Robertson, Stuart (2004) Figures for the artist in the writings of Henry James and Oscar Wilde. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4945/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Figures for the Artist in the Writings of Henry James and Oscar Wilde Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Faculty of Arts, University of Glasgow, May 2004 © Stuart Robertson 2004 II Abstract This study is a cultural materialist analysis of the spectacular commodity economy of the fin-de-siecle as mediated and represented in the iconography of the artist that Oscar Wilde and Henry James employ. The figure of the artist within the dominant social organisation of the fin-de-siecie is studied in relation to residual, dominant and emergent social formations. Focussing on four distinct figures, I examine the ways in which the discursive subject positions of the actress, the critic, the revolutionary and the child are oppositional because they represent positions that frustrate and evade the forceful processes that seek to incorporate individuals to the hegemony. This evasion is achieved because these positions exploit ambiguities within the discursive formations. Each of these positions is characterised by the same qualities of marginality, vulnerability and mutability, qualities traditionally identified as weaknesses, which I identify here as paradoxical strengths. The figure of the actress captures the force with which the processes of hegemony reify women, but she also represents an alternative to those schemes of identity formation. The vulnerability of the actress before the hegemonic discourses, a vulnerability that the artist shares, is paradoxically the quality that offers the greatest opportunity for constructing alternative positions. In a corruptly theatrical world the actress's art allows her to confound the possessive male gaze, and to evade the roles scripted for her by hegemony. The figure of the actress represents the first example of the theatrically multiple subjectivity that James and Wilde identify and explore. The critic is inextricably bound by systems of exchange and the logic of the marketplace and this represents the vulnerability of the critic. This vulnerability though depends upon the critic's intermediate position and this intermediate position is a site, I argue, which James and Wilde exploit as they re-conceptualise the action of culture and the work that art achieves. At the fin-de-siecle this work was recognised as necessary and urgent by many intellectuals. The developing mass culture presented an emergent form of social organisation, one that offered substantial opportunities for change. Cultural critics sought to find ways to understand and influence these social forms. Both Henry James and Oscar Wilde critique the dominant narratives of art and culture through their readings and rewritings of Matthew Arnold's works. Their rewritings reveal the ..'f ......~_.: . complicity of Arnold's formulationsf«¥:mhe hegemony at the same time as they identify • .''lI''''It~' oppositional positions and strategies. These oppositional positions and strategies depend upon redefining the existing relations of production and consumption that govern aesthetic encounters. The work that art does becomes the transformation of the individual's consciousness, a change from the fixed bourgeois self to a theatrically III multiple subjectivity. The critic mimes this change in order to make the process available to all. The revolutionary represents the vulnerability of the individual to political discourses of reaction and revolution. This vulnerability is realised by James and Wilde in their works through the figure of the scapegoat, an individual whose relation to the group is explicitly dangerous and revelatory. I argue that James and Wilde both identify a theatrically multiple subjectivity and I trace the genealogy of this subjectivity in Hegelian thought. I illustrate how Henry James's investigation of city-spaces demonstrates his understanding of the creation and regulation of subjects in modernity. The figure of the child is a familiar role for the romantic artist but the romantic child is also the latent being intently examined by late nineteenth century psychology, ethnology, and physiology. I argue that the potential of the child, as its promise and its threat, reveal the means through which subject positions are established, fixed and regulated, and holds out the promise of evading those regulatory schemes. I read Oscar Wilde's fairy-tales in the context of late nineteenth century folklore research, in particular the writings of Andrew Lang, and I relate James's literary children in 'The Turn of the Screw' and What Maisie Knew to his developing modernist literary form. I conclude that a significant contribution of these writers to the establishment of a distinctively Modernist literary practice was their detailed exploration and examination of the relationship of the artist to the dominant and emergent social formations, and their commitment to an active role for the artist in contesting the limits of modern subjectivity, doing battle with the forces of capital. IV ABSTRACT 11 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS VI LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS VII INTRODUCTION: FIGURES FOR THE ARTIST 1 FIGURES AS MASKS 8 SUBJECTIVITY, ART AND CULTURE 17 CHAPTER ONE: ARTISTS AND ACTRESSES 27 Telling tales: speculation and gossip 30 Learning to Lie 33 'PLA YING A PART': ACTRESSES AND ARTISTS 41 Miriam Rooth: the actress as artist 43 Three figures for the artist in The Tragic Muse 49 CHAPTER TWO: REWRITING ARNOLD; THE CRITIC AS IRONIC ALIEN ........ 57 CULTURE, THE CRITIC, AND THE CRITICAL SPIRIT 60 THE ALIEN HENRY JAMES 71 OSCAR WILDE: THE CRITIC AS ALIEN AS IRISHMAN 77 CONCLUSION 97 CHAPTER THREE: 'A LIVELY INWARD REVOLUTION'; THE REVOLUTIONARY AND THE FIN-DE-SIECLE ARTIST 99 Consciousness, reason, and spirit l 01 Individualism, the artist and the revolutionary 105 Vera; or, The Nihilist 112 Christ, the scapegoat, Wilde and his trials 115 THE REVOLUTIONARY AND THE ARTIST IN HENRY JAMES 119 Two French models for the modern artist: Flaubert and Courbet 124 Paris, revolution, realism and fldnerie 127 Hyacinth the artist-fldneur-revolutionary 132 Hyacinth Robinson in Paris and London 143 CONCLUSION: ARTIST, REVOLUTIONARY AND SCAPEGOAT 151 CHAPTER FOUR: THE AGE OF CHILDREN 153 The secrets that children hold 156 Science and Children 159 Ethnology, Folk-lore and Andrew Lang 166 WILDE'S STORIES AS NARRATIVES OF THE SELF 176 Child-artist-Christ 183 v HENRY JAMES: CHILDREN AND THEIR SECRETS 185 CONCLUSION 205 CONCLUSION 208 BIBLIOGRAPHY 223 VI Acknowledgements I would like to thank Adam Piette for his intellectual support and patience throughout the writing of this thesis, and David Roberts for granting me remission from teaching. VII List of abbreviations The following abbreviations are used throughout this work. Wherever text is emphasised the emphasis is that of the original text unless otherwise indicated. Complete Tales The Complete Tales of Henry james, ed. by Leon Edel, 12 vols (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963) Edel, Hennj james Leon Edel, Henry james,S vols (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953-72) EdeI, Letters Letters of Hennj james, ed. by Leon Edel, 4 vo Is (1974-84) Notebooks TIle Complete Notebooks of Henrq james, ed. by Leon Edel and Lyall H Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) Ellmann, Oscar Wilde Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1988) TheArtist as Critic Oscar Wilde: The Artist as Critic; Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. by Richard Ellmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1970) Sentimental Education Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, ed. and trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964) Complete Letters Rupert Hart-Davis and Merlin Holland, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (London: Fourth Estate, 2000) Phenomenology G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Sprit, ed. by J. N. Findlay, trans. by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) Horne Henry james Philip Horne, Hennj james: A Life in Letters (London: Penguin, 1999) Hyde, Oscar Wilde H. Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde: A Biography (London: Methuen, 1976, reprint. 1980) Literary Criticism I Henry James, Literanj Criticism: Essays on Literature; American Writers; English Writers, Library of America series (Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1984) Literary Criticism II Henry James, Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, and the Prefaces to the New York edition, Library of America series (Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1984) Kaplan, Hennj James Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1992) Vera Oscar Wilde, Vera: or, The Nihilist, ed. Frances Miriam Reed, Studies in British Literature (Lampeter, Dyfed, Wales: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1989) Ross, ed., Collected Works The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. by Robert Ross, facsimile reprint edition, 15 vols (London: Thoemmes Press, 1993) Oxford Notebooks Philip E. Smith II and Michael S. Helfand, Oscar Wilde's Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of a Mind in the Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) Complete Prose Works Matthew Arnold: Complete Prose Works, ed. by R. H. Super, 11 vols (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1962-77) Complete Works The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994) 1 Introduction: Figures for the Artist The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been.