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Otten_FM_3rd.qxp 4/19/2006 1:36 PM Page i A Superficial Reading of Henry James Otten_FM_3rd.qxp 4/19/2006 1:36 PM Page ii Otten_FM_3rd.qxp 4/19/2006 1:36 PM Page iii A SUPERFICIAL READING OF HENRY JAMES Preoccupations with the Material World Thomas J. Ot ten The Ohio State University Press Columbus Otten_FM_3rd.qxp 4/19/2006 1:36 PM Page iv Copyright © 2006 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Otten, Thomas J. A superficial reading of Henry James : preoccupations with the material world / Thomas J. Otten. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8142-1026-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8142-9103-1 (cd- rom) 1. James, Henry, 1843–1916—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Material culture in literature. 3. Realism in literature. I. Title. PS2127.M37O88 2006 813'.4—dc22 2006000595 Cover photograph: Vase, about 1897–1900. Object place: Boston, Massachusetts, United States. Grueby Faience Company, Boston, 1894–1909. Buff stoneware with applied decoration and matte glaze. 3 31.43 x 15.24 x 15.24 cm (12 /8 x 6 x 6 in.). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Anonymous gift in memory of John G. Pierce. 65.212. Cover design by DesignSmith. Type set in Adobe Garamond. Printed by Thomson Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Otten_FM_3rd.qxp 4/19/2006 1:36 PM Page v For Kelly Hager Otten_FM_3rd.qxp 4/19/2006 1:36 PM Page vi Otten_FM_3rd.qxp 4/19/2006 1:36 PM Page vii Contents List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi A Note on Quotations xiii Introduction xv PART ITURNING TO MATTER IN HENRY JAMES Chapter 1 Revolving Heroines 3 Chapter 2 A Culture of Faulty Parallels 11 PART II PRACTICAL AESTHETICS Chapter 3 The Properties of Touch (The Spoils of Poynton) 39 Chapter 4 The Reproduction of Painting (“The Liar,” “The Real Thing,” The Tragic Muse)60 Chapter 5 Bodies, Papers, and Persons (The Aspern Papers, “The Birthplace”) 86 Chapter 6 Adulterous Matter (A London Life, The Sacred Fount, The Ambassadors) 110 PART III THE MATTER OF LITERARY CRITICISM Chapter 7 Literary Studies as Sublimated Physicality 135 Chapter 8 The Color of Air: New Materialism 154 Notes 167 Index 193 Otten_FM_3rd.qxp 4/19/2006 1:36 PM Page viii Otten_FM_3rd.qxp 4/19/2006 1:36 PM Page ix Illustrations Figure 1 John Singer Sargent, Henry James (1913). Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London. 61 Figure 2 Diego Velázquez, The Toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus) (1647–51). © National Gallery Picture Library, London. 65 Figure 3 John Singer Sargent (Florence, Italy, 1856–1925, London, England), The Breakfast Table (1883–84). Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.150. Photo by Rick Stafford. 79 ix Otten_FM_3rd.qxp 4/19/2006 1:36 PM Page x Otten_FM_3rd.qxp 4/19/2006 1:36 PM Page xi Acknowledgments For reading some or all of the pages of this book, I thank Ian Baucom, Wai Chee Dimock, Kelly Hager, Victoria Hayne, Deidre Lynch, Michael Trask, Alexander Welsh, and Ruth Bernard Yeazell. Their praise and criticism have made this project much stronger than it would otherwise be. I also want to acknowledge a number of other people who have also contributed much to my intellectual life over the years I worked on this project: Lara Cohen, Kevis Goodman, Laura Green, Richard Kasemsarn, Thomas Kierstead, Vera Kutzinski, Jesse Matz, Christopher R. Miller, Pamela Sutton-Wallace, Stephen Trask, Maurice Wallace, and Lynn Wardley. Thanks as well to Gordon Hutner, who provided counsel at a crucial moment. Nancy Sommers and the late Richard Marius, both of the Expository Writing Program at Harvard University, gave me my first job along with much encouragement at the beginning of my career. And I am profoundly indebted to my colleagues in the Boston University English Department for their kindness and support as I was readying the manu- script for publication. I am grateful to the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University for providing an energizing forum for an early version of chapter 4, and I espe- cially wish here to express my appreciation to Peter Brooks, the Center’s director at that time. A Morse Fellowship from Yale University made pos- sible the writing of much of the manuscript. An early version of chapter 3 appeared in American Literature as “The Spoils of Poynton and the Properties of Touch” (1999); an early version of chapter 4 appeared in the Yale Journal of Criticism as “Slashing Henry James (On Painting and Political Economy, Circa 1900)” (2000). I thank the editors and referees of these journals for their challenging responses to my work. The two anonymous readers for The Ohio State University Press were exemplary for their generous intelligence. I am also indebted to my editors at Ohio State, Heather Lee Miller and Sandy Crooms, who have not lost their enthusiasm for publishing literary studies. To Leslie Brisman, Wai Chee Dimock, and Joseph Roach—indispensa- ble friends, guides, and examples—this unembroidered expression of my humble gratitude will have to suffice. This book began to take shape in my mind when I was writing a UCLA dissertation under the direction of Ruth Bernard Yeazell, with Alexander Welsh as second reader. Their extraordi- xi Otten_FM_3rd.qxp 4/19/2006 1:36 PM Page xii xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS nary teaching seems to me an experience I am still learning from; their extraordinary range of knowledge is something I still seek to emulate. My parents, Jewel T. Otten and James D. Otten, and my parents-in- law, Faye Paxson Hager and Lewis Hager, have been inspirations, each in her or his own way. My sister, Julia Anne Knier, who owns a boutique, knows a lot about accessories. I am also grateful to Brian Knier, Jennifer Hager, and Julian Bray, my in-laws and excellent friends, for their support. Kelly Hager is always my first reader. Otten_FM_3rd.qxp 4/19/2006 1:36 PM Page xiii A Note on Quotations Unless otherwise noted, all references to Henry James’s fiction are to The Novels and Tales of Henry James, The New York Edition, 24 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1907–9). These references appear in the text by volume and page number. References to Henry James’s literary criticism, including the prefaces to the New York Edition, are to the two volumes Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers and Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces, ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York: Library of America, 1984); these references appear in the text with the respective abbreviations LC 1 and LC 2. References to William James, The Principles of Psychology, ed. Frederick Burkhardt et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983) appear within the text, along with the abbreviation PP when context alone does not make clear the source of the quotation. All emphases within quotations appear in the original; they are not my own. xiii Otten_FM_3rd.qxp 4/19/2006 1:36 PM Page xiv Otten_FM_3rd.qxp 4/19/2006 1:36 PM Page xv Introduction This book is about “the elaborate, copious emptiness of the whole Henry James exploit.” That phrase is from H. G. Wells’s notorious 1915 attack on James in Boon, the satiric miscellany in which Wells captures with per- versely brilliant exactitude the dimensions and scale and governing ethos of the Jamesian novel, which is “like a church lit but without a congrega- tion to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string. .”1 All of these images are precisely chosen (even if their fidelity to the Jamesian text is slightly grotesque); taken together, they map out both the properties of the material world in Henry James and the poetics, the rhetorical figures, to which those properties give rise. The egg-shell reflects those fragile collectables—often cracked ones— around which human relationships are so often arranged in James: objects like Madame Merle’s teacup, and Poynton’s spoils, and Maggie Verver’s golden bowl. Then, too, the image literalizes Madame Merle’s insistence, in her great speech on what she calls “appurtenances,” that “every human being has his shell and that you must take the shell into account” (3:287). The carefully preserved string conjures up those collectors in James who, finding themselves in economically diminished circumstances, fulfill their acquisitive impulses by accumulating the ephemeral, focusing their finely tuned sensibilities on the lowest common denominator of the world of objects; it is the sort of thing that Fleda Vetch’s father in The Spoils of Poynton, who collects pen-wipers, old calendars, and match-boxes, might pick up. (More slyly, Wells’s string suggests the Jamesian concept of the ficelle, literally string or twine but also theatrical terminology James adopt- ed in his comments in the New York Edition prefaces on the role of minor characters.) The dead kitten, suggestive of a morbid investment in a tiny body, outrageously exaggerates the immense amount of meaning carried in James’s novels by vulnerable children (The Turn of the Screw, What Maisie Knew) and a diminutive and dying heroine (The Wings of the Dove). The kitten, the shell, and the string add up to an “elaborate, copious emptiness,” a cornucopia of insignificance, because for Wells the Jamesian novel focuses too much on too little of the material world: overly refined technique (“intensely there”) is devoted to representing tiny bits of refuse.

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