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THE POLITICS of the AESTHETIC in HENRY JAMES Fotios Sarris A

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THE POLITICS of the AESTHETIC in HENRY JAMES Fotios Sarris A THE POLITICS OF THE AESTHETIC IN HENRY JAMES Fotios Sarris A thesis submitted in confonnity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto @ Copyright by ~otiosSarris 1997 National Library Bibliothèque nationale I*m of Canada du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographie Services services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395. rue Wellington OttawaON KlAON4 Ottawa ON K1A ON4 Canada Canada The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or seU reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microfom, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts from it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otheMrise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. The Politics of the Aesthetic in Henry James Ph.D, 1997 Fotios Sarris Department of English, ~niversityof Toronto Abstract Most of the criticism on Henry James characterizes him as apolitical or merely ignores the political implications of his fiction. Moreover, the category of the aesthetic, one of the central concerns and themes of James's work, is generally regarded, in both his life and his fiction, as a refuge from politics and history. But contrary to prevailing critical opinion, the political traverses and implicates the aesthetic, not only in James's rnost explicitly political novel, The ~rincessCasamassima, but also in such quintessentially "apolitical" and ostensibly socially quarantined novels like The Spoils of Ponton and The Golden Bowl. In the first novel, the aesthetic itself acts as a dubious vehicle for political solidarity and revolution. Meanwhile, read in the context of both political and psychoanalytic theories of "fetishism,"The Spoils of Ponton reveals a distinct homology and interpenetration between art and the comrnodity, as well as between what James calls "the sublime economy of art" and the more mundane market economy against which art attempts to define itself. Finally, in The Golden Bowl, Adam Ververfs career and his daughter's efforts to preserve the "equilibrium" of their domestic and social relations suggest a sirnilar homology and relationship between the aesthetic and ideology. iii CONTENTS Abstract ii Introduction 1 Mimesis and Politics in The ~rincessCasamassirna 18 Fetishisrn in The Spoils of Poynton 83 Aesthetic Ideology in The Golden Bowl 147 Conclusion 220 Works Cited 227 Introduction "The place to begin," begins Alfred Habegger's attempt to answer the question "Who Made James the Modern American Master, and Why?", the title of the concluding chapter of his book, Gender, Fantasv, and Realism in American ~iterature,"is George Santayana's original definition of the genteel tradition, which gives a brilliant formulation of the antithetical relationship between power and the alternative sphere" (289). What Habegger means by the "alternative sphere" is the sphere of art and culture, and the definition by Santayana to which he refers is this one: The truth is that the one-half of the American mind, that not occupied intensely in practical affairs, has remained, I will not Say high-and-dry, but slightly becalmed; it has floated gently in the backwater, while, alongside, in invention and industry and social organization the other half of the mind was leaping dom a sort of Niagara Rapids. This division may be found symbolized in American architecture: a neat reproduction of the colonial rnansion--with some modern comforts introduced surreptitiously--stands beside the sky-scraper. The American Will inhabits the sky-scraper; the American Intellect inhabits the colonial mansion. The one is the sphere of the American man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American wornan. The one is al1 aggressive enterprise; the other is al1 genteel tradition. (39-40) In the same essay, Santayana goes on to Say that, while William and Henry James "were as tightly swaddled in the genteel tradition as any infant geniuses could belnboth "burst those bands almost entirely," Henry "turning the genteel Arnerican tradition, as he turns everything else, into a subject-matter for analysis" (54). Much of the criticism after Santayana likewise treats James as a critic of the genteel tradition. Robert Dawidoff in particular suggests that James's writing explores the link between these two spheres, that "James saw that the prevailing American genteel moralism was a degenerate morality, and he suspected it had to do with keeping the enterprise of American business culture going behind a veneer of professed ideals" (97). But Habegger, one of the more provocative and trenchant representatives of the so-called anti-Jacobite school, advances the suggestive argument that James's work in fact embodies a different sort of link: contrary to popular belief, Habegger says, the genteel tradition is a close relative or ancestor of modernism, and Henry James "is one of the few American writers who bridged [these] two entities" (291). "One should not be deceived by the ferocity of modernismJs attack on the 'genteel,"' Habegger warns, for "both defined themselves against a mainstream seen as coarse, powerful, dominant, and yet clearly inferior to themselves. The genteel tradition and modernism were each an outsiders' elite" (291) and Henry James, a "sissy" whose "unachieved manhood" led him "to work out the rnost distinguished 'alternative spherel in American literature" (301-2). The genteel tradition in James "remains exactly the same sort of thing it has always been--a superior counterculture that defines itself against the ordinary, the practical, the material. It insists as it has always done on art as something separate, something vastly more distinguished" (302).' Of course such conceptions of art have long preceded both James and the genteel tradition, but Habegger's book has the virtue of attempting to provide a particular historical explanation and narrative of its embodiment in both James's art and canonization, Thus James's rise to prominence in America after the second world war is attributable to his workls "authorizing" the "escapist fantasies" of certain hnerican intellectuals whose "rediscovery" of James is inspired by a "social and political alienation . not essentially different £romn James's own "unachieved manhood" (301). The "balked former radicals" associated with the Partisan Review, to whom we owe James's current status in American letters (such as, most prominently, Lionel Trilling and Philip Rahv) , proclaimed James "the great nineteenth-century American realist" because they found in his work a ' The gendered nature of this division is of course obvious and forrns a subject in itself. Further commentary here would lead me somewhat astray from my own subject, though I will touch upon certain issues relating to gender in my chapter on The Spoils of Povnton. Suffice it to say here that disparagements of this aspect of James's writing Say far more about gender roles and the social conceptions and expectations of "masculinity"and "femininity" than they do about James's artistic achievements or failures. Would anyone take James to task on the same grounds on which Habegger does had James been a woman? Probably not. 4 reflection and justification of their own "elitist" withdrawal £rom "mass society" and political activity (301). Fingering Lionel Trilling in particuiar, Habegger declares that "a depoliticized critic helped exalt a depoliticized writer, neither of whom was sufficiently aware of his real place in history" (300). So runs what is only one of the more recent variants of a long-standing condematory tradition of criticism on James. Habegger is one in a long line of anti-Jacobite critics opposed to the effete gentility, elitism, cosmopolitanism, and political quietism of both James and the liberal humanist or modernist critics who have succeeded in canonizing him. This anti-Jacobite line may arguably be said to begin with william James's pragmatist and nativist objections to the Europeanized, rarefied supersubtlety of his brotherfs writing, though it only comes into prominence in the twenties and thirties in the works of such Arnerican progressives and nationalists as Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, V.L. Parrington, and Charles Beard. Like Habegger, these writers insist on an historical understanding of James. Rejecting any notion of art's autonomy--that James, that is, may "be read only with reference to himself" (290)--Habegger maintains that "Henry James cannot be understood apart £rom Arnerican masculinity, its violent rites of passage, the Civil War, the rough and tumble of primitive capitalism, and fernale Arnerican culture in the 1860s and 1870s" (290). Habegger's analysis, however, along with that of most populist or left-leaning anti-Jacobites, posits a rigidly "antithetical relation" [my emphasis] between "aggressive male power armed with capital and technology, and the alternative sphere" (290). Thus, in 1927, Charles Beard explains in his history of The ~iseof ~merican Civilization that Henry James wrote for a poignant middle class of seasoned families . distressed by the doings of the plutocrats and the vulgarisms of democracy. The grandson of a millionaire, a whole generation removed from the odors of the shop, and granted by good fortune a luxurious leisure, James steered his way into a more rarefied atmosphere, normally as the sparks fly heavenward. (441) In a similar vein, V.L. parrington observed in his history of America that, amid his native country's "sprawling energy," Henry James was unable to barricade himself securely against the intrusion of the unpleasant. His organisrn was too sensitive, his discriminations too fine, to subject them to the vulgarities of the Gilded Age, and he fled £rom it all.
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