Front Matter

Home , A Little Tour in France, A Small Boy and Others, English Hours

Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-51461-3 - Henry James in Context Edited by David McWhirter Frontmatter More information

HENRY JAMES IN CONTEXT

Long misread as a novelist conspicuously lacking in historical consciousness, Henry James has often been viewed as detached from, and uninterested in, the social, political and material realities of his time. As this volume demonstrates, however, James was acutely responsive not only to his era’s changing attitudes toward gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity, but also to changing conditions of literary production and reception, the rise of consumerism and mass culture, and the emergence of new technologies and media, of new apprehensions of time and space. These essays portray the author and his works in the context of the modernity that determined, formed, interested, appalled and/or provoked his always curious mind. With contributions from an international cast of distinguished scholars, Henry James in Context provides a map of leading-edge work in contemporary James studies, an invaluable reference work for students and scholars, and a blueprint for possible future directions.

DAVID MC WHIRTER is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University.

HENRY JAMES IN CONTEXT

edited by

DAVID MC WHIRTER

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb28ru,UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521514613

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2010

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Henry James in context / edited by David McWhirter. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-521-51461-3 1. James, Henry, 1843–1916 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. James, Henry, 1843–1916 – Knowledge and learning. 3. James, Henry, 1843–1916 – Homes and haunts. 4. James, Henry, 1843–1916 – Appreciation – History. 5. Literature and society – United States – History – 19th century. 6. Literature and society – United States – History – 20th century. 7. Literature and society – England – History – 19th century. 8. Literature and society – England – History – 20th century. 9. Civilization, Modern – Historiography. 10. Culture in literature. I. McWhirter, David Bruce. II. Title. PS2124.H454 2010 8130.4–dc22 2010011236

isbn 978-0-521-51461-3 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of illustrations page ix Notes on contributors x Preface xix List of abbreviations xxii Chronology Christopher Carmona xxiv

part one life and career, times and places 1 1 Nineteenth-century America (1843–1870) Andrew Taylor 3 2 Nineteenth-century Europe (1843–1900) Millicent Bell 14 3 Victorian England (1870–1890) Priscilla L. Walton 26 4 Fin-de-siècle London (1890–1900) Michael Levenson 37 5 The twentieth-century world (1901–1916) Martha Banta 47 6 Autobiographies and biographies Sheila Teahan 58 7 Letters and notebooks Philip Horne 68 8 The James family Pierre A. Walker 80

vi Contents part two historical and cultural contexts 91 9 Aestheticism and Decadence Michèle Mendelssohn 93 10 Authorship Richard Salmon 105 11 Children Kevin Ohi 115 12 Consumer culture Miranda El-Rayess 126 13 Cosmopolitanism Jessica Berman 138 14 Courtship, marriage, family Lynn Wardley 150 15 Ethics Merle A. Williams 161 16 Language Elsa Nettels 171 17 Law Stuart Culver 180 18 Manners Mary Ann O’Farrell 192 19 Media and communication technologies Mark Goble 203 20 Modernism Eric Haralson 214 21 Money and class June Hee Chung 224 22 Museums and exhibitions Tamara L. Follini 234 23 Nationalism and imperialism John Carlos Rowe 246

Contents vii 24 Print culture Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen 258 25 Psychology Sarah Blackwood 270 26 Race Kenneth W. Warren 280 27 Realism and naturalism Phillip Barrish 292 28 Sexualities and sexology Hugh Stevens 301 29 Social sciences and the disciplines Wendy Graham 310 30 Things Victoria Coulson 321 31 Time Deidre Lynch 332 32 Travel and tourism Roslyn Jolly 343 33 Urbanity Eric Savoy 354 34 Visual culture Kendall Johnson 364 35 Women and men Donatella Izzo 378 36 Work Rory Drummond 389

part three reception 401 37 Publishing history and contemporary reception Linda Simon 403 38 Critical response, 1916–1947 Michael Anesko 412

viii Contents 39 Critical response, 1947–1985 Jonathan Freedman 423 40 Recent criticism (since 1985) Gert Buelens 435 41 Translation and international reception Annick Duperray and Jeremy Tambling 445

Further reading 459 Index 479

Illustrations

1 ‘The Six-Mark Tea-Pot’ by George du Maurier, Punch, 30 October 1880. Courtesy of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland. page 94 2 A. L. Coburn, ‘The Cage’, frontispiece to What Maisie Knew, ‘In the Cage’ and ‘The Pupil’, New York Edition, vol. XI (1907–9). Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. 128 3 A. L. Coburn, ‘The Curiosity Shop’, frontispiece to the ﬁrst volume of The Golden Bowl, New York Edition, vol. XXIII (1907–9). Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. 129 4 Young Henry James, Jr with his father Henry James, Sr, a daguerreotype from the studios of Matthew Brady (1854). Frontispiece to A Small Boy and Others (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1913). 368 5 Max Beerbohm, ‘Mr Henry James (in America)’, A Book of Caricatures (London: Methuen, 1907), plate 48. 373

Contributors

MICHAEL ANESKO teaches English and American literature at the Pennsylvania State University. His principal publications include ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (1986) and Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells (1997). He has just ﬁnished a new study, The French Face of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Monsieur de l’Aubépine and His Second Empire Critics, to be published by Ohio State University Press (2011).

MARTHA BANTA, Professor Emeritus, UCLA, is the author of six books and numerous essays, reviews and editions, many of which treat the works of Henry James. Among them are Barbaric Intercourse (2002), One True Theory and the Quest for an American Aesthetic (2007) and the introduction to the Complete Letters of Henry James: 1876–1878, forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press.

PHILLIP BARRISH is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995 (2001) and White Liberal Identity, Literary Pedagogy, and Classic American Realism (2005). His Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism is forthcoming.

MILLICENT BELL, Professor of English, Emeritus, Boston University, has published widely on Henry James, from her pioneering Edith Wharton and Henry James (1965)toMeaning in Henry James (1993). Her most recent contributions to James studies are the introductions to the Penguin Classics edition of The Wings of the Dove (2008) and to the Complete Letters of Henry James, 1872–1876 (2009).

JESSICA BERMAN is Associate Professor of English and of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is the author of Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community (2001) and co-editor of Virginia Woolf Out of Bounds (2001).

List of contributors xi Her new book on the ethics and politics of transnational modernism is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

SARAH BLACKWOOD is Assistant Professor of English at Pace University. She has published articles on portraiture, photographic technology and early psychological discourse in American Literature and the Emily Dickinson Journal and is currently working on a manuscript entitled ‘The Portrait’s Subject: Inventing Psychology in American Literature and Visual Culture, 1839–1900’.

GERT BUELENS is Professor of English at Ghent University. He is the author of some sixty essays in books and journals, including Modern Philology, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, PMLA, Textual Practice and Diacritics. Henry James and the ‘Aliens’: In Possession of the American Scene won the American Studies Network Book Prize for 2004.

CHRISTOPHER CARMONA is a PhD candidate at Texas A&M University studying Beat literature, with a particular interest in the queer relationships of the Beat Generation and other literary groups. He has published an article in Beat Scene (2009) and a poem in Beatlick News (2009), and is currently working on an edited anthology of Texas Beat writers.

JUNE HEE CHUNG is Assistant Professor of English at DePaul University. She is the author of the recently completed Henry James, Popular Cosmopolitanism, and the Arts of Modernity and has published ‘Getting the Picture: American Corporate Advertising and the Rise of a Cosmopolitan Visual Culture in The Ambassadors’ in American Literature.

VICTORIA COULSON is a lecturer in American Literature at the University of York. Her publications include Henry James, Women and Realism (2007), essays on Elizabeth Bowen and Victorian Gothic architecture, and ‘Sticky Realism: Armchair Hermeneutics in Late James’, which won the 2004 Leon Edel Essay Prize in The Henry James Review. Her next book is about happiness in James.

STUART CULVER teaches at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. His articles on American literature and culture have appeared in ELH, American Literary History and Representations and also in several edited collections on James and other topics. His essay in this volume is drawn from a larger project on the relationship between James and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

RORY DRUMMOND works largely on James’s short ﬁction, with particular emphasis on its portrayal of socially marginal characters. He has contributed papers to international James conferences in Paris, Venice and Newport,

xii List of contributors and has recently completed his PhD thesis, ‘“Poor Things”: Henry James on London Life, 1888–1903’, with Cambridge University. He is Head of English at Framlingham College, Suﬀolk.

ANNICK DUPERRAY is Professor of American Literature at the University of Provence (Aix-Marseille Université). She is volume editor for two of the four volumes of the critical edition of Henry James’s Nouvelles complètes (Editions Gallimard/Bibliothèque de la Pléiade). Her publications include an analytical study of Henry James’s tales, Echec et écriture: essai sur les nouvelles d’Henry James (1993). She also edited The Reception of Henry James in Europe (2006).

MIRANDA EL- RAYESS completed her doctoral thesis, ‘Shops and Shopping in Henry James’, at University College London. She now teaches at UCL and at New York University in London, and reviews for the Times Literary Supplement. She is the author of a recent article on James and Tennyson, and is preparing a monograph on James and consumer culture.

TAMARA L. FOLLINI is a fellow and lecturer in English at Clare College, Cambridge. Her articles on Henry James have appeared in such journals as the Henry James Review, Cambridge Quarterly and the Journal of American Studies. She was president of the Henry James Society in 2007 and is a general editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James.

JONATHAN FREEDMAN is Professor of English and American Culture at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture (1991); The Temple of Culture: Assimilation, Aggression and the Making of Literary Anglo-America (2000); and Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (2008). He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Humanities Center.

MARK GOBLE is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (2010), and has published essays on Henry James and various media technologies, as well as on such topics as US poetry and visual culture and cinema and the avant garde.

WENDY GRAHAM is the author of Henry James’s Thwarted Love (1999), and is currently putting the ﬁnishing touches to a manuscript on the Pre- Raphaelite movement and celebrity. Her articles on British and American literature have appeared in Boundary 2, Modern Fiction Studies, the Henry

List of contributors xiii James Review, Arizona Quarterly and American Literary History. She teaches British and American literature at Vassar College.

ERIC HARALSON is an associate professor of English at SUNY-Stony Brook. He is the author of Henry James and Queer Modernity (2003) and of numerous essays on the sexual politics of Anglo-American prose and poetry. He is also co-editor of The Critical Companion to Henry James (2009) and A Historical Guide to Henry James (forthcoming from Oxford). He serves as Book Review Editor of the Henry James Review.

PHILIP HORNE is a professor in the English Department at University College London. He is the author of Henry James and Revision: The New York Edition (1990) and editor of Henry James: A Life in Letters (1999). He is co-editor (with Tamara Follini) of a special issue of Cambridge Quarterly entitled ‘Henry James in the Modern World’ (2008). He has also edited James’s A London Life & The Reverberator (Oxford World’s Classics), The Tragic Muse (Penguin) and The Portrait of a Lady (Penguin).

DONATELLA IZZO is Professor of American Literature at Università ‘L’Orientale’, Naples. She is the author of Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James (2001), and has edited and contributed to numerous volumes and journal issues on literary theory, cross- cultural literary rewritings and topics in American studies. Revisionary Interventions into Henry James, a collection of essays co-edited with Carlo Martinez, appeared in 2008.

KENDALL JOHNSON is Associate Professor of Early American Literature at Swarthmore College. He is the author of Henry James and the Visual (2007) and the contributing co-editor of The Critical Companion to Henry James (2009). His essays have appeared in American Literature, American Literary History and the Henry James Review.

ROSLYN JOLLY teaches English literature at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of Henry James: History, Narrative, Fiction (1993) and Robert Louis Stevenson in the Paciﬁc: Travel, Empire, and the Author’s Profession (2009). She is currently writing a book on travel and climate in nineteenth-century literature.

MICHAEL LEVENSON is William B. Christian Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of A Genealogy of Modernism (1984), The Fate of Individuality: Character and Form in the Modern English Novel (1991), The Spectacle of Intimacy (with Karen Chase, 2000) and the

xiv List of contributors forthcoming Modernism (Yale University Press). He is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (1999).

DEIDRE LYNCH is Chancellor Jackman Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at the University of Toronto. Her books include The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Inner Meaning (1998) and, as editor, Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees (2000). She is currently completing At Home in English: A Cultural History of the Love of Literature.

DAVID MC WHIRTER teaches in the English Department at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Desire and Love in Henry James (1989), and editor of Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship (1995) and (with Pamela R. Matthews) Aesthetic Subjects (2003). He is 2010 President of the Henry James Society, and is currently completing a book on James’slate 1890s ﬁctions.

MICHÈLE MENDELSSOHN is University Lecturer at Oxford University. She is the author of Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture (2007) and is currently working on a book on race and decadence in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and American ﬁction.

ELSA NETTELS is Emeritus Professor of English at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. She is the author of James and Conrad (1977), Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells’s America (1988)and LanguageandGenderinAmericanFiction:Howells,James,Whartonand Cather (1997).

MARY ANN O’FARRELL is the author of Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush (1997) and co-editor of Virtual Gender: Fantasies of Subjectivity and Embodiment (1999). She has published work on James in the Henry James Review and is currently at work on an essay on James and Hitchcock and on a longer project about appearances of Jane Austen in contemporary popular discourse. She teaches at Texas A&M University.

KEVIN OHI is the author of Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov (2005), of Henry James and the Queerness of Style (forthcoming, University of Minnesota Press), and of numerous articles on Victorian literature, American literature, queer theory and ﬁlm. He teaches English at Boston College and is currently writing a book about literary transmission.

List of contributors xv

JOHN CARLOS ROWE is USC Associates’ Professor of the Humanities and Chair of the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His books include The New American Studies (2002), Literary Culture and US Imperialism (2000), The Other Henry James (1998) and The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (1984).

RICHARD SALMON is a senior lecturer in the School of English, University of Leeds, where he specializes in teaching Victorian literature. He is the author of Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (1997) and William Makepeace Thackeray: Writers and their Work (2005) and is currently completing a study of literary professionalism in the early Victorian period, provisionally entitled The Disenchantment of the Author.

ERIC SAVOY is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Université de Montréal. He has published widely on various aspects of Henry James and queer theory. His book, Conjugating the Subject: James’s Queer Formalism, is forthcoming from Ohio State University Press. He was president of the Henry James Society in 2009.

LINDA SIMON is Professor of English at Skidmore College and general editor of the journal William James Studies. Her most recent book is The Critical Reception of Henry James: Creating a Master (2008). Previous books include Genuine Reality: A Life of William James (1998) and Dark Light: Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-Ray (2004).

HUGH STEVENS is a senior lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London. He is author of Henry James and Sexuality (1998)andco-editorofModernist Sexualities (2000). He has recently edited The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing.

JAKOB STOUGAARD- NIELSEN is Lecturer in Scandinavian Literature at University College London. He received his PhD with a thesis on the visual and textual culture of Henry James’s New York Edition. He co-edited World Literature, World Culture: History, Theory, Analysis (2008) and has published articles on James in various books and journals, among them an essay on James’s author portraits in the Henry James Review.

JEREMY TAMBLING is Professor of Literature at Manchester University and Honorary Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Henry James: Critical Issues (2000) and Lost in the American City: Dickens, James, Kafka (2001), and recently published an

xvi List of contributors article on James and opera in The Reception of Henry James in Europe (ed. Annick Duperray).

ANDREW TAYLOR is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Henry James and the Father Question (2002) and Thinking America: New England Intellectuals and the Varieties of American Identity (2010), and co-editor of The Afterlife of John Brown (2005) and Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader (2007). He is also co-editor of Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures, published by Edinburgh University Press.

SHEILA TEAHAN is Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University. She is the author of The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James (1996) and of essays in Arizona Quarterly, Henry James Review, and elsewhere. She is currently completing a scholarly edition of James’s William Wetmore Story and His Friends, and is writing a book on tropology and causality in James.

PIERRE A. WALKER is Professor of English at Salem State College. He has written numerous articles on Henry James and other literary topics, and is the author of Reading Henry James in French Cultural Contexts (1995) and the editor of Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American Social Scene (1999). Along with Greg W. Zacharias, he is general editor of The Complete Letters of Henry James.

PRISCILLA L. WALTON is Professor of English at Carleton University in Canada. She is the author of Our Cannibals, Ourselves: The Body Politic (2004) and The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James (1992), and the co-author, along with Jennifer Andrews and Arnold E. Davidson, of Border Crossings: Thomas King’s Cultural Inversions (2003). She edited the Everyman paperback edition of James’s The Portrait of a Lady and is the editor of the Canadian Review of American Studies.

LYNN WARDLEY is Assistant Professor of English at San Francisco State University. Her current projects include a book on Lamarckian plots in American literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and an essay on organicism and American Expressionist drama.

KENNETH W. WARREN is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (1993) and So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (2003).

List of contributors xvii

MERLE A. WILLIAMS is Personal Professor of English and Assistant Dean for Graduate Studies in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She is the author of Henry James and the Philosophical Novel: Being and Seeing (1993) and is currently completing a monograph entitled ‘The Challenge of Prometheus: A Reassessment of Shelley’s Thought’. Her other publications are in the ﬁelds of Romantic poetry and the modernist novel, looking particularly at the relations between literature and philosophy.

Preface

This volume presents a collection of concise, original scholarly essays focused broadly on apprehending Henry James in the context of the history, sociology and aesthetic and material culture of an emerging and consoli- dating modernity – a modernity James lived, and was uniquely positioned to observe, in various phases of its development; which he represented, analyzed and critiqued throughout a long career straddling two continents and two centuries; and which has continued to shape the reception of his work during the twentieth and twenty-ﬁrst centuries. Long misread as a novelist conspicuously lacking in historical consciousness, James has often been viewed – sometimes attacked – as detached from, and uninterested in, the social, political and material realities of his time. But as recent criticism has increasingly discerned, and as I hope this volume will help to demon- strate, James is an essential modern novelist precisely insofar as he was acutely, if anxiously, responsive not only to his era’s changing attitudes toward gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity, but also to changing conditions of literary production and reception, to the rise of consumerism and mass culture, and to the emergence of new technologies and media, of new apprehensions of time and space – responsive, that is, in the fullest sense to the material and historical conditions that in his own time determined new, speciﬁcally modern forms of experience, desire and subjectivity. Henry James in Context thus aspires to be both a consolidation and an extension of key trends in contemporary James studies and modernist studies that have shifted attention from long-standing assumptions about James’s status as an inaugurator of aesthetic modernism (a predecessor, for instance, of Eliot and Pound), toward a reading of James as a writer and cultural analyst confronting and representing, in Ross Posnock’s phrase, ‘the challenge of modernity’ (more a contemporary, as Posnock has argued, of Weber, Simmel and Benjamin: see The Trial of Curiosity [Oxford University Press, 1991]). James and his characters are modern not only because they live in cities, ride the subway, send telegrams, read the tabloids or Symonds’s AProblemin

xix

xx Preface Greek Ethics, shop in department stores, view art in modern museums, get divorced, travel in Pullman cars or cross the Atlantic in fast-moving steam- ships, but also because their consciousnesses are produced and shaped by such historical, social and material developments. This volume works to illuminate James’s modern subjects (in both senses of the word) by locating the author and his works in the context of the modernity that determined, formed, interested, appalled and/or provoked his always curious mind. Part One, ‘Life and career, times and places’, engages the unique multiplicities of James’s career as an American and English novelist (arguably even a French novelist); as someone who lived through and responded to both the American Civil War and the European Great War; who knew Emerson and Flaubert as well as Oscar Wilde; who as a child was exposed to culture both at Barnum’sin New York and at the Louvre; and whose greatest direct influences were arguably Hawthorne, George Eliot and Balzac. The volume thus begins with a series of overviews of James’s life and writing during various phases of his career that also aim to provoke speculative reconsiderations of the multiple social, cultural and literary contexts (nineteenth-century America; nineteenth-century Europe; Victorian England; fin-de-siècle London; the cosmopolitan twentieth-century world) within which he operated, and to which he so richly responded. These biographically oriented surveys are supplemented by chapters on one additional, peculiarly Jamesian milieu (the James family, once described by his brother William as a country unto itself), and on the primary textual avenues (James’s memoirs and existing biographical studies; his letters and notebooks) through which we gain access, archivally speaking, to this complex writing life. Since 1984, when John Rowe announced his intention to question and destabilize ‘the myth of ... the high modernist Henry James, whose destiny always seem[ed] to end in the intricacies of his late style and its retreat from life into the palace of art’(The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James,p.28), James studies have increasingly followed Rowe’s lead in working ‘to modern- ize James’ by reconnecting him not only to ‘our own recent history in the humanities’, but also to the historical context of the culture of modernity in which he lived and wrote. The chapters in Part Two, ‘Historical and cultural contexts’, are organized around topics and/or keywords that are arranged alphabetically, and work to place James in a matrix of interrelated contexts – aesthetic, economic, social, political, institutional, epistemological, spatial, temporal, material and technological – that together map the parameters of sociocultural modernity as it emerged and changed during his lifetime. The contexts addressed include specifically literary movements (aestheticism, realism, modernism), conceptual formations (authorship, time, social class), and technologies (language, media), as well as the institutional, economic and

Preface xxi social dimensions of print culture that shaped James’s writing and career. Contributors to Part Two consider how the specific materialities, institutions and structures of modernity to which they attend function to produce and shape specifically modern forms of experience, desire and subjectivity, even as they enable James’s rich imagination of alternative trajectories of experience and embodiment, of new possibilities for being in the world. Part Three, ‘Reception’, focuses on responses to, writing about and cultural appropriations of James during and after his lifetime. Writing in 1931,William Troy commented that James, ‘like certain other great writers of the past, has come to mean something different to each of the successive literary generations that have taken up his work. What James meant to readers of Harper’s and the Atlantic in the Eighties and Nineties, what he meant to the generation of Mr H. G. Wells, or to the generation of Mr T. S. Eliot and Mr Ezra Pound, was probably not any of the things he means, or may come to mean, to the [present] generation’ (‘The Lesson of the Master’,inSelected Essays,ed.Stanley E. Hyman [Rutgers University Press, 1967], p. 45).Thechaptersinthissection consider Henry James in the contexts provided by successive generations of readers and critics and their varied historical and cultural milieux. Examining the reputation, reception and construction of Henry James and his oeuvre from his own time to ours, and exploring the cultural work ‘Henry James’ has performed (or been made to perform) in different times and places, Part Three traces the shaping and reshaping of James’s figure and fictioninthe history of reading practices and literary studies, in relation to the rise and fall of conflicting theories and methodologies, and in the context of the shifting aesthetic, social and political agendas of criticism. I am grateful to the Department of English and the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University for their material and intellectual support of this volume. Mary Ann O’Farrell, always my best reader, helped me to shape this project from its conception onwards; Christopher Carmona, my graduate assistant, contributed to Henry James in Context in important ways too numerous to mention here. I also wish to thank Ray Ryan, Sarah Roberts and Maartje Scheltens of Cambridge University Press for their professional acumen, advice and support throughout the editing process; Hilary Hammond for her copyediting expertise; and each of the forty- three contributors for their cooperation, patience and splendid work.

david mcwhirter Texas A&M University

Abbreviations

No complete scholarly edition of James’s works has been published to date. The fourteen volumes published thus far by the Library of America – the most comprehensive and easily accessible (if still incomplete) collection of James’s ﬁction and non-ﬁction writings – are used throughout this book as standard sources for the texts they contain. Parenthetical references appear as abbreviations followed by page number. All the volumes listed below are published by Library Classics of the United States, New York, NY.

CS-1 Complete Stories, 1864–1874. 1999. CS-2 Complete Stories, 1874–1884. 1999. CS-3 Complete Stories, 1884–1891. 1999. CS-4 Complete Stories, 1892–1898. 1996. CS-5 Complete Stories, 1898–1910. 1996. CTW-1 Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America: English Hours, The American Scene, Other Travels. 1993. CTW-2 Collected Travel Writings: The Continent: A Little Tour in France, Italian Hours, Other Travels. 1993. LC-1 Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, & English Writers. 1984. LC-2 Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition. 1984. N-1 Novels 1871–1880: Watch and Ward, Roderick Hudson, The American, The Europeans, Conﬁdence. 1983. N-2 Novels 1881–1886: Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians. 1985. N-3 Novels 1886–1890: The Princess Casamassima, The Reverberator, The Tragic Muse. 1989. N-4 Novels 1896–1899: The Other House, The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age. 2003.

xxii

List of abbreviations xxiii N-5 Novels 1901–1902: The Sacred Fount, The Wings of the Dove. 2006. In addition, the following frequently referenced publications are also cited parenthetically, abbreviated as indicated. A Henry James Autobiography: A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, and The Middle Years, ed. F. W. Dupee. New York: Criterion, 1956; reprinted Princeton University Press, 1983. CL 1855–1872–1, The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855–1872, ed. CL 1855–1872–2 Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias. 2 vols. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. CL 1872–1876–1, The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1872–1876, ed. CL 1872–1876–2 Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias. 2 vols. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008–9. CN The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. Oxford University Press, 1987. CP The Complete Plays of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel. Oxford University Press, 1991 [1949]. HJC Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American Social Scene, ed. Pierre A. Walker. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. HJL-1, HJL-2, Henry James Letters, ed. Leon Edel. 4 vols. HJL-3, HJL-4 Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1974–84. HJR Henry James Review. Louisiana State University, 1979–95; University of Louisville, 1995–. LL Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.

Chronology Christopher Carmona

This chronology includes all of James’s major publications as well as his stories and essays discussed in this volume. Journal and magazine publication venues are provided only for James’s ﬁrst listed publication therein, in order to suggest their range and variety.

1842 Older brother William James born. 1843 Henry James, Jr born 15 April at 21 Washington Place, New York City, the second child of Henry James, Sr and Mary Robertson Walsh. In October the family travels to England, meeting literary figures including John Stuart Mill, Alfred Tennyson and Thomas Carlyle. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol; Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Tell- Tale Heart’. 1844 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Experience’. 1845 Brother Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) born. 1846 Brother Robertson (Bob) born. 1847 Greenwich Mean Time adopted across Great Britain by the Railway Clearing House, synchronizing train schedules. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre. 1848 Sister Alice born. Seneca Falls Convention occurs, signalling the birth of the women’ssuffrage movement in America. 1849 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto; Alfred Tennyson, ‘In Memoriam, A.H.H.’ 1850 Margaret Fuller drowns, and Henry Jr overhears conversations about her death between Henry Sr and figuressuchasWashington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Thackeray and Henry David Thoreau. Thomas Cook organizes first ‘grand circular tour’ of Europe. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.

xxiv

Chronology xxv 1851 Frederick Scott Archer, English sculptor, invents the wet plate negative, leading to rapid advances in photography in the second half of the nineteenth century. Western Union Corporation founded. The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations opens in Hyde Park, London. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or The Whale. 1852 Louis Napoleon III proclaimed Emperor of France; Henry Sr delays plans to move family to Europe for education until 1855. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1853 Becomes an enthusiastic theatregoer and sees P. T. Barnum’s production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Begins attending Vergnés Institute for Young Gentlemen in New York. 1855 James family leaves for Europe with stops in London, Paris and Geneva, and then returns to London, where a private tutor is hired for the James boys. Sees Charles Kean’s production of Henry VIII in London. Walt Whitman, ﬁrst edition of Leaves of Grass. 1856 James family moves to Paris; boys are sent to a Fourierist school called the Institution Fezandié. Learns French while in Paris and frequently visits the Louvre. 1857 Attends the Collège Imperial and befriends Benoît Constant Conquelin (later a celebrated comic actor). Contracts typhus; bed-ridden for two months and reads voraciously. The Panic of 1857 hits the US, ending a period of prosperity following the Mexican American War and the California Gold Rush. Dred Scott decision by US Supreme Court rules that people born of African descent or their descendents cannot be citizens of the United States. Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act (UK) grants right to secular divorce, establishing a model of marriage based on contract. Atlantic Monthly founded. 1858 The Jameses move back to the US, settling in Newport, Rhode Island, where Henry Jr enrolls in the Berkeley Institute, studying Latin and English literature. Begins friendship with Thomas Sergeant Perry.

xxvi Chronology 1859 Disenchanted with the American education system, Henry Sr moves the family back to Geneva; Henry Jr enrols in the Institution Rochette. John Brown raids Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. 1860 James family returns to Newport. Abraham Lincoln elected the 16th President of the United States. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun; Sir Henry Maine, Ancient Law. 1861 James’s cousins, the Temples, come to live in Newport, and Henry Jr begins friendship with Minny Temple. Tags along with his brother William to study art with William Morris Hunt; quickly realizes he does not have the same talent as other students and begins to pursue literature. Hurts his back fighting a stable fire in Newport, leading to reoccurring back problems throughout his life. Civil war begins with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. Rebecca Harding Davis, ‘Life in the Iron Mills’. 1862 Enters Harvard Law School. Wilky enlists in the Union Army, where he joins the 44th Massachusetts Regiment and later becomes part of the first African American 54th Regiment under Robert Gould Shaw. 1863 Leaves law school. Robertson enlists in the 55th Massachusetts Regiment; Wilky is wounded at Fort Wagner and returns to Newport to recover. The London Underground Railway System opens. 1864 Family moves to Boston. Begins writing book reviews for North American Review and forms friendship with its editor, Charles Eliot Norton. Anonymously publishes first story, ‘A Tragedy of Error’,in Continental Monthly. 1865 ‘The Story of a Year’ published in Atlantic Monthly. Civil war ends; President Lincoln is assassinated. First transatlantic telegraph cable goes into operation. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend; Louisa May Alcott, Moods. 1866 Family moves to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Meets William Dean Howells, assistant editor of Atlantic Monthly. Hyde Park riots protesting the defeat of the Reform Bill and of the Liberal government (UK). 1867 Begins writing reviews for The Nation.

Chronology xxvii Publishes ‘Poor Richard’ in Atlantic Monthly. Charles Dickens gives his first US readings in New York City. First commercially viable typewriter invented by Christopher Scholes. 1868 Publishes ‘A Most Extraordinary Case’. 1869 Sails for Europe searching for a back pain cure in Italy and France; tries a water cure and then tours London. First American transcontinental railroad completed. Suez Canal opens, enabling European imperial expansion. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy. 1870 Returns to Cambridge and writes travel sketches for The Nation. Death of Minny Temple. Publishes ‘Travelling Companions’. The Franco-Prussian War breaks out; Rome becomes the capital of Italy. Construction of the Brooklyn Bridge begins. Carl Westphal publishes first medical case report on homosexual- ity in German psychiatric journal. Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and Boston Museum of Fine Arts founded. 1871 Publishes ‘A Passionate Pilgrim’ and begins publishing first novel Watch and Ward in serialized form in Atlantic Monthly, where W. D. Howells assumes editorship. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man. 1872 Becomes occasional art reviewer for Atlantic Monthly. Travels with his Aunt Kate and sister Alice to Europe, where he continues to write travel narratives for The Nation. The National Society for Women’sSuffrage (US) is formed. The Army and Navy Stores opens flagship London department store. Howells’s first novel, Their Wedding Journey. James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge. 1873 Severe Wall Street crash. Walter Pater, ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance. 1874 Returns to America. Publishes ‘The Last of the Valerii’, ‘Adina’ (Scribner’s Magazine), and ‘Mme de Mauves’ (Galaxy). First Impressionist exhibition held in Paris, featuring Monet, Morisot, Renoir and others. George Eliot, Middlemarch.

xxviii Chronology 1875 Moves to Paris where he meets Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant and other French writers; writing articles on Parisian society and culture for the New York Tribune. Begins serializing Roderick Hudson in Atlantic Monthly; publishes A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales and Transatlantic Sketches (Boston: James R. Osgood). First translation of his work (‘The Last of the Valerii’) appears in Revue des Deux Mondes. 1876 Moves to London and to 3 Bolton St, Piccadilly. Begins publishing The American serially in Atlantic Monthly. Queen Victoria is crowned empress of India. Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone. Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology. 1877 Publishes ‘Occasional Paris’. Thomas Alva Edison invents the phonograph. Émile Zola, L’Assommoir. 1878 Elected to the Reform Club, London. Publishes The Europeans (Boston: Houghton, Osgood), ‘Daisy Miller’ (Cornhill Magazine), ‘Longstaff’s Marriage’ and ‘Rose- Agathe’ (Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine). Articles on ‘The Afghan Difficulty’ and ‘The Early Meeting of Parliament’ appear in The Nation. William James marries Alice Howe Gibbons. The Whistler–Ruskin trial (UK) concludes with the judge’s decision to award the artist Whistler damages for libel for a scathing review by Ruskin. 1879 Begins friendships with Edmund Gosse and Robert Louis Stevenson. Publishes Hawthorne (New York: Macmillan), ‘The Pension Beaurepas’ and ‘An English Winter Watering Place’. Photogravure process perfected by Czech artist Karl Klič, paving the way for the development of a new generation of lavishly illustrated magazines. 1880 Meets American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson in Italy and begins friendship. Washington Square published in Cornhill Magazine and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine; Confidence (Boston: Osgood); begins serializing The Portrait of a Lady in Macmillan’s Magazine. 1881 Travels to US due to mother’s illness.

Chronology xxix The Portrait of a Lady (Boston: Houghton Mifflin). President James Garfield assassinated. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Common Law. 1882 Death of mother, Mary Walsh James; returns to Europe. Returns to US following death of father, Henry James, Sr. Meets President Chester A. Arthur and Oscar Wilde in Washington. Publishes ‘The Point of View’. Adapts ‘Daisy Miller’ for theatrical production. Married Women’s Property Act (UK) alters British law regarding women’s property and inheritance rights, turning husband and wife into separate legal entities. W. D. Howells, ‘Henry James, Jr’ (Century Magazine). 1883 Returns to London after executing father’s will; brother Wilky dies. Publishes Portraits of Places (London: Macmillan). Reverend Andrew Mearns, ‘The Bitter Cry of Outcast London’. 1884 A Little Tour in France (Boston: Osgood). Publishes ‘The Author of “Beltraffio”’ (English Illustrated Magazine), ‘Pandora’ (New York Sun) and ‘The Art of Fiction’ (Longman’s Magazine). Walter Besant helps create the Society of Authors to protect authors’ rights and promote copyright reform. Home Insurance Building in Chicago, first steel-framed skyscraper. Banking Act (UK) centralizes banking in London, making it the international centre for finance. Third Reform Bill (UK) extends franchise to qualified adult males in the boroughs and countryside, increasing the parliamentary electorate by 6 million. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1885 The Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act (UK) criminalizes homosexual acts or ‘gross indecency’. 1886 Moves to 34 De Vere Gardens, London. Publishes The Princess Casamassima and The Bostonians (London: Macmillan). Cosmopolitan Magazine publishes its first issue. The Infant Custody Act (UK) stipulates that the child’s welfare should be taken into account when deciding custody,

xxx Chronology

increasing women’s chances of gaining custody of their children after divorce. ‘Black Monday’ (UK) unemployment protest leads to rioting in Pall Mall, London. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. 1887 Dawes General Allotment Act (US) passes, designed to force assimilation of Native Americans. 1888 The Reverberator and Partial Portraits (London: Macmillan). ‘The Lesson of the Master’ (Universal Review), ‘A London Life’, ‘The Aspern Papers’ and ‘London’. First volume of the Oxford English Dictionary (A–B) published. Collier’s Weekly founded. London match-girls employed by Bryant & May factory strike to protest poor working conditions. In her article ‘Marriage’, Mona Caird asks ‘Is Marriage a Failure?’ eliciting 27,000 letters to the Daily Telegraph. Mrs Humphrey Ward, Robert Elsmere. 1889 Aunt Kate dies. Visits the Exposition Universelle in Paris and sees the newly opened Eiffel Tower. Begins work on a dramatization of The American; publishes ‘An Animated Conversation’. First performances of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House on Broadway and in London. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will. 1890 The Tragic Muse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin). William James, Principles of Psychology. 1891 The American: A Comedy in Four Acts opens in Lancashire and then at the Opéra Comique Theatre in the Strand in London. Publishes ‘The Pupil’, ‘Brooksmith’ and ‘The Science of Criticism’ (New Review). Passage of first International Copyright Law (US). Edison invents the kinetoscope; the Lumière brothers stage first movie exhibition (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat). John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Modern Ethics; George Gissing, New Grub Street. 1892 Sister Alice dies of breast cancer. Publishes ‘Collaboration’, ‘Greville Fane’ (Illustrated London News), ‘The Real Thing’ (Black and White) and ‘The Private Life’.

Chronology xxxi Max Nordau, Degeneration; Frances Harper, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted. 1893 Attends performance of The Second Mrs Tanqueray in London. Publishes Picture and Text and Essays in London and Elsewhere (New York: Harper) and ‘The Middle Years’. The World’s Columbian Exposition opens in Chicago. 1894 Death of Constance Woolson in Venice; James travels to Italy to help settle her affairs. Publishes ‘The Death of the Lion’ in first issue of The Yellow Book. 1895 Has De Vere Gardens flat wired for electric lighting. Guy Domville is staged at the St James’s Theatre in London, to mixed opening-night reception; replaced after five-week run by Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Publishes Terminations (New York: Harper; includes ‘The Altar of the Dead’ and ‘The Next Time’). Oscar Wilde convicted and imprisoned for two years for ‘gross indecency’. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist. 1896 Publishes The Other House (New York and London: Macmillan), Embarrassments (London: Macmillan), ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ (Cosmopolis) and ‘The Way it Came’ (Chapman’s Magazine of Fiction); The Spoils of Poynton serialized as The Old Things in Atlantic Monthly. President Cleveland invokes the Monroe Doctrine in a border dispute between England and Venezuela, concretizing the United States’ claim over the Americas. US Supreme Court decision in Plessy vs. Fergusson upholds Jim Crow segregation laws. 1897 Buys and begins to use a typewriter. What Maisie Knew (Chicago and New York: Herbert S. Stone). Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? 1898 Moves to Lamb House in Rye, Sussex, which he buys in 1899. Publishes ‘In the Cage’ (London: Duckworth); serializes ‘The Turn of the Screw’ in Collier’s Magazine and then publishes it with ‘Covering End’ in The Two Magics (London: Heinemann); series on ‘American Letters’ appears in Literature. Views his first film, The Corbett–Fitzsimmons World Championship Prizefight.

xxxii Chronology Hires James B. Pinker as his literary agent. The USS Maine is sunk outside of Havana Harbor, beginning the Spanish American War. 1899 Meets American sculptor Hendrik Anderson in Rome. Publishes The Awkward Age (London: Heinemann and New York: Harper) and ‘The Future of the Novel’. Boer War begins. Theodore Roosevelt gives ‘Strenuous Life’ speech advocating ‘American values’ of hard work and patriotism. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class; Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. 1900 Publishes The Soft Side (London: Methuen and New York: Macmillan) and ‘Broken Wings’. Gold Standard Act fixes gold as the basis for US currency. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie. 1901 Publishes The Sacred Fount (New York: Scribner’s), ‘Matilde Serao’ (North American Review) and ‘The Saint’s Afternoon and Others’. Death of Queen Victoria. President William McKinley assassinated; Theodore Roosevelt succeeds him. 1902 Begins friendship with Edith Wharton. Publishes The Wings of the Dove (New York: Scribner’s) and ‘Flickerbridge’. 1903 Publishes The Ambassadors (New York: Harper), William Wetmore Story and His Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), The Better Sort (including ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ and ‘The Birthplace’) and ‘Émile Zola’. Ford Motor Company founded. Wright Brothers take first flight. Women’s Social and Political Union (UK) founded by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. Edwin S. Porter, The Great Train Robbery. W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk; Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’. 1904 Travels back to the United States for an extended visit, lecturing on Balzac and other topics, a trip taking him from New England south to Florida and west to San Diego and Seattle.