1976), 66-77. ------