ASPECTS OF IDENTITY IN FOUR NOVELS BY HENRY JAMES

Barbara J. Morris

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto

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Abstract

Henry James's handling of character raises questions about the nature of identity and the formation and definition of self. This study focuses on four of his novels in addressing aspects of identity in Henry James, and it is broadly divided among the following four topics: the relation between self and language; self and place; self and society; and self and deception-

The first chapter, on The American, deals with self - definition, language, and the "self-made man," with alternatives of "being" and "doing" as they relate to identity, and with the association of identity, experience, and knowledge. This chapter also discusses the concept of national identity and type, a topic that is explored more fully in the second chapter, on Washinqton Scmare, in which nationality, place and social context shape the identity of the characters. The third chapter, on The Awkward Aqe, looks mainly at the way identity is socially controlled and the way that consciousness and perception work to realize self. Finally, with The Winss of the Dove, identity, dissimulation and social function are connected through a study of that novel's two major women characters. The thesis proposes that Kate Croy's claim to the status of heroine challenges that of Milly Theale; both women consciously create identities in the face of social necessity. In James's representation of character, self proves to be unstable and fluid, dependent on ever-changing consciousness, perception and experience. Identity in Henry

James is not a fixed concept or entity; rather it involves continual making and remaking so that any given representation of it is always provisional, true only for the moment and neither fixed nor complete.

iii Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1

The American ...... 27

Washinqton Square ...... 73

The Awkward Aqe ...... 121

The Winss of the Dove ...... 160

Conclusion ...... 210

List of Works Consulted ...... 216 Introduction

In the tale "The Great Good PlaceN (1900), Jamesrs autobiographical hero, an overworked, highly respected writer named George Dane, falls into a reverie during a visit by one of his young disciples and drearns of "the real exquisite": "to be without the complication of an identity. In his dream, Dane happily finds himself in a

place that must be heaven, where he is released from the complications and worries of his identity. Dane likes the Great Good Place very much, He has time freely to read, to converse, to think--al1 without the oppressive burden of his identity and self-consciousness. But it is clear that this respite is temporary, for Dane compares it to a Catholic

retreat, saying, "1 don't speak of the putting off of one's self; I speak only--if one has a self worth sixpence--of the

gettirig it backW (24). When Dane finds or, in his case, retrieves his best self, he must leave the Great Good Place and return to his study, his work, his disciples, his iife.

"Yet the wise mind was everywhere--the whole thing

infallibly centred, at the core, in a consciousness~ (31). Dane's perception of himself and of his self in the world-- his consciousness--is, he realizes, central. His identity

' Henry James, "The Great Good Place," The Complete Tales, ed. Leon Edel, 12 vols. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 2 -is his life; his consciousness of self constitutes him; his happiness or fulfilrnent depends on the way his life matches, realizes, and integrates what he perceives as his best or fullest self.

The problem for Dane and, 1 believe, for al1 of James's major characters lies in the way self or identity is defined, represented, and realized both within the consciousnesses of the characters themselves and in and by the world (because circurnstances partly determine character). Presumably there can also be a discrepancy between the way characters think of themselves (what they perceive as their identity) and the way the world perceives them. Knowingly or unknowingly, they may project an identity to the world that is not the same one by which they def ine themselves to themselves. 1 t is precisely James's understanding of the cornplex nature of identity that makes his characters so remarkable and justifies William Dean Howells' comment, "Not since English began to be wxitten has it so . . . unerringly imparted a feeling of charactex." Very loosely put, James's novels represent and thematize problems and questions of identity. The interest for the critic is not in defining what the characters are, not in assembling for description the traits that make up the character; the interest is in studying the way James, through his characters, works out very complex aspects of identity. To approach James through character is arnply justified; as his advice in "The Art of Fictionn (1888) irnplies, character is his major concern. Howells calls James's fiction "character-painting"rather than tlstory-tellinguand stresses that James's "main business is to possess his readers with a due conception of his characters" for "it is the character, not the fate, of his people which occupies him.' Although James does not refer specifically to the tem 15dentity1tnor does he directly state his idea of identity, his attempt to represent the consciousness of his characters necessarily and essentially concerns hirn with questions of identity. 1 think that the problem of identity is absolutely central in James's writing and that the way he works it out points toward a consistent, coherent, even very modern idea of identity. That narrative fiction embodies anxiety about representation in general (of society, of class structures, of institutions, of political ideologies, of individuals) has been the contention of much critical analy~is.~In

Henry James criticism, Mark Seltzer's work is notable in its

' Roger Gard, ed. Henri James: The Critical Heritaae (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968) 126-134. Post-structuralist studies, including the deconstructive operations of Jacques Derrida, the political criticism of Michel Foucault, the writings of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and of the feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva, have focused primarily on the way structures of language operate in narrative to represent the world and the way in which language is itself a field of ideological contention. 4 ernphasis on the linking of language to ideology. In The Art of Power (19843, Seltzer discusses the "double discourse" of the Jarnesian text; he demonstrates that the content and techniques of literar-y representation in James's works are cornplicitous and continuous with larger political, historical, and social structures. While the narrative may superficially repudiate these systems of order and power, Seltzer argues that its operations are ultimately grounded in a structure of language which deploys and secures relations of power; the doubleness of the narrative occurs in its simultaneous disavowal and reinscription of those relations of power. Seltzer's focus is on the way the discourse of the text represents the world? Seltzer's analysis provides the lead for a related study: not of the representation of the relation between language and the world but of the representation of the relation between language and self, or more precisely between language and character in the novel. ill lice nt

Bell, in Meaninq in Henry James (19911, notes the need for such a study when she says, "In prose fiction, it is not only language itself in word-by-word and sentence-by- sentencz sequence that must be observed as a source of successive effects. but also the larger units of effect that

4 Mark Seltzer, The Art of Power (Ithaca, NY: Corne11 UP, 1984). precipitate in our minds as narrative events . By "events," Bell does not mean simply plot or incident; she repeatedly connects character and incident, faithful to

James's own view of them as inseparable:

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What is either a picture or a novel that is not of character? What else do we seek in it and find in it? It is an incident for a young woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way. . 1 . At the same tirne it is an expression of character.

Character is itself, then, a "narrative event," an obvious

and intrinsic property of narrative, but it seems to resist narrative analysis, possibly because of Our preconceptions about the very idea of character. Because it involves hurnan attributes, "characterH as a category proves difficult to analyze. Fredric Jameson suggests as much when he states:

[Olne of the fundamental problems of narrative analysis . . . [is] the relationship between the category of a "characteru and the cognitive content (traits, ideas, symbolism) which makes a given character up. The structural analysis of narrative has developed out of a refusal of the surface phenornena of narrative itself, substituting for them its own terminology. . . . Yet the concept of character alone has proved recalcitrant to this kind of analytic translation, and it is hard to see how the structural analysis of narrative can make any further theoretical progress without attacking this particular problem, which may be described as that of the stubbornly

Millicent Bell, Meanins in Henrv James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991) 10.

O Henry James, "The Art of Fiction, Partial Portraits (London: MacMillan, 1888) 392-393. anthropomorphic nature of our present categories of character.'

We perceive character not as a phenomenon constituted by language, not as a process of narrative, but as an arbitrarily fixed and named constituent, one that necessarily refers to an idea. Characters have proper names, after all, so they must be substantive; that is, when we name a character, we relate the name to the cognitive content which makes him/her up, and we expect the narrative to represent, in whatever way it will, this autonomous, already complete entity--the character .8 In IlThe American and the Realist Body," Mark Seltzer recognizes much the same problem in narrative analysis as Jameson; Seltzer remarks on the critical tendency to separate the novel's topics from its techniques, "as if the representation of a subject in the novel automatically placed the subject, as it were, in quotation marks. Il9 By subject, Seltzer (like James) means the novel' s idea, but the subject is also the perceiver, the human subject--

' Fredric Jameson, "The Ideology of The Text," Salmaqundi (1975-76) : 217. Aristotle distinguishes character as I1that which enables us to de£ine the nature of the participantsu £rom agents by whom "action is brought aboutn (Itonthe Art of PoetryfUClassical Literary Criticism, trans. T. S. Dorsch, Penguin, 1965, 39). 1 refer more closely to Aristotle on character in my chapter on The American.

' Mark Seltzer, "The American and the Realist Body, l1 New Essa~son The American, ed. Martha Banta (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987) 136. certainly for James subject becomes inseparable from character. That this subject is put in quotation marks

suggests that character exists separately £rom its representation or that the idea of the character is outside the narrative. In his discussion of character in Fiction and the Fiqures of Life, William Gass generalizes tendency to regard character as autonomous:

Aristotle regarded character as a servant of dramatic action, and there have been an endless succession of opinions about the value and function of characters since--al1 dreary-but the important thing to be noted about nearly every one of them is that whatever else profound and wonderful these theories have to Say about the world and its personalities, characters are clearlv conceived as livins outside lansuase. . . . [Theyl seem to have corne to the words of their novels like a visitor to tom . - . and later they leave on the arm of the reader. . . .'O [emphasis added]

ft is possible that because character is the reader's mirror in the story, we somehow think of characters as existing outside or apart from the words that create them, as if they were autonomous entities, knowable as actual people, rernembered after the narratives that contain +,hem are forgotten. Such a common response to characters (certainly proven by the way we casually talk about fictional characters as if they were old friends or real people) has been criticised as unsophisticated, but Millicent Bell warns that "we have, perhaps, been too prone

'O William Gass, Fiction and the Fisures of Life (Toronto: Random House, 1972) 36. to condemn the naive way in which a fictional character

acquires, in Our minds, a history outside the text, as though he were a person only a part of whose life has been shown. Every presented element implies others

unpresented. "l' The characterfs function in the novel ends when we close the book, but the character does not. That is, the character continues to live, independently of the narrative, as an entity in the reader's rnind. In her assumption that "al1 the life characters will ever have or need, for the

purpose they serve, is there before us," Mary Springer Doyle's definition of a literary character misses the fact that for the reader some characters & acquire more life than that contained by the text:

A literary character is an artificial construct drawn from, and relatively imitative of, people in the real world. The identity of a character becomes known primarily from a continuity of his or her own choices, speeches, and acts, consistent with the kind of person to be presented. Secondarily, identity is reinforced by description, diction, and in incidents of apposition

Bell, 7. 1 believe this is true of al1 well-realized characters, but some authors go much further to encourage our belief in the continued life of characters outside their texts. After the publication of Pride and Preiudice, Jane Austen mentions that Elizabeth Darcy has her portrait painted in a yellow dress--cause enough, it unfortunately seems, for Emma Tennant's sequels, Pemberlev (1993) and &I Unesual Marriase (1994). Similarly, Austen gives us bits of Emma's history after her marriage to Mr. Knightley, outside the pages of Emma. Faulkner creates his entire communicy of Yoknapatawpha complete with characters who frequently appear in other characters' stories, as if, al1 along, their lives have been lived beyond their own texts, crisscrossing and influencing other lives, outside the readerfs knowledge. to other characters. The choices, acts, and habits that constitute a character are limited by, consistent with, and suitable to the governing principle of the whole work of which the character is a part. The "life" of a literary character thus comes to a close when his or her part in the work is complete."

What if, as in the case of Christopher Newman or Merton Densher, identity is not reinforced by description? What if--as often happens in James--diction or speech serves to

conceal identity and obfuscate truth rather than to reveal

identity? And what if a character is not known by any particular acts or "doingU but, instead, by "being?" Mary Springer Doyle's definition falls short when it is measured against James's characters,'' and, more importantly, it fails to account for what makes characters alive and imitative of people in the real world. Nor does James himself account for what makes characters real; even though he may create numerous fine examples, he nonetheless recognizes the impossibility of providing a formula:

The characters, the situation, which strike one as real will be those that touch and interest one most, but the measure of reality is very difficult to fix. . . . It goes without saying that you will not write a good novel unless you possess the sense of reality; but it

'' A Rhetoric of Literaw Character (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978) 14.

l3 I specify James, but Doyle's definition does not account for the Itlifettof any great characters mainly because she does not allow that they have it. will be difficult to give you a recipe for calling thac çense into being."

In The Pleasures of Readins in an Ideolosical Aqe, Robert Alter specifically locates the problem of understanding character in contemporary narrative theory's inability to "talk coherently about the nexus between text and what by consensus we are willing to cal1 reality,ll and in its attempt to undercut the mimetic validity of a character:

It is symptomatic that narratology should be most conspicuously inadequate in its treatment of character because with its conception of narrative as a system of structural mechanisms, character can be little more than a function of plot. The narratologists have scarcely ny critical vocabulary for encompassing the mime tic d mension of character. . . . Purportedly real istic character is now deemed a carnouf lage device or a mask . . . or worse, a pernicious illusion woxking to sustain an oppressive ideol~gy.'~

Like Bell, Alter daims that the various lines of attack on

character and the idea that literature, because it is composed of linguistic and literary conventions, is therefore somehow severed £rom reality, "reflect a kind of sophistication that becornes its own egregious naivete.ll"

He puts the question thus: "if on some level we always know

'' "The Art of Fictionv (1884), Partial Portraits (London: MacMillan, 1888) 388. " Robert Alter, The Pleasures of Readinq in an Ideolosical Aqe (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989) 50-52.

l6 Alter, 53. Il that chaxacters in fiction are mere constructs, congeries of words, compounds of convention and invention, what is it about them that leads us to take them so seriously?" Our experience of characters, because they resemble us, insists that they are more than linguistic constructions, The character embodies the reader in the text and we will not allow that we ourselves are constituted solely by Our

language or that our own sense of self, our consciousness, is placed and determined by a system of language: we maintain a stronghold in an idea of self as consciousness that exists outside or independent of language and of Our or othersf representations of it. The postulation of the existence of a discrete entity, what Lionel Trilling refers to as "actual self" or "integral selfhood,~"suggests, by extension, a division, a gap between the core self with its inviolable integrity and the self's facade or external representations. Indeed, Norbert Elias observes "how persistent and how much taken for granted in the societies of modern Europe is the feeling of people that their own 'self,' their 'true identity,' is something locked away 'inside' them, severed from al1 other people and things

outside. mlls

" Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticitv (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1971) 31, 46. " Norbert Elias, The Civilizins Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen, 19781, 253, quoted in Posnock, 169. 12 Ross Posnock in his book The Trial of Curiositv argues that James implicitly challenges subjectivist fictions of the self. Even if a core self did exist, however, it would not have to be a static or a fixed entity; this is to Say that the idea of self or centered subjectivity does not preclude self's change or development. Robert Alter puts the argument as follows:

The unity of character so often denounced as a sham by new wave critics is neither monolithic nor static, as they clairn, but, on the contrary, is mobile,

unstable, elusive even as it seems palpable- - in our reading experience. . . . [Tlhe unity of character inheres in dynamic contradictions, which is also a basic fact of our psychological lives and as such helps explain the realistic persuasiveness of successfully achieved fictional character."

Far from being reductive and old-fashioned, therefore, the idea of unitary character may actually be complex and radical in its recognition of contradiction, unpredictability and change in character. John Dewey, the Arnerican social philosopher usually associated with his contemporary, William James, but whose philosophy, Posncck

Ross Posnock, The Trial Of Curiositv (New York: Oxford UP, 1991). Specifically, Posnock distinguishes between the central and the centered consciousness, defining the former as a technique and the latter as the ideology of individualism. He argues that James unties the historically tied knot of the person as an entity of "unshakeable unity" (168), that James dissociates identity £rom stability,- and that "James employed the technique [of a central consciousness] less to legitimate and authorize centered subjectivity than to reveal its compromised status and obliviousness to its own solipsismfl (91).

'O Alter, 55. notes, is actually closer to Henry's," recognizes the instability or fluidity of self. Dewey's conception of selfhood is particularly useful for understanding James's characters:

Surrender of what is possessed, disowning of what supports one in secure ease, is involved in al1 inquiry and discovery; the latter implicate an individual still to make, with al1 the risks implied therein. For to arrive at new truth and vision is to alter. The old self is put off and the new self is only forming, and the form it finally takes will depend upon the unforeseeable result of an adventure.-17

Dewey's use of the word "adventure" especially fits a Jarnesian context. James's understanding of what constitutes an "adventure" is articulated in "The New York Preface to 'Daisy Miller'" where he writes, "a human, a persona1 'adventure' is no a priori, no positive and absolute and inelastic thing, but just a matter of relation and appreciation--a name we conveniently give, after the fact, to any passage, to any situation, that has added the sharp taste of uncertainty to a quickened sense of life." Uncertainty is the defining quality for both James's and Dewey's sense of character.

" Posnock, 10. -17 John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Norton, 1929) 245-6.

L3 Henry James, The Art of the Novel (1934; Boston: Northeastern UP, 1984) 286. For convenience, I have used this edition which collects al1 James's Prefaces in one volume. Subsequent references to the prefaces will be abbreviated Art and will appear in parentheses. To suggest that there is a developrnent through the course of his career in James's idea of identity £rom a nineteenth-century belief in the stability, unity, and knowability of self to a modern notion of self and identity as the surn of protean consciousness is reductive? In the first place, the suggestion misrepresents the nineteenth century; quite early in the century, the psychologist and philosopher Thomas Brown wrote, Vrom the beginning of life to its close, the mind has existed, and is known to us only as thus existing, in various States of changeful feeling,"3 which may imply that the mind or self exists onlv in our perception of its changeableness. At the same time,

Friedrich Schlegel was pondering the dualism of self and consciousness.26 William James hirnself believed (like his brother) that consciousness is not an entity, not a thing, but a flux and system of relations and that self (or so called soul) is merely the surn of this mental life.

'' Donna Przybylowicz, for one, seems to rnake this suggestion in Desire and Repression (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1986), when she comments that "the protagonist . . . in the late works does not manifest a unified sensibility, an integrated ideal ego that is the focus of the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel" and that her study will "show James's rnovement, in the course of his long and productive career, £rom a more realistic type of narrative to one that incorporates modernist techniques and concerns" (2-4) .

'5 Quoted in Kearns, 10.

26 1 refer to Schlegel in my chapter on The Winss of the Dove . Reflection on the nature of self and identity is not confined to the twentieth century. Although the concept of self is relatively modern, eighteenth-century philosophers, such as Locke and Hume, reflected on the idea. Indeed, Hume seems precociously modern in his rejection of the idea of self as fixed entity:

There are some philosophers, who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we cal1 Our Self; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity. - - . Unluckily al1 these positive assertions are contrary to that very experience which is pleaded for them; nor have we any idea of self, after the manner it is here explained. For from what impression could this idea be derived? This question it is impossible to answer without a manifest contradiction and absurdity; and yet it is a question which must necessarily be answered, if we would have the idea of self pass for clear and intelligible. It must be some one impression that gives rise to every real idea. But self or person is not any one impression, but that to which Our several impressions and ideas are supposed to have reference. If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must continue invariably the same, through the whole course of Our lives: since self is supposed to exist after that manner. But there is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never al1 exist at the same time. It cannot, therefoue, be £rom any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is derived; and consequently there is no such idea."

Hume concludes that al1 we can rnean by self is a "bundle or collection of different perceptions" and that "[tlhe mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively

l7 A Treatise of Human Nature (1738), 2 vols. (1911; London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1956) 1: 228-9. make their appearance," where "there is properly no sirnplicitv in it at one tirne, nor identitv in different, whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that

simplicity arid identity. 11" Clearly, the nineteenth century and before recognized that the concept of identity and self is elusive; and in its treatment of character, nineteenth- century realism is often, like modernism, exploratory rather than definitive. Thus, to daim that the nineteenth century believed in the simplicity, stability, and unity of self misrepresents the period. Secondly, it would be difficult to prove that James's idea of identity and its representation changes given the greât similarity between his representation of an early character like Christopher Newman and a later one, Merton

Densher. 1 will not, therefore, attempt to force James to fit into a particular tradition, realist or modern, even though 1 tend to think that his view of identity is essentially modernist. And despite the fact of his experimentation and exploration in the rendering of

Hume, 239-40. It might be argued that the perceptions require the perceiver, a point that would bring us closer to James, for whom the perceiver is the vesse1 of changing consciousness. There are those, however, like Thomas Reid who responded to Hume's empiricism with the daim that "every man of cornmon sense has a clear and distinct notion of identity," but who gives the dodge, "If you ask a definition of identity, 1 confess 1 can give none; it is too simple a notion to admit of logical definition." Essavs on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), quoted in Reason and Res~onsibilitv,ed. Joel Feinberg, 5th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Inc., 1981) 302. consciousness in his later fiction, 1 do not think that James's idea of identity, at times ambivalent, actually changed over the course of his career or moved toward resolution in the late work. Instead, James consistently attempts to represent the mind or self as livinq, as a process that is part of experience." In an unsigned review in Murray's in November

1891, a perceptive critic writes cf him:

An involved situation, a moral dilemma, the giant and complex grasp of society in its widest sense, upon the individual--these and such as these are the problems to the tracing out and solution of which he brings an extreme fineness and subtlety, subtle and fine as the workings of the human mind hardly conscious of its own movement from point to point.3D

In his representation of the mindis movement from point to point, James represents identity as a process and self as fractured. This idea does not deny the existence of self: self can exist as something that changes and grows, that includes its own potentiality, and that realizes parts of itself at different moments. Its movement and potentiality do not preclude its existence. Quite early (November 1882) ,

l9 1n Metaphors of Mind in Fiction and Psvcholosv (Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1987), Michael S. Kearns makes a helpful distinction between tlmind-as-entityuand "mind-as-a-livingbeing." Kearns argues that for Henry James (and for William) sentience is life and self is a process, a mental experience. I stress that to see self-- and identity--as process. in no way contradicts or negates the existence of self.

'O Gard, 224. Howells recognizes that James is doing something new with

character but he will not label James, saying "We must agree, then, to take what seems a fragment instead of a whole, and to find, when we can, a name for this new kind of

fiction."3' James himself does not name or describe his aims in this new kind of fiction, but in "The Art Of Fictionu he

describes what he rneans by consciousness and experience. There he equates experience with sensibility and describes consciousness as a space or chamber: "Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tiss~es."~'The character is a literary construct, a representation of an identity whose consciousness is a repository for experience. Thus, in so far as the character embodies human flux, what Bell calls the "unpresentedu and Alter calls the uirnponderable,f133the character is realistic. Because self

31 Gard, 129.

" The Art of Fiction," 389-90.

33 Alter illustrates his idea by providing an example of a character, Stendhal's Mme. de Renal in The Scarlet and the Black, who acts realistically but quite unpredictably; that is, the characterfs portrayal is rounded and consistent (what we usually label 'believablet within realist conventions), but what makes the character most real, most recognizably human, is her capacity to behave in a way that is unpredictable but still "in character." 19 is connected to consciousness, and because consciousness is ever-changing, deepening and broadening with experience, any literal representation of self or the human mind as a static, fixed entity is untrue and impossible. The rneasure of reality ultimately rests in the reader and in the extent to which a character figures the reader's experience of self and the world. The character's reality or mimetic validity, although ostensibly created by language, is located in the reader's recognition of real, human experience. What occurs is a I1matching of experience and reading . "'" As the following chapters set out to demonstrate, James's characters irnplicitly or explicitly raise questions about the nature of identity and the formation and definition of self. Although I often use the terrns identity and self interchangeably, they are not necessarily the same.

By self, 1 mean (very loosely) a person's essence or individuality; identity is the condition of being that individual. In some conceptions, self has an a priori existence; it precedes identity and is that on which identity is based. But the terms resist definition and they often conflate. 1 am reluctant to commit myseif or James to narrow definitions partly because 1 am unable to describe self or identity and partly because James is frequently ambivalent. While he provides numerous metaphors for consciousness (a chamber, for one) that show what he means

" Alter, 60. 20 by it, he does not directly describe his idea of identity and self. Sometimes he seems to hold a positivist belief in an entity, an interiority, if you will, that is self, while identity is the representation of that self to the world. If the identity one projects to the world is true, it represents that entity, self; and if the identity one projects is false, it is not expressive of that entity. At other times, he seems to believe in the existence of self but indicates that it cannot be represented, at least by language. In still other instances, and most often, he suggests that he sees identity and self as synonymous, both as protean as consciousness, with which they are also equated. Al1 three--self, identity, and consciousness--are conflated, and none is fixed or stable. As a point of departure for my thinking about what self and identity are for James and how he represents them through his characters, I am strongly influenced by B. Honigts comment on Hannah Arendt's conception of identity.

Honig writes :

Arendt's actors do not act because of what they already are, their actions do not express a prior, stable identity; they presuppose an unstable, multiple self that seeks its, at best, episodic self-realization in action and in an identity that is its reward. . . . This multiple self is characterized by Arendt as the site of a struggle that is quieted, temporarily, each time the self acts and achieves an identity that is a performative production. . . . Arendt insists that autonomy is an impositional construction. It imposes a univocity on a self that is fragmented and multiple; it involves "a mastery which relies on domination of one's self and rule over otherstl;it is a formation to which the self, on Arendt's account, is resistant. This self is not, ever, one."

1 find Honig's description particularly useful for

analysing the question of identity in The Arnerican (1877). My first chapter uses this novel as a point of departure for an inquiry into the problem in general. Among the questions

that 1 attempt to address are the following: what is the relationship between language and identity? How does James, in his conception and representation of character, comprehend the process of self-definition? How do alternatives of 'beingt and 'doing,' central concerns of James, present thernselves? To what extent is James influenced by contemporary ideas of selfhood? And finally, how is identity related to experience and perception? By focusing on these questions, 1 arrive at the central idea of

35 Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992) 215-235. I wish to emphasize that 1 use Arendt's formulation here not because her larger theory that self is realized specifically by political acts is relevant to my concerns but because her general formulation of self provides a suggestive starting point for my discussion. Arendt's view is that existential achievement requires political action and that the real or "authentic" self is the political self. Her mode1 of the self-performing personality is compatible with integrity and moral commitment, but only if the performance is in the political arena (Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchrnan, New York: State U of New York P, 1994, 8-10). James's characters, however, act and achieve (temporary) self-realization through acts that are outside the political sphere. Arendt believes that finally identity is attained only by death because death is the completion of one's involvement. 1 argue in my chapter on The Winss of the Dove that Milly Theale gains her identity through death. my thesis: in James's representation of character, self proves to be unstable and fluid, and identity not a fixed concept but, instead, one that involves continua1 making and remaking so that any given representation of it is always provisional, tme only for that moment and neither fixed nor complete . In the second chapter, 1 shift my focus somewhat to take up a thread that I introduce in the first through Christopher Newman and through James's autobiographical writings on the question of Arnerican identity: namely, the way identity is dependent on and informed by nationality and place. 1 argue that, despite the general tradition in criticism of minimizing the importance of setting in

Washinqton Square (1880), place, nationality and social context are essential in that novel and forge the identity of the characters,

The third chapter, on The Awkward Aqe (1899), discusses the interaction of self and society that the form of this novel dramatizes. Like Washinqton Sauare, place and social context figure prominently, in that a certain kind of English society centred in London establishes what its members, particularly its young women, ought to be, and thus identity is socially controlled. Moreover, London itself figures as a metaphor for consciousness, perception, and knowledge--to wander about London is to explore and, to some extent, realize self. In this novel, James represents identity and the process of self-definition as a kind of path-finding and building.

The Winqs of the Dove (1902) also calls into question the formulations of individual identity and social function. In rny fourth chapter, 1 concentrate on the implications for identity of the dissimulation and deception practised by the two central characters, Kate Croy and Milly Theale. 1 consider Kate a heroine of equal proportion to the more conventionally recognized Milly Theale. Kate is forced to be a divided self and thus her great potential for self- fulf ilment and for love is frustrated. Facing death, Milly must delude herself and others in order to shape her identity. Identity is, therefore, consciously created in the face of social necessity, and the ethical implications of deception, acting and self-creating rnust be considered. Although there are overlaps and points of intersection, my study is loosely divided along four lines. In the first chapter, 1 attempt to set dom some theoretical ideas of self and identitp before moving to the chapter's main focus on self and language. The second chapter deals with self and place; the third with self and society; and the fourth with self and deception.

'' For the theoretical background of my thesis, 1 am influenced not only by Hannah Arendt's conception of identity as a site of struggle but also by Theodor Adorno's conception of self as a potentiality or "not yetu and by Julia Kristevars useful distinction between self in process and in momentary stasis. 1 refer to specific works in the chapter itself. 24 1 selected The American, Washinston Square, The Awkward Ase, and The Winss of the Dove not only because these four novels span almost thirty years of James's career, falling respectively into the traditionally accepted categories of his early, middle, and late phases, but also because each presents a different aspect of the question of identity. Each poses a particular problem for consideration. Numerous other novels could have been included. Like Washinqton Square, The Bostonians and The Euro~eansare both set in

America, but I did not choose either of these for rny analysis of the dependence of identity on place because the former concerns itself mainly with social issues and the latter with the juxtaposition of Europe's gaiety and corruption to New England's stolidity and innocence. In Washinqton Square, the connection between place and identity is central and explicit, and the narrative is perhaps more straightforward than in the other "American" novels.

1 might also have included a study of What Maisie Knew, in which a child is the central consciousness, focusing on the interaction of perception, interpretation and identity; or the The Ambassadors where James develops the relation of consciousness and self to imagination and perception. But perhaps my most obvious omission is a detailed study of The Portrait of a Lady, in which matters of self, zhoice, morality, and identity intera~t.'~Because the question of identity is central and explicit in that novel, 1 allude frequently to The Portrait of a Ladv and use the familiar figure of Isabel Archer to provide examples and to draw parallels. But my objective is to provide evidence of the centrality of concerns of identity in James's novels where that concern is not already clearly recognized and critically explicated. Reading James through his treatment of identity is an approach that can illuminate texts other than those whose explicit subject is identity and its formation. In addition, because considerable critical study has been devoted to novels like The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors, I decided to concentrate instead on those like Washinqton Square and The Awkward Aqe that have been

37 Although not central to rny discussion, the connection between morality and self-realizing or self-performative acts must be addressed, if only briefly. Isabel Archer's intention to return to Rome at the end of The Portrait of a Lady proves her moral commitrnent to her husband and to her step-daughter; Christopher Newman's decision not to expose the de Bellegarde family skeleton is an act that attests to his integrity and goodness; Maggie Verver restores truth (and thus morality) in her marriage. James's characters realize themselves rnorally; that is, they assume societyfs moral code and act accordingly. Morality, however, is not, in rny view, what motivates their acts. An act of equal importance to her returning to Rome is Isabel's going to Ralphts deathbed. She goes because she loves him. Newman protects the de Bellegardes because he loves Claire and Valentin. Nanda acts out of love, not duty. Milly Theale acts--indeed hers are the most existential acts--because she loves Merton Densher. Maggie Verver smashes the bowl and exiles her father and Charlotte because she loves the Prince. Morality and love are not incompatible of course, but moral performance is itself often made possible because of love. given relatively less attention. Finally, though, the criteria for my selection nave been persona1 taste and my judgement that the four novels 1 have chosen best elucidate the four mairi "topicsu that 1 investigate. In bis introduction to Henry James: The Drama of Fulfilment, Kemeth Graham warns that the critic should "avoid making too many generalities about James, or drawing together too many of his works in the kind of web of cross- references and thematic connections that can make everything he wrote sound the same-" Graham rightly points out that James's writing is particularly resistant to this sort of comprehensive or generalizing approach:

James's own inclination as a writer should discourage any attempt at providing a conspectus of his practice or a 'keyf to his thinking. It is difficult to discuss with confidence topics like his over-al1 view of manners, or of renunciation, or of innocence, for example, because his ideas and even his vocabulary always take on the colour of the particular book he is writing ."

Graham, therefore, approaches James's ideas through each book, in terms which each book provides. Although there are obvious patterns that emerge in al1 of James's characters' growth toward self-knowledge, 1 think that Graham's approach is nonetheless a good one. 1 have attempted to follow his

3s Kenneth Graham, Henrv James: The Drarna of Fulfilment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) ix. The American

In "The New York Preface to The Portrait of a Lady,l1 Henry James recalls Turgenieff's cornments on characters as autonomous selves; that is, a character exists before he/she is written or represented.

1 have fondly rernembered a remark that 1 heard fall years ago from the lips of Ivan Turgenieff in regard to his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture. It began for him almost always with the vision of some person or perçons, who hovered before hirn, soliciting hirn, as the passive or active figures, interesting him and appealing to him just as what they were and by what they were. He saw them, in that fashion, as "disponibles,"saw them subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those that would most bring them out; to imagine and select and piece together the situations most useful and favourable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to produce and to feel. (Art 42-3) '

James uses Turgenieff's remarks to explain his own "first dim move toward 'The Portrait,' which was exactly [his]

' In Henry James: Letters, ed. Leon Edel, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1974-1984)' Edel notes that the conversation remembered by James in the New York Edition preface occurred some 30 years earlier. Edel records James's letter of 8 February 1876 to William James in which he writes of a visit to the rooms of Turgenieff whose gout had confined him to his sofa: "1 saw Tourgenieff [sic] the other day. . . . He talked more about his own writings- etc. than before, and he said hefd never invented anything or any one. Everything in his stories cornes £rom some figure he has seen. . . . He said moreover that he never consciouslv puts anvthinq into his people and things. To his sense ali the interest, the beauty, the poetry, the strangeness etc., are there in the people and things. . . II (2: 25-8). 28 grasp of a single charactertn a "vivid individual--vivid,so strangely, in spite of being still at large, not confined by the conditions, not engaged in the tangle, to which we look for much of the impress that constitutes an identity." He describes Isabel Archer as a figure, al1 complete, "placed in his imaginationm like a "rare little 'piecet left in deposit . . . and which is already there to disclose its merit afresh as soon as a key shall have clicked in a cupboard dooru (Art 47-81 . Christopher Newman, the hero of James's third novel,

The American (1877). has a sirnilar completeness and vigorous independence before he is written: "once the man himself was imaged to me (and germination is a process almost always untraceable) he must have walked into the situation as by taking a pass-key from his pocketu (Art, 24). The figure of Newman being imagined, fully formed as an idea before the narrative is written, suggests that, for James, the character pre-dates the language that represents him.

Such a conception of character might imply belief in the idea that man is self-constitutive and that an absolute originates in him which is autonomous and internal, separate from language and al1 that seems external. Whether or not James believes in the idea of the autonomous, core self is worth examining. In this chapter,

1 will begin by discussing conceptions of selfhood as they relate to character, identity and the representation of Christopher Newman. My study focuses on three aspects of Newman's representation. First, since the novelfs title encourages it, I address James's concern with national identity, with Newman as a type of American, and with the implications of stereotyping and of "copies.'' The second

part of rny study involves an explanation of the alternatives of "being and doing" as they relate to identity and the realization of Christopher Newman's character. Here, I make use of Aristotle, Pater, and James himself in his Autobiosra~hv,in "Ivan Turgenieffw and his comments on Emerson in Hawthorne to tie character representation to action and to language. In the third major section of my

study, 1 focus on the representation of self through lanquage--through talk, through silence, through promises, through translations, through reading. Al1 these linguistic threads pertain to character and are the basis for my final assertion: that the representation of Christopher Newman and his experience underline James's view--arguably a modern one-- of the provisional and potentially creative nature of ident ity . James admits that his idea of Newman will take "much working out," but he insists that "one's last view of him would be that of a strong man indifferent to his strength and too wrapped in fine, too wrapped above al1 in other and intenser, reflexions for the assertion of his 'rightsul

(Art, 22) . His ' rights' involve avenging himself on the de 30 Bellegardes for the wrong they have done him. The reader feels that he is capable of revenge and that he would be justified, that such action is his right, as James says. But at the end of the novel, after what he has endured, Newman chooses not to assert his right. The implication here is that Newman does not have these "other and intenser, reflexions" in the beginning, that they must be brought out by what James later refers to as those situations favourable to the "sense" of the character himself (Art, 42). To some extent, therefore, James's sense of Christopher Newman must loosely involve Newman's openness to experience and his potential or capacity for develcpment, or in John Dewey's words, his capacity to alter with "the unforeseeable result of an adventure."' Newman's formation, however, must not be unrealistically inconsistent with the original and informing idea of him; for although identity rnay be understood as transitional or in process, as an uncertain and unforeseeable result of an adventure, the concept of identity cannot absolutely be rejected. The problem for James, then, is how to represent Newman, the apparently already self-made man as self-making. Of the contradiction inherent in the self-making nature of the individual, Theodor Adorno says:

Quoted in my introductory chapter. The individual embodies another contradiction: he is "both more and less than his general definition." Thus individuality is best understood as 'not yet' and therefore "bad wherever established. . . . Without exception men have yet to become themselves. By the concept of self we should properly mean their potential, and this potential stands in polemical opposition to the reality of self."

Al1 representations of self must therefore necessarily be provisional, and they must also include potentiality or the

"'net yet."' It is precisely this sort of cornplex representation that James persistently and self-consciously

I1works out," as he says, through Christopher Newman, particularly through Newman's relation to language. For from the beginning Newman is uneasy about his representation. He wonders "what under the sun he

'representedf"for Mrs. Tristram (43). Unsure of his ability to represent himself eloquently, he asks Valentin de Bellegarde ro represent hirn to Valentin's sister, Claire de

Cintre, not to "plead my cause, exactly," but to "say a good

word for me" (104). And finally he desires her as his wife

Theodor Adorno, Neqative Dialectics, trans. E. P. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 19731, 151, 278. The concept of self as constituted by a potentiality or its own "'net- yetHr is also suggested by Julia Kristeva, who distinguishes between the "sujet unaire" and "subject in process." Her editor and translator, Leon S. Roudiez, comments that by the term "unary subject" Kristeva does not refer to "traditional concepts of consciousness, where the self is seen as a homogeneous, consistent wholeu; rather the unary subject is "momentary stasisu [Introduction, Desire in Lansuase, by Julia Kristeva (New York: Columbia UP, 1980) 191 . While a momentary stasis rnay be opposed to process, both possibilities rnay exist in one subject or agent. because she will represent hirn or "interpret him to the

worldI1 (110).4 Mark Seltzer reads Newman as a representative of American capitalism and as represented by it; The American is at once about the buying and selling of cornmodities and a reflection of a capitalist mode of character representation in which persons are related to objects .' James provides Seltzer with a provocative starting point for his reading by describing Newman's body in terms of "physical capitalN (18), and Newman's habitua1 use of the language of commerce in relation to people seems to support Seltzerfs reading: Newman's wife, for instance, must be "the best article on

the marketn (441, and Claire de Cintre is "the admired obiect in al1 its complexityu (110). Even though he has retired £rom business and allows no correspondence with his former business interests (whatever they are), effectively removing himself in Europe from his Arnerican commercial context, Newman is still an American and

' With much more sinister implication, Isabel Archer is forced to represent her husband Osmond. Ralph Touchett, of course, recognizes "the hand of the master; for he knew that Isabel had no faculty for producing studied impression^.^^ Realizing that her marriage is desperately unhappy, Ralph refers to Isabel's face as a representation: "[Ilf she wore a mask it cornpletely covered her face. There was something fixed and mechanical in the serenity painted on it; this was not an expression, Ralph said--it was a representation, it was even an advertisernent " (4 : 142) . 1 discuss masks and their implications for questions of identity in my chapter on The Winqs of the Dove.

Seltzer, New Essays. a capitalist and thus he is doubly disadvantaged. Understanding him as the type of an American capitalist,

however, unfairly limits him and, 1 would argue, ignores the contradictions in his character that seem to defy such stereotyping. His entire experience has been that of a commercial person, so it is not surprising that his vocabulary testifies to his past, and in so far as he is living in Europe on his capital, he is certainly a

capitalist; but Newman has not come to Europe to buy but to "undertake to know something," to satisfy "a mighty

hankeringw (42). That he is unable to articulate clearly, without seeming crass or opportunist, just what he is after is perhaps indicative more of the limitations inherent in his speech than of those inherent in his total psychological make-up. The suggestion that he objectifies people, therefore, is true only in so far as his language appears to do so, for the events of the novel and his relations with

other characters prove that he does not. To some extent it is true that Newman is represented by and represents American capitalism, but there is a suggestion that he is more than the sum of such associations. The problem with seeing Newman merely as the American capitalist is that it duplicates the de Bellegardes' view of him, a limited, ungenerous view that disregards his ability to project himself into other worlds than the commercial (those of romance, culture, society) . Newman himself protests: And to be turned off because one was a commercial person! As if he had ever talked or dreamt of the commercial since his connection with the Bellegardes began--as if he had made the least circumstance of the commercial--as if he would not have consented to confound the commercial fifty times a day, if it might have increased by a hair's breadth the chance of the Bellegardes' not playing him a trick!. . . But now his sense of outrage was deep, rancorous, and ever present; he felt that he was a good fellow wronged. (245)

Seltzer finds that Newman's fascination with copies or imitations of originals in the opening scene of the novel "is part of the more general account of re~resentationthat

the novel proceeds by in~oking."~He goes on to Say that Newman's interest in copies may be accounted for partly because he is a manufacturer, one who cares about mass- producing copies; but Newman's commercial interests do not fully answer for what is more broadly thernatized in the novel. Seltzer points out that

James's concern with the character of the commercial person, as represented and as representative, goes "al1 the way down" and the problem becomes precisely: what is the relation between a person and what he or she represents and personifies? More specifically, how is character, in this account, related to the more general type or original of which he or she appears as a copy?'

Newman is described as the representative "type" of the American commercial person, filling out the "national mouldM with "almost ideal completenessu (18). In "Henry Jamesfs

Seltzer, 137. ' Seltzer, 136. 3 5 Christopher Newman: 'The American' as Westerner, " Lewis O. Saum claims that Newman is a typical Westerner with "an intensely Western story." James, of course, had not been to the American West and did not go until 30 years after he wrote The American. Saum lists numerous textual references to prove that Newman is deflned as a Westerner; for instance, Newman writes "San Franciscon on his card. (If 1 write "Toronto" on mine, can we assume that 1 define myself as Torontonian?) Saum says that for James the qualities of a Westerner included being hard working, optimistic, generous, good natured, and unintellectual; in short, the Westerner is a plain man and a fine fellow. Saum suggests too that because the pejorative characteristics associated with the Westerner are absent in Newman, possibly Westerners did not acquire their bad reputations until later in the nineteenth century.' 1 think that Saum is mistaken in this conjecture. James certainly read Dickens, whose Martin Chuzzlewit, published in 1844, satirizes America and her confidence men. And James's own George Fenton of Watch and

Ward (1871) predates Newman and is just the sort of Western confidence man that Saum suggests James didn't yet know about. The contrast between the characters of Newman and Fenton attests to James's reluctance to stereotype his important characters.

' "Henry James ' s Christopher Newman: ' The American' as Westernerfr'The Henrv James Review 15 (1994): 1-9. 36 If, however, Newman is a representative Western American commercial person, James avoids strictly limiting or classifying this "type." The opening description of Newman is a catalogue of contradictory traits: his countenance has "vagueness which is not vacuity, that blankness which is not simplicityN; his eye blends innocence and experience, is "frigid and yet friendly, frank and yet cautious, shrewd yet credulous, positive yet sceptical, confident yet shy." If Newman is to represent a type, then that type is made so confusing that in the end "you could find in it alrnost anything you looked forM (18). This does not mean that Newman is not a type of American, maybe even an archetype as the definite article of the novel's title might imply, but defining and delimiting this type remains as difficult as defining Newman himself. Perhaps it is useful here to apply James's own distinction, made in an early essay on Dickens (1865), between the writer who knows only of "menft and the writer who knows of "man" as well as "men." James criticizes Dickens, calling him "the greatest of superficial novelists" because he invents characters who are "statements of type," "nothing but figure. But writers who "seek the true and final manifestation of characteru create men and women whose interest lies "in their complete and unconscious subjection to ordinary and healthy human ernotions." Given James's strong views on the limitations of Dickens' creations--"there is no humanity herev and "he has added nothing to our understanding of human characteru'--1 think it is reasonable to claim that James attempts more in his invention of Newman than a mere statement of type. This does not diminish, however, the relevance of James's interest in national type or in questions about what constituted the American identity, Throughout his life, James was occupied with observing and describing his compatriots, with determining their wArnericanism," but well before he wrote The American, he seems to have recognized the impossibility of classifying

definitive national types. During his term in 1862-63 at Harvard Law School, "even with the crash of greater questions about [him],"he was "positively occupied with . - . the degree and exact shade to which the blest figures in the School array, each quite for himself, might settle and fix the weight, the interest, the function, as it were, of

his Ameri~anism.~In 1914, recalling his "pursuit" he admits that it was "to differentiation exactly that I was then, in my innocence, rnost prompted: not dreaming of the stiff law by which, on the whole American ground, division

of tme, in the light of opposition and contrast, was becoming more and more to break dom for me and fail.u'O

"The Limitations of Dickens," The Portable Henry James, ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel (New York: Viking, 1951) 438- 439. The essay is on Our Mutual Friend, I1to [Jamesfs] perception, the poorest of Mr. Dickens's worksu (433).

'O Henry James, Autobiosraphv, ed. Frederick W. Dupee (New York: Criterion Books, 1956) 449-50. Division of type would necessarily fail for one possessed "of an imagination to which literally everything obligingly signified," and in spite of James's profession of innocence, it is clear that he was already aware of the cornplexity, the "extra~agance,~he says, of the pursuit even while he was involved in pursuing it. His difficulty is not surprising: the subtlety of his distinctions, his great tendency to qualify (until a thing or an idea becomes so weighted that it is sometimes hard to determine its essence) and his extraordinary perception of detail may have prevented James from seeing patterns altogether. Although he remarks that at nineteen he was "unconscious of any difficulty for knowing in the old, the comparatively brothering, conditions what an American at least wastql"he does not describe one. The absence of an explicit characterization of the entity belies exactly the difficulty. Even the shifting subjects of his early observations attest to his precocious recognition of his country's heterogeneity and the impossibility of fixing the type: a "cornmon Americanisrn" is disclosed to hirn in a visit to the army camps of 1861; a year later, Professor F. C. Child, 'his aspect al1 finely circular. with its close rings of the fairest hair, its golden rims of the largest glasses, its finished rotundity of figure and attitude . . . was the 3 9

American spirit " ;" at Harvard, the I1common characterI1 which "defies re-expression" "hung about al1 young appearances," appearances which "could be . . . robustly homogenous, and yet, for livelier appeal to fancy, flower here and there into special cases of elegant deviation."" The American was written some 15 years after these reflections, and it is more likely than not that during those years James's seminal recognition of "deviation,"variation, and the difficulty of fixing definitions of type would develop in complexity to a point where he would admit the irnpossibility, and perhaps undesirability, of stating finally just what an American &. In fact, in a short epistolary work of 1880 entitled A Bundle of Letters, James expresses precisely this intelligence through the observations of Rudolph Straub, a rnisanthropic German doctor who pursues a study of national types with scientific rigour. After extended acquaintance with a number of specimens each claiming to be "the real, the genuine, the typical American," Straub concludes that the American's typicality is elusive: it is, he says, "a type that has lost itself before it has been fixed,--what

- -

l2 Autobioqraphy, 427.

l3 Autobioqraphy, 450. 40 can you look for from this?"I4 1 disagree, therefore, with Martha Banta, who claims that

When Henry James wrote The American fifteen years after his visit to the army camps of the 1860s, he was still

holding to the faith that he, together- with the rest of his count had no problem- -ex .sting as t bey did

withi n "t the cornparatively brothering 1 condi t ion knowing the nature of the Arne rica.n . 15

On the contrary, even for the early James, "knowing the nature" or even believing in the existence of the American does not necessarily mean that he cari be delimited or stereotyped, as the opening passages emphasizing Newman's

"undefined and mysterious boundariesu (19) suggest. The attempts made by other characters to stereotype Newman meet with his denial or, more frequently, his amusement. Mrs. Tristrarn assures him that what he represents has nothing to do with him personally (43). In saying this, she recognizes the separation of self from its own representations and those of others; that is, while he rnay seem to represent a type for her, he personally or in himself is something else. He denies at any rate that he is her great, innocent Western Barbarian, "by a good deal." He good-naturedly tolerates being made a species of interest £or the cadaverous, inarticulate Madame de la Rochfidele and joins in the play of Valentin's witty suggestion that the de

'" Henry James, A Bundle of Letters (Boston: Loring, 1880) 62.

l5 Martha Banta, "Introduction," New Essavs, 22. Bellegardes "ought at least to put 'An ArnericantH rather than the list of customary entertainments on the cards announcing their fete (180).

Thus, while he may appear to others as a copy or a type, Newman does not represent himself this way: as his surname announces, he is a new man. The new man or Arnerican Adam is a figure in nineteenth-century American fiction and is described by R. W. B. Lewis as follows:

[He is] an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritance of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling. . . . Adam was the first, the archetypal, man. His moral position was prior to experience, and in his very newness he was fundamentally innocent. The world and history lay al1 before him.I6

Christopher Newman derives from or, more likely, is part of Lewis's discovery of this figure; the sirnilarities in character and circumstances are obvious, and Newman's confession of sudden awakening on Long Island to the possibilities of the world before him echoes the Adamic myth that his name suggests. As well, the name 'Thristopher1 recalls Saint Christopher, the patron sa3nt of travellers.

William J. Maseychik reads this naming--'IChristopher for the explorer, adventurer, and discoverer, Columbus; and Newman for the innocent Adamic manu--asevidence of the

l6 R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Traqedv and Tradition in the Nineteeth Century (Chicago: U of Chicago Pt 1955) 5. ntwo-dimensional,~"more flat than 'real'" aspect of the character.I7 In fact, Newman's name signals what is profoundly real about him; that is, he attempts to realize his identity by following his "mighty hankeringu (42) in a way he has not tried before. This pursuit of identity, described by John Dewey as "inquiry and discoveryu and involving the forming of the new self, makes Newman most real, most natural, since "to define oneself within closed lirnits, and then to try out the self in expansive acts that inevitably result in an eventual breaking dom of the walled-in self, are equally natural and inevitable act~."'~ Newman tells Claire de Cintre that he wants to "resembleu no one but himself, which, he says, is "hard enough work" (158). It is "workU in Newman's terms because one resembles or represents oneself by "doing what is expected of one," by "doing one's duty" (158). Emphasis here must be placed on doinq, for in "his life-long subrnlssiveness to the sentiment that words were acts and acts were steps in life" (281), Newman apparently believes that a person is known by his deeds, that one is as one does, that being is indistinct £rom doing. By the end of the novel, however, it is clear that Newman adjusts this sentiment because he must somehow accommodate his decision

l7 William J. Maseychik, "Points of Departure from The American," Henrv James: Modern Judsements, ed. Tony Tanner (London: MacMillan, 1968) 116-7. Dewey, 244. 43 -not to act. For in the end it is by not acting that he is defined: he is characterized by his state of being, by a contemplative state in which he is wrapped in those "other and intenser reflexions." James is insistent that this be

Our last view of Newman and that the character's "sacrificeu of the Wery act" is "of the essence" (Art, 22) . The alternatives of being and doing as they relate to character and its realizations are central in James and present thenselves early in his own life. He recalls that as a youth, he was encouraged by his Eather not to attach ontological importance to what he did or to a view of self

that was determined by doing: "What we were to do instead was just to & something, something uncormected with

specific doing, something free and uncommitted. . . . II 19 Although he was very interested in the new naturalism practised by his French literary acquaintances such as

Flaubert, de Maupassant and Zola, a school which tended to refute the concept of "essential character,I1 believing instead that circumstances and acts determine character, it has l~suallybeen held that James's own view was informed by a more traditional ideology:

But if the voices of late-nineteenth-centurypositivism were loud for James, the romantic view of selfhood was a music that still sounded on the air. In the Amexican tradition, there had been earlier versions of the persistent belief . . . that the sou1 was independent of the spectacle of human acts. The Puritans thought

Autobioqraphv, that only God knew the hidden nature of man or woman, and Emerson also believed that the independent spirit was accounted for in no way by circum~tances.'~

Such a view, however, disregards the obvious skepticism of James's comments in Hawthorne (1879) on Emersonion individualism. There it is clear that while he greatly admires Emerson, James nonetheless recognizes the historical and intellectual limitations of Emerson's thought:

Emerson expressed, before al1 things, as was extremely natural at the hour and in the place, the value and importance of the individual, the duty of making the most of one's self, of living by one's own persona1 light, and carrying out one's own disposition. . . . He said "al1 that is clearly due to-day is not to lie," and a great many other things which it would be still easier to present in a ridiculous light. He insisted upon sincerity and independence and spontaneity, upon acting in harmony with one's nature,and not conforming and compromising for the sake of being more confortable. He urged that a man should await his call, his finding the thing to do which he should really believe in doing, and not be urged by the worldfs opinion to do simply the world's work. . . . The doctrine of the supremacy of the individual to himself, of his originality, and, as regards his own character, "unique" quality, must have had a great charm for people living in a society in which introspection--thanks to the want of other entertainment--played almost the part of a social resource.''

The suggestion, of course, is that "ridiculous" subjectivist doctrines such as Emerson's are naturally supplanted on-re a

'O Bell, 37 " Henry James, Hawthorne (1879; London: MacMillan, 1967) 87-8. 45 community (or, for that matter, a country) develops greater cultural and social resources, Emerson's insistence on the duty of "acting in harmony with one's nature" is echoed by Newman's assertion that it is one's duty to resemble oneself. But whereas Emerson argues that the individual "should not be urged by the world's opinion," Newman explains resernbling oneself as "doing what is expected of one." Curiously, Newman seems to overlook the potential contradiction or division (on which Emerson's philosophy is based) between the world's expectations and the individual's. More importantly, though, Newman's view implicitly recognizes the centrality of the world--that is, history, culture, other people--in the making (and iremaking) of self. Such an idea is a significant departure from the privileged, autonomous status granted the individual by Emerson. Whereas Emersonian autonomy separates and fixes self and the world agonistically, a view of self as provisional and shifting allows acts to be understood also as provisional, episodic self-realizations. With the performance of an act, an identity is produced or realized, but self is always multiple, always "a site of struggle that is quieted, [only] temporarily, each tirne the self acts."" Thus, the

-$7 B. Honig on Hannah Arendt, quoted earlier in my introduction. connection between act and identity remains, but it is a dialectical rather than a fixed relationship. In his dictum that character must be revealed by action and is necessarily connected to the "spectacle of hurnan acts," Aristotle may provide a starting point for clarifying James's view of the realization of character in doing and being. Aristotle ties character to dramatic function, to its realization through acts and choices, to its role, therefore, as the "agentv of action:

In tragedy it is action that is imitated, and this action is brought about by agents who necessarily display certain distinctive qualities both of character and of thought, according to which we also define the nature of the actions. . . . [Flor tragedy is a representation, not of men, but of action and life, of happiness and unhappiness--and happiness and unhappiness are bound up with action. The purpose of living is an end which is a kind of activity, not a quality. . . . Tragedies are not performed, therefore, in order to represent character, although character is involved for the sake of the action?

For Aristotle. it is possible to have a tragedy without character but only with agents: "It is chiefly on account of the action that [tragedy] is also a representation of persons." Thus Aristotle subordinates the representation of character to the requirernents of action--something James does not do. In the first place. both James's notebook entries and his prefaces attest to the frequency with which

" "On the Art of Poetry, Classical Literarv Criticism, trans. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) Ch. vil 47 his conception of a character, like Christopher Newman or Isabel Archer, who is initially figured independent of and uncircumscribed by plot, cornes to hirn first and is the subject and the pivot for the development of a narrative; and second, his characters do more than function "for the sake of the action." In 1897, he praised Turgenieff especially for making character over action his principle:

His vision is of the world of character and feeling, the world of the relations Iife throws up at every hour and on every spot; he deals little, on the whole, in the miracles of chance--the hours and spots over the edge of time and space; his air is that-of the great central region- of passion and motive, of the usual, the inevitable, the intimate--the intimate for weal or woe. No therne that he ever chooses but strikes us as full; yet with al1 we have the sense that their animation cornes from within, and is not pinned to their backs like the pricking objects used of old in the horse- races of the Roman carnival, to make the animals run. Without a patch of "plot" to draw blood, the story he mainly tells, the situation he mainly gives, runs as if for dear life. . . . Character, character expressed and exposed, is in al1 these things what we inveterately find. Turgenieff's sense of it was the great light that artistically guided him; the simplest account of him is to Say that the mere play of it constitutes in every case his sufficient drama."

Clearly James agrees that character itself constitutes not merely a sufficienr drama but the best, rnost interesting drama . In addition, there is much evidence to support the view that, unlike Aristotle, James believes the purpose of living is an end which is "a quality." It is perhaps this purpose

'' " Ivan Turenief f , " The Portable Henrv James. ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel (New York: Viking, 1951) 458-460. 48 that Christopher Newman learns by the end of The American: that, in Pater's formulation in NWordsworth,u"the end of life is not action but contemplation--beinq as distinct from doinq--a certain disposition of the mind: is, in some çhape or other, the principle of al1 the higher rn~rality."~

Since this essay was published in 1874, it is quite possi~le and very tempting to think that James had read it before he wrote The American. The novel's ending makes my conjecture reasonable, but the value Pater places on being over doing also duplicates the view, earlier expressed, of Jamesfs father, so whether James was influenced by Pater in particular remains uncertain. Newman's representation of himself through his speech

(as well as through his significant silences) also refutes Aristotle's dictates. Although Aristotle specifies that "there is no revelation of character in speeches in which the speaker shows no preferences or aversions whatever," it is often exactly this sort of speech that reveals and characterizes Newman. To Mrs. Tristram's annoyance, he generally omits his otm preferences and aversions £rom his talk, and "he was not what is called subjective." On the subject of himself, Newman is an "indifferent talkeru able to narrate "things he has done," but "sorne other person was always the hero of the tale . . . and Newman's own emotions

Walter Pater, "Wordsworth, Essays on Literature and Art, ed. Jennifer Uglow (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1973) 115. were but scantily chronicled" (40). His reticence in

general (he is "often silent" (30)), as well as his reluctance to shift from story (the narration of the acts of himself and others) to subjective discourse, indicates Newman's reluctance to represent himself and perhaps suggests his suspicion of the ability of language to represent the self.

1 think 1 am justified in reading Newman this way: to

overlook his uneasiness about his own representation would be to make out that he is a great Western Barbarian and "very simple," as Mrs. Tristram speculates, but Newman

asserts, "I'm very deep. That's a fact." His question that follows, "How do you recognize a man of feeling?' (41), indirectly postulates the idea that one's interiority may not be represented in such a way that it is apparent or recognizable to others, recalls Norbert Elias' observation, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, on the formation of depth and the disguise of Yrue selfn that characterize modernity. Newman's question indicates not only his awareness of a division between self and its representations, but also his mistrust of talk in general.

Since it is located in the context of narrative comment on his lack of subjective or persona1 references in his conversation and of Mrs. Tristram's professed difficulty in determining what sort of person he is £rom his conversation, the question, more specifically, challenges the 50 representational authority of speech. Can one's talk tell what one really is? 1s talk to be trusted anyway? Almost without exception, Newman's experience of the talk of other characters in the novel indicates that it is not trustworthy. In those who talk excessively, moral laxity is implied: Tom Tristram is "a great gossip and tattler, and to produce a laugh would hardly have spared the reptation of his rnother" (39); young Madame de Bellegarde is "a silly, rattling womanm (145); the duchess, Madame dfOutreville, builds a "cold, stout, soft, artificial wall of polite conversation" (291) that forbids the entry of truth; and finally, M. Nioche makes "tao many fine speechesH

(177), vowing in his talk to act, but never acting. Although he assures Newman that he "meant them at the time" and thus they are not lies, M. Nioche's promises, nonetheless, 'Iirnply lies" because he does not intend to carry thern out; his speech exists only in the grammar of the present and is a performance that is dissociated frorn its performative function because what he promises is never realized." The lessons in conversation he gives, in which speech, a dialogue, is invented or staged, solely for itself

In "Other Minds," Philosophical Pa~ers,ed. J. 0. Urmson and G. J. Warnock , 2nd ed. (London: Oxford UP, 1970), J. L. Austin discusses the way in which promises that one fails to perform "imply lies," "as ' 1 promise' implies that 1 fully intend, which may be untruen; in addition, he cautions that even "fully intending is not enough--you must also undertake to show that 'you are in a position to promise,' that is, that it is within your powerH (100-3). without an actual referent, enact and formalize the dissociation of words and reality. M. Nioche. though, is compared only to "an innocuous insect (177), innocuous because the irresponsibiliiy of his speech does not directly harm Newman (although it might have been better for everyone if Nioche had kept his promise to kill his daughter); Urbain de Bellegarde, however. who also makes false promises, does sting Newman. Like M. Nioche, the marquis is "a man of foms and phrases and postures," and even his name, Urbain, in its association with "urbane." suggests a polished, superficial politeness that may be a false veneer. But whereas M. Nioche is merely shabby and pitiable, Bellegarde, "full of possible impertinences," is a man towards whom

Newman was "irresistibly in opposition" (139). The opposition is irresistible not only because he Velt, himself, that he was an antidote to oppressive secretsn

(151) and intuits their existence in the marquis, but also because Newman's use of language is antithetical to that of the marquis:

[Newman] had little of the small change of conversation, and his stock of ready-made formulas and phrases was the scantiest. On the other hazd he had plenty of attention to bestow, and his estimate of the importance of a topic did not depend on the number of clever things he could Say about it. (150)

The marquis is "profoundly disagreeablew to Newman essentially because the manner and the content of his speech thwart truthful expression and, more importantly, deny Newman any sort of self-expression at all, effectively preventing him £rom representing himself. In the marquisf Company, "Newman, for the first time in his life, was not himself" (140).

Of course, the events of the story justify Newman's mistrust of Bellegarde. Literally, his word is not to be trusted. Although he says that he will "recommend" his sister's acceptance (1411, it must be noted that Bellegarde does not actually use a contractual statement like '1 promise.' Newman understands his declaration of intent as a promise, and Valentin insists on registering it as a vow

(and 1 would be reluctant to atternpt to prove that it is not a promise, but it is one calculated to buy time and to keep options open). Nonetheless, the marquis manages to pledge nothing formally, deferring to his mother for "the last word." Old Madame de Bellegarde, however, alters their side of the bargain, saying only that they will not "interfereu (146). In Newmanfs movement f rom the marquis' smoking room to the marquise's drawing room, the promise shifts £rom one intending active recommendation to one of simple non- interference. Decidedly, the de Bellegardes play fast with words. When Newman attempts to pin down the marquise, to force her to acknowledge her resolution in contractual terms, she hedges, saying, "1 donft know what you rnean by 'backing outf1'(147). At no tirne, though, does she Say explicitly that she will not back out. Nor does she clearly state her promise, revised and compromised as it is, in terms that mean something; that is, she never says, "If my

daughter says that she will marry you, 1 promise that 1 will not interfere with you or with her." The progressively non- committal exchange ends with de Bellegarde's duplicitous tautology "Our word is our word," a linguistic structure which refers circularly only to itself and refuses to concretize or attach unequivocal meaning outside its own

structure. The de Bellegardes pledge themselves, really, to nothing more than a word, which they control. The word rernains their exclusive possession; even in its grarnmar--

ll~~rnword is word- - they do not relinquish ownership . During this initial period, Newman thinks he understands their words; that is, he attaches rneaning to them. Later, he is unable to do this: their words are "rnere humming in his ears," signs that they are "simply crazyu

(216). It is at the point that Newman realizes the meaninglessness of their words that they are most powerful. Again there is an ernphasis on the power of the word: the marquise reiterates the tautology "our word is Our word," saying to her son "your word is sufficientu (215) at just the point when any meaning or intention that had been attached to it is proven entirely false. In part, the falsity lies in Che de Bellegardes' re-interpretation of their promise. It is not a new idea that words are slippery and can have many possible interpretations; but the idea of shifting or multiple meanings (which only makes sense if

there is an opposite pole of stability) still insists on a connection between word and meaning(s) or between words and those things or ideas to which words refer. The word of the de Bellegardes, however, is unreferential, and although Newman continues his fruitless attempts to ascribe sense to

it, its resistance is ultimately its power. In short, their word literally means nothing, but because it cannot be questioned, it is closed, authoritative, repressive. And it is sacred. Mme. de Bellegarde's power is in her childrenrs

obedience to her word (217) and the marquis' "words are

gospelu (242). The allusion to religion is important, for the church's authority often lies in its power to silence dissenting voices and in the holy silences which form its liturgy and echo in its great cathedrals. Both the word of the de Bellegarde family and those of the Catholic Church are finally silencing, clearly figured at the end of the novel by Claire de Cintre's entornbment in "dead damning

silencev (245) behind the "high-shouldered blank wallM (305) of the Carmelites. Silence itself, though, is not always repressive, either for Newman or for James. Most notably, in The Ambassadors, the observance of silence prevents the destruction of intirnacy and beauty. Strether and Madame de

Vionnet are mutually, discreetly--and very expressively-- silent on the truth of her relationship to Chad: "These things, al1 the same, he wouldn't breathe to Madame de Vionnet--much as they might make him walk up and down. And what he didn't say--as well as what she didn't for she also had her high decencies--enhanced the effect of his being there with her at the end of ten minutes more intirnately on the basis of saving her than he had yet occasion to be. It ended in fact by being quite beautiful between them, the number of things they had a manifest consciousness of not sayingN (22: 114). If "high decenciesu require that certain matters not be spoken of, if there are unspeakable truths for which silence must substitute," so too are there occasions for James when silence consciously chosen says more than speech. 1 disagree with Millicent Bell's suggestion that, underneath it all, James is suspicious of words (Newman may be, but not James) or that words are inadequate:

Of course, no prose testifies more than James's to the value of language. . . . Yet a doubt lingers behind his confident volubility, a suspicion of statement. James's fiction is a fiction of talking; his narrative

'' The unspeakable truth in The Ambassadors is, of course, that the relationship of Chad and Madame de Vionnet is sexual and involves overnight visits to quiet provincial inns. In The Winqs of the Dove, the unspeakable truth is that, despite possible allowances and excuses and qualifications, at the bottom of it Katets scheme is evil, Mertonts complicity is base, and Mllly's death may have been hastened by her knowledge of their duplicity. Kate and Densher come to the point when "al1 the unspoken between them looked out of their eyes in a dim terror of tneir future conflict. Something even rose between them in one of their short silences--something that was like an appeal from each other not to be too truem (20: 401) . voice and the voices of many of his characters strive for expressiveness--yet there are moments when a blank of some sort suggests the inadequacy of words and stories ?'

When James's characters choose silence rather than explicit expression, it is not exactly because words are inadequate; rather, 1 think it is because the richness of their experience or understanding deserves proportionate volubility. Although language creates the value of experience for Henry James ("art makes lifeH), some experiences require a verbal copiousness that would spi11 over the pages. Silence or "a blank of some sort," is, by contrast suggestive and perhaps ultirnately more expressive of particular characters and experiences than speech is. The suggestiveness of the blanks is the subject of John Auchard's book, Silence in Henrv James, which closely analyzes the implications of various characters' silences and convincingly relates James's use of silence to significant early tnodernist movements in art, particularly syïnbolism and expressionism. Auchard writes:

In James's fiction vitality often derives from the force of silences. ~xce~tionall~powerful in the novels, over tea or over abysses, some silences are merely polite and social, others profoundly moral and phi losophical. James explores how the superficially bare, quiet, and passive can signify fulness and activity, and how the seeminglyPengaged life can add up to an insignificant af fair. Language itself becomes anti-language, and silence--not merely dumb tribute to the incommunicability of things--becornes charged expression and the major force of human a~tion.~'

Christopher Newman's final, most important silence is without doubt an example of a major force of the sort Auchard recognizes in James. It is, therefore, worthwhile to examine Newman's silences and their function in the novel . Newman is "often silent" and his "habitua1 mode 02 utterance" is to speak "slowly, with a certain dryness of accent and with frequent pausesw (30). The pause, a brief silence, is thus a recurrent element in Newman's speech, but the narrator implies that it is especially marked on those rare occasions when he talks about hirnself. To sorne extent his halting, reluctant speech may be in response to his mistrust of language, but his pauses function in other ways as well. In "The Aesthetics of Silence" (19671, Susan Sontag defines various uses of silence:

Still another use for silence: furnishing or aiding speech to attain its maximum integrity or seriousness. Everyone has experienced how, when punctuated by long silences, words weigh more; they become almost palpable. Or how, when one talks less, one begins feeling more fully one's physical presence in a given space .

" Silence in Henry James (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1986) 9.

3g Çusan Sontag, "The Aesthetics of Silence," Styles of Radical Will (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1991) 20. 58 The narrator often comments on Newman's physical presence, on what he does with his body during his pauses; in particular, his habit of lounging in a chair and stretching his legs is frequently noted." At his second meeting with Claire de Cintre (and the first meeting in her own house), he llperformed the rnovement which was so frequent with him, and which was always a sort of symbol of his taking mental possession of a scene--he extended his legsH (82). Newman takes possession, registers his presence, not through speech but through this physical gesture; in fact, as if herself also wordlessly responding to his silent comment, several minutes pass before Mme. de Cintre breaks the silence. Sontag discusses "still another use for silence: providing time for the continuing or exploring of thought. Notably, speech closes off thought. . . . Silence keeps things 'open.' "" With Claire de Cintre, Newman has many "speechless sessions" (150) which are apparently very satisfying. Although the narrator curiously intrudes to "confess [himlself unable to determine" what entertains Newman during these sessions, he nonetheless assures the reader that Newman "was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake to

Lewis O. Saum says of Newman's stretchinq, That conçummate Westerner, ~aryCooper, could have p&formed the same mannerism nicelyu (6). In my chapter on Washinqton Ssuare, 1 discuss other Jarnesian Westerners and leg- stretchers.

" Sontag, 19-20. suppose that silence meant displeasurev (150). When Mme. de Cintre's response to Newman's marriage proposal is to sit dom "in silence," "ber attitude seemed to be a consent that Newman should sav moreu (114-5, emphasis added) . And more generally, the six month contract of silence which is her condition and with which Newman complies so that he may continue to see her keeps what is paramount unuttered; thus, alternatives of finality remain open and nothing is irreversible. Silence can exist also as the transcendence of speech; that is to Say, that which one knows or experiences fully and completely cannot be spoken in fullness and completion because speech necessarily limits knowledge or experience.j3 John Auchard observes that "more than any other twentieth- century writer, James allows his characters to rnaintain the active interna1 experience which is their peculiar birthright, and he does so by allowing them the integrity of their silences. What Newman knows, he finally does not tell: the marquise's treachery remains unspoken and Newman remains in possession of his secret. What he has experienced, he refuses to discuss: it is silence and "barren stillnessu which are his "release £rom ineffectual

33 Thomas Carlyle is echoed here: "Under al1 speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Tirne." "Sir Walter Scott," Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 4 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1864) 4: 138.

" Auchard, 16. longingu (305) ; he will not speak of the de Bellegardes again and wants to hear nothing more about them, he warns

Mrs. Tristram (308)- It is not because his experience is incomplete or because it hurts him to speak of it; it is, rather, that any articulation could only be provisional and thus necessarily incomplete. Silence is, paradoxically, ultimately expressive because it certifies the completion of his thought, the end of his experience. And the beauty of it is that his silence on the çubject keeps the story intact; it needs no further commentary or incident. Significantly, he realizes its completion in the silence of the Cathedra1 of Notre Dame:

Everything was over, and he too at last could rest, . . . He was very tired; this was the best place he could be in. He said no prayers; he had not prayers to Say. . . . The most unpleasant thing that had ever happened to him had reached its forma1 conclusion, as it were; he could close the book and put it away- (306) [emphasis addedl

At the end of the novel, Newman has read his own experience, his own story. Knowledge, experience and understanding are figured throughout by images of reading

(novels, in particular), and to a lesser extent, play going.

Peter Brooks observes that "as the romantic melodrama usurps the realism of the early chapters, James has Newman increasingly figure his situations with metaphors of the popular romance, the arts, and other stylized 61

representational modes, n35 but these metaphors are highly visible £rom the very beginning. When in the opening pages

Tom Tristram asks him if he is going to write a book (33), Newman responds by telling Tristram about the business affair which led to his decision to "get out of the gameH

and to go to Europe:

"And al1 this took place quite independently of my will, and 1 sat watching it as if it were a play at the theatre. 1 could feel it going on inside of me. You may depend upon it that there are things going on inside of us that we understand mighty little about." (34)

Although he can feel it going on inside him, Newman is

outside his own experience as a spectator at a drama, unable to understand it, unable to read it. When he first hears the history of Mme. de Cintre's Eorced marriage, he remarks,

Tt is like something in a play," and watching her visitors, "he felt as if he were at a play, and as if his own speaking

would be an interruption" (98). Of course, her visitors are speaking French, so Newman's incomprehension is quite literal; it is stated earlier, however, that he is able to

apprehend meaning by "a natural instinctu (20) and that he

repeatedly "emerged £rom dialogues in foreign tongues, of which he had, formally, not understood a word, in full possession of the particular fact he had desired to

35 Peter Brooks, "The Turn of The American, New Essavs, 97, n. 30. 62 ascertaintl (66).36 In his article, "Reading Newman Reading: Textuality and Possession in The American," Michael Hobbs argues that Newman's reading is initiallÿ an attempt to poçsess but that, toward the novelts end, he finally learns to read "not as an act of taking possession but as an act of understanding. "" James uses books and reading, literal and figurative, to similar effect in The Portrait of a Ladv. When we first meet Isabel, she is reading (albeit inattentively) in a window seat in Albany; when Lord Warburton arrives to propose to her, he finds her reading; when he comes to visit her in the last scene, she is reading. Isabel herself is compared to Ifan unread book" (3: 13) ; Madame Merle to "a new volume of smooth twaddlew (3: 363); Pansy to "a sheet of blank paper" (3 : 401) . Isabel is unable to read her husband, unable to read Ralph, and unable to read herself; but by the end of the novel, referred to by James as "the book of life," she is, metaphorically, able to read; that is, understand. In The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic

36 I do not think Newman's ability to apprehend meaning without understanding the foreign words is a delusion; surely while travelling we are frequently able to find out what we want to know without actually understanding the language. It al1 depends on what one wants to know, and in his foreign dialogues, Newman is after a particular fact, not the linguistically more complicated explication of an idea.

" The Henrv James Review 13 (1992): 124. Process, Meredith Anne Skura describes the connection between reading and understanding in James as follows:

James's Portrait of a Ladv rnoves almost as freely as Freud's associations do between literal and figurative meanings. . . . In general, James takes books less seriously as props in his story than as metaphors. . . . James makes playful use of the similarities between the actual books in his story and the rnetaphorical ones he invokes in his language; but the whole sense of Isabel's story depends on the difference between these two kinds of books. If real books in The Portrait of a Ladv are trivial, while metaphorical ones set standards, this is because "reading" and what one reads have been transferred from the mundane sphere of actual events and have become instead the narrator's means for describing something finer and less tangible. James's wordplay is part of the delicate and paradoxical exchange between imagination and fact in the novel."

That reading is also a figure for knowledge and understanding in The American is clear from the beginning.

Arid James is as playful here in his choice of real books as he was later to be in The Portrait of a Ladv. Newman does not know much about women because "he had never read a novel! " (38) . At Valentin's deathbed, he is unable to read Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons Dansereuses, a novel that, ironically, might have served to warn him about the nature of the de Bellegardes, French society, and deception. If he were more interested in books, he might be aware too that the marquis' study of French princesses who do not marry is sinisterly portentous. He soon begins to feel, though, that he is reading a novel: Mme. de Cintre's deep impression on

38 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1981) 168-9. 64 him rnakes hirn feel that "he had opened a book and the first lines held his attentionw (82). And he compares the conclusion of his experience to closing the book. Reading is peculiarly appropriate as an image for understanding, or perhaps registering, experience because it suggests an activity that is a process. While it is true that Newman is reading towards understanding, reading is itself part of the experience, and he will not necessarily see how everything fits while he is engaged in the process.

Madame de Bellegarde, for example, is at f irst unreadable because Newman does not share her understanding of convention and propriety: her smile is "circumscribed,~and her countenance suggests "a document signed and sealed"

(120), its contents inscrutable to him. And later, she is again figured as a document, this time a burnt and indecipherable one with "her thin lips curving like scorched paper" (280), suggestive too of the daming document written by her husband and tossed into the £ire by Newman. He does, however, becorne a very imaginative reader, able to guess fairly accurately what will be the subtext of his own story, that involving the past treachery of the de Bellegarde tlrascals":

"And is it by that elegant terni," said Mrs. Tristram, I1that you designate the Marquise de

Bellegarde? l1 "Weil," said Newman, "she is wicked, she is an old sinner. "What is her crime?" asked Mrs. Tristram. "1 shouldn't wonder if she had murdered some one-- al1 frorn a sense of duty, of course." "How can you be so dreadful?" sighed Mrs. Tristram. "1 am not dreadful. 1 am speaking of her favourably." "Pray what will you Say when you want to be severe? " "1 shall keep my severity for some one else--for the marquis. There' s a man 1 can' t swallow, mix the drink as 1 will." I1And what has & done?" "1 can't quite make out; it iç something dreadfully bad, something mean and underhand, and not redeemed by audacity, as-his mother' s misdemeanors may have been. If he has never committed murder, he has at least turned his back and looked the other way while some one else was comrnitting it." (151-2)

Brooks, commenting on "the banter and broad humor" of this fanciful conversation in which James willingly ironizes melodrama, pointedly describes Newman as a reader:

One could indeed Say that Newman's imagination here generates the novel to corne, releasing the metaphors of irnprisonrnent that characterize the description of the elle gardes so that they can function as metonymies: so that they can be plotted out in action. It is now the task of James's narrative to demonstrate to us that Newman has not overread the Bellegarde text, indeed that it is impossible to do so: that the Bellegardes are as bad as they appear, that the metaphoric melodrama and gothic novel they suggest really will come into being. The Bellegarde text is one that sustains the dramatic demands placed on it by the "penetrating imagination.

The Bellegarde text though is easier for Newman to read than his own. Claire de Cintre's seclusion, for instance, is "like a page torn out of a romance, with no context in his own experienceN (276). His feeling, coming as it does before the conclusion, that a page does not fit, does not rnean that he is a baà reader of his experience; rather, it points to the difficulty of the text of which he is forced to become a very astute reader. Newman rnust contextualize his experience to make it part of himself, to make it his text, not necessarily so that he can make sense of the actions of others but so that he can understand finally what has happened to hirn; his reading is, therefore, a self- conscious process, a process that merges the seemingly antithetical states of being and doing. Newman's reading is clearly related to the question of identity, even if that question must remain, finally, unresolved. In the preface, James confirms that this is Newman's (and the reader's) central concern:

It is a case of Newman's own intimate experience all, that being rny subject, that thread of which, from beginning to end, is not once exchanged, however mornentarily, for another thread; and the experience cd others concerning us, and concerning him, only so far as it touches him and as he recognizes,- feels or divines it. (Art, 34)

The metaphor of reading that James uses to figure Newman's hard-won consciousness is not a rhetorical trope only; that is, it is not distanced £rom the events of the story. Quite literally, Newman does learn to read another language. In his detailed study of James's use of the topography and language of France, particularly Paris, Edwin Si11 Fusse11 says "If The American had a subtitle it rnight be Learnins French. The title and the subtitle would be interchangeable, both of them in reference to Christopher

Ne~man."~1 do not think that Fussellts suggested subtitle is appealing, although Newman does learn to read French and to read the French, figuratively (for he reads the de Bellegardes and understands their treachery) and literally,

It 1s his ability to "force meaningn (268) from the murdered marquist scribbled last words that ultimately gives Newman power to act against the de Bellegardes. The noter written in French, is remarkably brief ad it is surprising that Mrs. Bread, who has lived in France for over forty years, is unable to decipher it. Her illiteracy and her lack of curiosity about the contents of such a significant letter are somewhat difficult to believe, but James risks plausibility here so that he can reveal the development of Newman.

Mrs. Bread, who thanks God she is not a Frenchwoman and is more British than ever after forty years in Paris, is the most complex character of all, linguistically considered- She speaks both English and French; she can read English only; she can write neither tongue. One might say that her linguistic complication exceeds her novelistic use, except for one instance when her inability to read ~rench-obligesNewman to promise that

he will translate for her the accusatorv* note of old M. de Bellegarde. . . ..l I

" Edwin Si11 Fussell, The French Side of Henri James (New York: Columbia UP, 1990) 49. It is imperative that Newman be the reader because it is for his experience that the note has profound meaning (thus meaning is located not in the words, but in reading or the reader) . Much is made too of the manner of both his acquiring and his actual reading of the note:

At last the door in the wall opened and Mrs. Bread stood there, with one hand on the latch and the other holding ouc a scrap of white paper, folded small. In a moment he was master of it, and it had passed into his waistcoat pocket. . . . And he bade her good-night and walked rapidly back to the inn. He ordered his vehicle to be prepared for his retuxn to Poitiers and then he shut the door of the common salle and strode toward the solitary lamp on the chimney-piece. He pulled out the paper and quickly unfolded it. It was covered with pencil-rnarks, whkh at first, in the feeble light, seemed indistinct. But Newman's fierce curiosity forced a meaning from the tremulous signs. (267-8)

That the meaning is "forcedu emphasizes not only the general difficulty of reading and the effort required but also the arbitrariness of the relation of words and meanings as well as reading's purely physical properties: papers and pencils and rnaterial marks.

What is foregrounded in this sornewhat perverse passage is a hesitating of the act of reading, and more precisEly, an emphasis on the recalc itrant phys icality of wri t ing and reading- -on the un£01 ding of a scrap of paper , on .he indist inctnesS O f the penciled ma rks on the paper, on a translation, in severa sense of marks into signs that equates construi rnean with its forceful extraction from shifting, ut al trembling, signs .42

" Seltzer, New Essavs, 151. ït is difficult to see how the passage is "somewhat perverse," as Mark Seltzer claims. After all, the note is very old and written in pencil by the frai1 hand of a dying man; of course the marks would be indistinct. That James fastidiously relates the details of Newman's reading is also not without purpose: first it prolongs the rnystery for the reader (as indeed the entire chapter has done) and heightens oür sense of Newman's anticipation, and second the attention to physical detail--the specific room, the location of the larnp, the fact even that the paper requires unfolding--1ends realism to the otherwise unmitigated melodrama and implausibility of the note and its circumstances. Seltzer's view of the passage's perversity hinges on his own reading of these physical details; he argues that the passage is not simply an enactment of the forced relation of sign and meaning, but rather that this and numerous other passages in which images of papers, writing, and reading proliferate (1 have not exhausted the supply in my earlier references to sorne of them) are part of the "paper systemu that the novel represents.

Newman's "business papersH (3011, and the little piece of white paper he tries to bargain with, are finally instances of the same "paper systemu that dominated later-nineteenth century concerns about money and representation both. The novel opens in 1868 and appears in 1876, precisely the period of what has been called the "greenback era," the period in which the concern about how something like paper money could embody value became the dominant national issue. . . . What was called the American Hpaper systemn affected at once al1 forms of money and foms of writing.')

While it may well be true that James's writing and the images he employs are informed by "determinant economic causes," including both his persona1 finances" and the monetary system of his country, economics does not finally explain his representation of Newman. It does not fit with the answer to the question of what, finally, Newman gains

" Seltzer, New Essavs, 152. Seltzer locates James's narrative in the context of American economic history with the creation of and debate about private and bank-issued paper currency first in the period from 1825-1845 and aqain in the 1870s. There was general mistrust of paper mone; because it lacked the solidity and thus the real value of gold or silver and second because its creation was accompanied by and partly enabled manic land-speculation which causeà instability. It is its "uncertain symbolism" that Seltzer draws on for his reading of The American. His primary source is Irwin Unger's book The Greenback Era: A Social and Politial History of American Finance 18654879 (1964; Princeton, 1968) , a study used in great detail by Ian Bell in his article, "Money, History and Writing in Henry James: Assaying Washinston Sware,I1 to which 1 refer in the next chapter . From his letters it is clear that James was financially presçed during the period in which he wrote The American, and he was undoubtedly thinking about money a great deal, particularly paper money and cheques from America. On January 24, 1876, he replies to his motherfs charge that his "drafts of money had been excessive and inconvenient," saying "the mere daily process of life in Paris is a conspiracy against one's purse" and that he continues to await returns £rom Roderick Hudson. In a letter of February 3, 1876, to William Dean Howells, James talks of writing a novel (The ~rnerican)to be sent to the Galaxv for irnmediate publication because a "prompter monthly income . . . is a momentous considerati~n,~and "it was the money question solely that had to determine meu (Edel, Letters, 18, 22). As it turned out, however, The American was published by Howells in the Atlantic Monthly, installments beginning in June, 1876. 71 £rom his reading, and it does not account for the reader's last view of him or the readerrs conviction that Newman has indeed gained sornething of a value quite separate £rom economics froin his experience. It is the very act of reading itself which will account. The note is not recorded in its original language, but instead the utremulous signsu are cited in English. Given the extensive use of French words and phrases without translation or comment throughout the novel, it is surprising that such an extraordinary document would not be transcribed exactly as it was written. Possibly it is given in translation to signify how far Newman has come in "learning French," with al1 the literal and figurative implications of the phrase.

One last reason for Jamesr emphasis on French in The American is that partial acquisition of it through persistent if not exactly heroic effort witnesses a growing sophistication in our representative national ~rotaaonist. . . . It is Newman alone who in the Lbeginning d knows almost no French. It is Newman alone who in the course of the novel takes lessons in a foreign language, . . . It is Newman alone who makes modest headway. . . . Linguistically and Otherwise, Newman is a progressive charac terizat .on,a Ibeit in very modest terms. . . 45

Newman's ability to read the little scrap of paper is a measure of his progress; but it is his destroying it that defines the full extent of his understanding. For in burning the paper he shows that he is able to understand--to 72 read--to make sense of the unpresented, the immaterial, the absent. Just as silence rnay ultimately be al1 that is truly expressive, Christopher Newman's act of destruction may be the only creative possibility for hirn because only absence and silence--the blank spaces--allow him the imaginative freedom he needs to construct rneaning for himself from his experience. If his achievement, then, is to read himself and to read himself creatively, it is perhaps true that his anxiety about his own representation will not be resolved. But it is his consciousness of the provisional nature of any representation and the continua1 creation and re-creation of something £rom nothing that most defines Christopher Newman as The American because, as James says, "An American reads between the lines." 46

'" Hawthorne, 54. Washinqton Sauare

Published three years after The American and only one year before The Portrait of a Lady, Washinston Sauare (1880)

is ostensibly unlike these two. It does not take up the international theme. There are no American innocents confronting their destinies in the corru~tionof Europe. Washinqton Sware relies instead on what appears at first glance to be a rather homely corner of the sparsely

furnished American scene of the 1840s. Between 1878 and 1881, James seems to have shifted his attention from those American innocents in Europe like Christopher Newman in

1877, Daisy Miller in 1878 and Francie Dosson in Confidence

(1879), to his own Boston and New York background and to personalities an8 ideas dominant in America. New England Puritanism is to a large extent the interest of The

Europeans (1878); his New England predecessor is the subject of his critical biography, Hawthorne (1879); and the social context of New York is essential in Washinston Square.

1 think, however, that to separate James's early works along the line of international versus national can be deceptively simple and even misleading, for Washinston

Square should not be categorized with The Euro~eans. Washinqton Square has more in common with The American and with The Portrait of a Lady. Like them it is concerned with commerce, in particular, with money's infiltration of a domestic scene and with the irremediable damage it causes to the purchaser and to the purchased. Like The American, ltWashinstonSauare is al1 about language," and "each of the characters in Washinaton Square is made known to us by his or her habitua1 mode of expression";'moreover, it is about resistance to the betrayals of expression, about distrust of language, and about the integrity of silence. Finally, it is about Americanism and the national traits that a character may embody. It is a major work, but despite F. R.

Leavis' daim that it is one of James's six greatest novels,' Washinqton Scniare has received relatively little critical attention, seldom figuring in full studies of James's oeuvre? Darshan Singh Maini observes that "the treatment given to Washinston Scniare during its critical passage for nearly a century is not very edifying on the whole. Most critics have either not bothered about the book or have given it an indulgent nod or two en route.ll'

Millicent Bell, Meaninq in Henr, James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991) 70. ' The Great Tradition (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1954) 161-2. There are, of course, some important exceptions, among them Richard Poirier's The Comic Sense of -~enrvJames (1967) and Millicent Bell's Meaninq in Henrv James (1991). But for the most part the novel has been neglected.

4 Darshan Singh Maini, "Washinqton Sauare: A Centennial Essay," Henrv James Review 1 (1979): 83. This article surnmarizes the major criticism of the novel from the early reviews to about 1976. 75

Perhaps Washinston Sauare is neglected because it seems rather modest or %lenderW5 when compared with either of

those more obviously irnpressive novels written immediately before and after it; perhaps because its unprepossessing, very un-Isabel, un-Daisy like heroine lacks immediate ap~eal;~perhaps because our reception of the novel has been to some extent determined by James's own disparaging remarks. In a letter to William Dean Howells, dated January

31, 1880, he referred to it as "a poorish story in three numbers--a tale purely American, the writing of which made me feel acutely the want of the 'paraphernalia,"'' and twenty-£ive years later, while working on the New York

Edition, he wrote to Robert Herrick !, "1 have tried to read over Washinqton Square and 1 can't, and 1 fear it must go!u8 His decision to exclude it from the New York Edition seems

James referred to it as such in a letter to Grace Norton of 20 September 1880 in Henry James Letters, ed. Leon Edel, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 4 vols., 1974- 1984) 2: 308. Hereafter, Henry James Letters is noted as Letters .

An anonymous contemporary reviewer in Athenaeum (February 1881) remarks upon the fortunate dissimilarity between Catherine Sloper (whom the reviewer calls TarolineM) and James's other young American women (clearly the reference is to Daisy):- "Mr. James has contrived . . . to give hi s readers . . a view O f the American young lady in a total ly new ch.aracter. . . In depicting this character Mr. James must certainly be considered to atone for the less favourable idea of his younger countqwomen which many of his previous portraitures have given." Casebook, 31. ' Letters, 2: 268. 7 August 1905, Letters, 4: 370-1. 76

to verify the author's aversion to it. But William James,

who seldom said good things about his brother's work, apparently liked Washinston Sauare. His praise of it is significant because it elicited James's own admission that

"the only good thing in the story is the girl. lt9 Càtherine Sloper is good: the dimensions of her

character may come to us very slowly, but in the end her portrayal is as solid as her character. She is concentrated

literalness and feeling, an exernplar of moral value and honesty, but she is not dull. It is through her portrayal that James defines and assesses a quality of the national character and the moral life of America. As an American heroine, however, Catherine is original: although she shares certain characteristics with them, she is not a New England village girl like Gertrude Wentworth, who has imagination and is really loved by her suitor, or Mary Garland, "mere colourless patience," who resists change and for whom it seems "very frightful to develop."'O Nor, despite her prornised wealth (which is intangible and allows her no independence anyway), is Catherine one of James's brilliant and charming American princesses. In fact, she does not fit

"To William James," 27 November 1980, Letters, 2: 316.

'O Henry James, Roderick Hudson, New York Edition (London: MacMillan, 1909) 70, 334. comfortably into any of the generally recognized types of female figures reflective of various cultural myths." Catherine's peculiar identity as an American is the

essence of the novel and is, 1 believe, implicitly thematized throughout the narrative. Specifics of place

help to render her character--Catherine is an American from

Washington Square in New York in 1840 and these

circumstances are central to her identity. 1 will argue

that Washinston Square is, as James claims, "a tale purely

Arnericanu and that its Americanness partly derives from the physical and social landscape of New York that it portrays and from its two major male characters, but that, ultimately, its Americanness lies in the girl. Despite James's repeated references to the novel's Americanness and his preoccupation with what that meant,

there is a long and persistent tradition in comrnentary on Washinston Sware of minimizing the significance of the novelts New York setting and atmosphere. Surely the title

calls attention to the centrality of place, and James is clear about the implications of entitling the story as he

In The Faces of Eve (New York: Oxford UP, 1976) , Judith Fryer develops labels--Temptress,American Princess, Great ~other,"real- witch-bitch, "- and New Woman- - to describe the representations of American heroines and other female figures in James. It is not difficult to determine in which category one might place Isabel Archer, Millie Theale, Maggie Verver, Mme. Bellegarde, Mine. Merle, Olive Chancellor or Rose Armiger, but others--Mary Garland, Gertrude Wentworth and Catherine Sloper--are not as easily placed. Fryer does not discuss Catherine Sloper. did. In "The Preface to Roderick Hudson," he states that "to name a place, in fiction, is to pretend to represent it"

(Art 8). Located at the bottom of Fifth Avenue, Washington Square is a specific enclave whose boundaries regulate character and action in James's novel as much as they do in those of his compatriot, Edith Wharton. In The Custom of

the Countrv, published in 1913 but set in the "old New York" so familiar to Wharton, Ralph Marvell reflects on the "rightness" of his family while mounting his grandfather's

doorstep to his "symmetrical old red house-front, with its frugal marble ornament" in Washington Square:

'They' wzre his mother and old Mr. Urban Dagonet, both, £rom Ralphrs earliest memories, so closely identified with the old house in Washington Square that they might have passed for its inner consciousness as it rnight have stood for their outward form; and the question as to which the house now seemed to affirm their intrinsic rightness was that of the social disintegration expressed by widely different architectural physiognomies at the other end of Fifth Avenue. As Ralph pushed the bolts behind him, and passed into the hall, with its dark mahogany doors and the quiet 'Dutch interior' effect of its black and white marble paving, he said to himself that what Popple called society was really just like the houses it lived in . . . . ~hatwas what 'they' had always said; what, at least, the Dagonet attitude-view of life, the very lines of the furniture in the old Dagonet house expressed."

For Wharton and for James, character is often dependent on, perhaps even synonymous with place; and certain places,

" Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Countrv (Penguin. 1987) 44. Washington Square among them, have particular cultural and class associations that define their inhabitants. Washington Square was associated with old money, respectability, moderation, and solidity:

[Ralph Marvell] was fond of describing Washington Square as the 'Reservation'. . . . Srnall, cautious, middle-class had been the ideals of aboriginal New York; but it suddenly struck the young man that they were singularly coherent and respectable. - . . 13

Although the Square was still relatively new in the 1840s when Washinston Sauare is set, James had the advantage of hindsight; he wrote the novel in 1880 when the Square had corne to mean the things that it does for Ralph Marvell and thus any reading of it is necessarily anachronistic and richly so for James's purpose. In addition, Washington

Square in the 1840s is James's own birthplace (1843) and childhood home. His rnotherls family lived there, and the elder Henry James installed his own family in 21 Washington

Place, one block away. Thus, to set the novel in 1840 allows James to write a city that created him--it is his place of departure. The Square is not simply a referential, cosmetic detail in the story, as it has often been perceived by critics. Their comments deserve a brief examination, if only to substantiate =y- claim that the significance of the novel's American setting and its bearing on the heroine have been undervalued.

l3 Wharton, 45. Arnong the first to comment is Cornelia Fulsifer Kelley, who devotes only five pages to the novel, mainly occupied with comparing it to Balzac's Eusenie Grandet, a possible mode1 for James. Although she says that Washinqton S~are "stands out as a masterpiece," she calls the title "pretentious," saying that while The Square is "adequately done as a background, it is most inadequately done in itselfu because the story of Catherine Sloper is not I1outstandingly typicalI1 of the place.'" What would be outstandingly typical, 1 wonder, for a place that, according to Luc Sante, "was converted from a potter's field to the centerpiece of a fashionable enclave circa 1835,"" and thus by 1840, when the novel is set, had only recently acquired any distinction at all? Santefs study of "Lures and Snares of Old New York" includes detailed work on the physical development and social conditions of Manhattan during the first half of the rïineteenth century. F. W. Dupee is also certain that the novel's American setting ïs merely superficial; he, however, expresses surprise that the story so typical:

It is not essential to Washinqton Square that its scene is American. The Old New York setting is lovely but insubstantial, an atmosphere and no more; and so farniliar seems the fable of the girl jilted by her

'' The Earlv Development of Henrv James (1930; Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1965) 280, 283. '' LUC Sante, Low Life (New York: Farrzr, Straus, Giroux, 1991) 4. fortune-hunting suitor that we are surprised to learn from James's notebooks that he was following quite closely an actual incident related to him by Fanny Kemble . l6

In the same vein, Richard Poirier argues that "the public status of characters in Washinqton Square depends not at al1 on their social place or nationality, and is wholly a matter of their similarity to stock characters in stage melodrama and the fairy tale. "17 While he rightly grants the characters a "public solidity," 1 think Poirier is mistaken in his denial of the full significance of and dependency on social place and nationality. So is Peter Buitenhuis, whose inability to account for Washinqton Square as a characteristically Arnerican work and whose scant treatment of it in his otherwise informative study of James's handling of American settings are puzzling. Buitenhuis writes:

" Henrv James (London: William Sloane, 1951) 63. The incident Dupee refers to is recorded in James's entry of 21 February 1879 in The Com~leteNotebooks, edited by Leon Ede1 and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford UP, 1987) 11-12. The actress, Mrs. Kernble, told James the history of ber handsome, penniless brotherts engagement to and desertion of "a dull, plain, common-place girlu with a private fortune, one on whom an impression once made was made forever. There are numerouç parallels between the actual story and James's narrative, but what is most provocative is not James's transposition of the stuff of life to art but his transferral of the scene of the romance £rom England to America. Nothing in the "germN requires American soil, so it is fair to assume that James has a greater purpose than the mere provision of backdrop in his decision to locate the story in America.

l7 The Comic Sense of Henry James (London: Chatto and Windas, 1960) 167. The conflict does not depend much on the national identity of the characters. . . . James did not gain much from locating it in New York . . . since the action is practically confined to drawing rooms, it can be divorced .-almost completely £rom local physical conditions . '"

The apparently widespread critical agreement that the New York setting is unimportant to the novel muçt be challenged because it ignores Jamesfs care and his purpose in the rendering of this setting.

Leaving aside for the moment his purpose, 1 wish to concentrate on the care James takes in detailing "local physical conditions." Ezra Pound, for one, comments on how close James's rendering of his milieu is to "externa1 reality."19 As Elizabeth Hardwick observes (and as The American Scene arnply proves), "details of metropolitan dynamics interested 'old New Yorkersf like James and Edith

Wharton," who, "with a rather vagrant historicismIu follow "the displâcsrrzzts of fashion as they try to place their

l8 The Grasoina Imaqination: The American Writinqs of Henry James (Toronto: U of Toronto PI 1970) 107-8.

l9 "Henry James," Literarv Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1954) 296. In this quirky but interesting essay, which originally appeared in August 1918, Pound says (much the same as James himself says of Hawthorne) that James "has written history of a persona1 sort, social history well-documented and incompleteu and "no one but an American can ever know, really know, how good he is at the bottom, how good his 'Arnericaf isw (302). About Washinaton Square in particular, Pound's point-form entry reads, "one of his best, 'putting America on the map,' giving us a real past, a real background" (312). characters on the city map. James's historicism is not llvagrant"however; in fact , numerous examples prove his historical precision. At the beginning of Washinston

Sware, James writes that "in 1820 . . . the uppermost boundary of the small but promising capital was indicated by the grassy waysides of Canal streetll;" in his historical study of old New York's development, Luc Sante confirms, "Canal Street was the cityfs northern limit through the

1820s. uiî Doctor Sloper's house, thought "to embody the last results of architectural sciencew (12), is marble- fronted and accurately reflects the style of the period: City Hall, built just before the development of Washington Square was also fronted with marble. Similarly, it is suggested to Catherine, after her fatherfs death, that she move to "one of the smaller dwellings, with brown stone fronts, which had at this time begun to adorn the transverse thoroughfares in the upper part of town" (161). Brownstone became the fashion for builders in the 1860s in New Yorkf3 so again James's sense of time is precise. Mrs . Pennimants avoidance of the Battery because she fears "intrusion from

" "On Washinston Square," New York Review of Books 18 (22 November 1990) : 25- " Washinqton Saare, ed. Gerald Willen (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1970) 2. Subsequent re£erences to the text will be noted parenthetically. -11 Sante, 2. Alfred Kazin, A Writerfs American Landscape in Literature (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988) 161. the Irish emigrants" (72) is another historically sound reference: although in 1820 the Battery was home to Miss

Catherine Harrington of "solid dowry" and "high fashion," the area had been inhabited by poor Irish since the Revolution, and by rnid-century numerous slums ran continuously up the west side from the Battery? Mrs.

Penniman's decision, instead, to meet Morris Townsend at "an oyster saloon in the Seventh Avenue, kept by a negro" (73) is also not without its perils. Again James's attention to detail is significant, for the location he pinpoints was just beginning to be notorious for its gambling establishments, saloons, and opium bars. Leon Edel remarks, "To a New Yorker, acquainted with the city, the location of Tomsend's office in Duane Street, and the oyster saloon on Seventh Avenue are touches as precise as they are atm~spheric."~ Finally, Doctor Sloperts approving observation of Mrs. Montgomery's house on Second Avenue provides another opportunity for James to detail bits of social and domestic history:

She lived in a neat little house of red brick, which had been freshly painted, with the edges of the bricks very sharply marked out in white. . . . There were green shutters upon the windows, without slats, but pierced with little holes, arranged in groups; and

l4 Sante, 16.

Leon Edel, The Life of Henrv James, 5 vols. (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953-1972) 3 : 403. before the house was a diminutive yard . . surrounded by a low wooden paling, painted in the same green as the shutters. . . . She received him in a little parlour. which was precisely the parlour he had expected: a small unspeckled bower, ornamented with a desultory foliage of tissue paper, and with clusters of glass drops . . . [and] a cast-iron stove, emitting a dry blue flame, and smelling strongly of varnish. (61)

Such details succinctly fix class and character. Second Avenue was the avenue of the respectable poor.'6 "brave little people1' like Mrs. Montgomery; James locates her house precisely, and his description of its appearance suggests respectability, careful housekeeping, and necessary thrift. Again identity is determined by place: Mrs. Montgomery is al1 that her neat little house suggests. The fullness of the detail is striking; usually James rnakes a specific but brief reference to places (we learn little, for instance, of the appearance of the oyster saloon). To support my claims for James's historical precision, I can do no better than to quote from his own discussion of exactness and of the process of artistic selection:

1 am far from intending . . . to minimize the importance of exactness--of truth of detail. One can speak best from one's own taste, and 1 may therefore venture to Say that the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel. . . . [Ilt is here that he [the novelist] competes with his brother the painter in his attempt to render the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, to catch the colour, the relief, the

" Sante, 15. expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle ."

Thus the meticulous description of Mrs. Montgomery's house and person constitutes the "solidity of specification" that

creates the impression of reality. That James chooses to describe Mrs. Montgomery's house and not the oyster bar is

his prerogative ("Art is essentially selection," he says2') ; as well this description serves functions other than its contribution to the novel's realism: it illustrates Doctor Sloper's great powers of observation, it sheds light on Morris and his circumstances, and it provides a balanced contrast to Doctor Sloper's comfortable, genteel hearth in Washington Square. James's praise for Balzac, who, he says, "tackled no group of appearances, no presented face of the social organisrn . . . but to make something of it" (Art 9-10), provides an idea of the principle which informs his representation of Washington Square. To "don the square means not simply to record it accurately (although he does this too) , but "to make something of it. His active construction of a coherent social world--a representation that involves creating and containing it--attests to his full grasp of the lesson of Balzac. James's "relentless and detailed study of very ordinary goings-on in a particular

" 'The Art of Fiction," 390.

"The Art of Fiction," 400. societyu leads John Lucas, in his balanced and perceptive reading of the significance of social context, to see Washinqton Swzlre "as a study of circumstances that will sufficiently explain why its people are what they are, behave as they do." Thus specifics of place help to render national character. And, as if anticipating that James's rendering of social circumstances and his attention to contextual detail might seem to some critics to be superficial or in some way forced on the text, Lucas adds:

There is nothing artificial in James's method. On the contrary, it has about it the feel of inevitable rightness that springs from the certainty with which he can place everyone in the environment that so takes his attention and which, if it doesn't amount to the manners, customs, usages, habits and forms that he found in the European novel, is certainly the next best thing .'9

Echoed here is James's insistence in the letter to Howells, mentioned earlier, that "it is on manners, customs, usages, habits, forms, upon al1 these thingç matured and established, that a novelist li~es."~' Lucas, however, places an emphasis not, as is usually the case, on the relative scarcity of materials £rom which James could select to paint his scene, but, instead, on the rightness of his touches to evoke such a full picture of the old New York that its social and physical aspect is truly felt.

29 Vashinaton Square," The Air of Reality, ed. John Goode (London: Methuen and Co., 1972) 40.

30 Letters, 2: 267. James's cornplaint in the letter to Howells is an abbreviated version of his well-kriown enurneration in

Hawthorne of the items of high civilization "absent from the texture of American life." Although Howells and others disagreed with him, James argued that "it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motionu3'and that America was wanting in that machinery. The view was not original : in Notions of the Arnericans (1828), for instance, James Fenimore Cooper writes:

The second obstacle against which American literature has to contend, is in the povertv of rnaterials. There is scarcely an ore which contributes to the wealth of the author; that is found, here, in veins as rich as in Europe. There are no annals for the historian: no follies (beyond the most vulgar and commonplace) for the satirist: no rnanners for the dramatist. . . . The weakest hand can extract a spark from the flint, but it would baffle the strength of a giant to attempt kindling a flame with a pudding-stone."

James's catalogue of those "rnatured and establishedu things absent in America is, however, often taken out of the passages's context. In the first place, James specifically refers to the America of the 1830s and takes his lead from Hawthorne himself, who complains of "the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy

Hawthorne, ed. Tony Tanner (London: MacMillan, 1967) 23. " James Fenimore Cooper, Notions of the Americans, ed. R. E. Spiller, 2 vols. (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1963) II. wrong. . . . "" James, with his list of specifics, is actually making concrete the rather vague language of Hawthorne's cornplaint, and he follows the list with an insistence that even though these things are left out, "an

American knows that a good deal remains." In fact, much of Hawthorne, especially its early chapters, stresses the intensity of the New England resources £rom which the artist can draw, as well as the necessity of having an American point of view to penetrate or realize what is undoubtedly present, if latent, in its "exquisite pro~incialism.~

Half of the interest that he [Hawthorne] possesses for an American reader with any turn for analysis must reside in his latent New England savour; and 1 think it no more than just to Say that whatever entertainment he may yield to those who know him at a distance, it is an almost indispensable condition of properly appreciating him to have received a persona1 impression of the manners, the morals, indeed of the very climate, of the great region of which the remarkable city of Boston is the metropolis."

33 Nathaniel Hawthorne, Preface," Transformations: or The Romance of Monte Beni (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1861) ix. In his preface to Transformations (a title later changed to The Marble Faun), Hawthorne accounts for his decision to set that novel in Italy: "Italy, as the site of his Romance, was chiefly valuable to him as affording a sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities would not be so terribly insisted upon, as they are and must needs be in Americatf(ix) . It is pertinent that James did not think the novel as successful as those Hawthorne set in his native country. '' Hawthorne, 23-24. 90

And much later, in Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), James favourably alludes to the particular national quality of

Hawthorne' s writ ing :

And the tone had been, in its beauty--for me at least-- ever so appreciably American; which-proved to what a use American rnatter could be put by an American hand: a consummation involving, it appeared, the happiest moral. For the moral was that an American could be an artist, one of the finest, without "going outside" about it. . . .35

The list of absent things is also frequently quoted as proof that throughout his life James believed there was no nutritive substance in America for the writer--hence a justification for his decision to live in Europe. But as the "happiest moral1' cited above indicates, James's case is not that simple. Early in his life, he contradicts his apparent privileging of European civilization when he warns,

"itfs a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe."36 What ought to be stressed is James's recognition of the cornplexity and unusual difficulty both of being a writer in America and of being an American ri ter.'^ Reflections like those about

35 Autobioqraphy, ed. F. W. Dupee (New York: Criterion, 1956) 480.

36 "Letter to Charles Eliot Norton, " 4 February 1872, Letters, 1: 274.

37 When James returned to America from Europe in 1881, after the publication of Washinqton Sauare, he recorded (in indelible pencil) in his first American Journal, "The Hawthorne, comments in letters, and the existence of numerous novels and stories with American characters or settings al1 attest to the cornplexity, the difficulty, and the continued attraction the American scene held for James. To write an American comedy of manners in the fashion of, say, Jane Austen, or socially realistic fiction in the

style of Balzac posed a particular problem not because of Arnerica's want of resources. Surely there was enough to write about; while James may feel that America has not yet given birth to great Arnerican writers, he does not ever deny that the raw materials are present:

American civilisation has hitherto had other things to do than to produce flowers, and before giving birth to writers it has wisely occupied itself with providing something for them to write about."

Arnerica's want of "attendant forms" (a tem used frequently in The American Scene to denote conventions, manners, and al1 the items of high civilization) creates the difficulty. That is, nineteenth-century America seemed not to possess an essential and homogeneous set of shared cultural assurnptions painter of manners who neglects America is not thereby incomplete as yet; but a hundred years hence--fifty years hence perhaps--he will doubtless be accounted so. My

impressions-of America, however, 1 shall, after all,- not write here. 1 don't need to write them . . . 1 know too 11 what they are. n many ways they are extremely easant ; but, Heaven forgive me! 1 fe el as if rny time were rri bly wasted here! (25 Novembe r 188 1, The Complete Notebooks, 214.)

38 Hawthorne, 23 . like those represented by Oxford and Eton, Epsom and Ascot. As a heterogeneous country inhabited mainly by emigrants from numerous older cultures, its lack of established, coherent national identity and its insecure sense of itself made America daunting for a writer. Although "hard-core nativists continued . . . to insist upon the reality of a homogeneity derived from the particular attributes [Protestant Anglo-Saxon] expected of the American character," most people, including James, who had a very "un-American awareness of and interest in the other,~~~had to "take notice of al1 the others who made up the American populace: native Americans, Blacks irnported as slaves directly £rom Africa or by way of the Caribbean, Jews, Italians, Irish Catholics, Slav~.~~"~On what common ground did Americans stand? What shared assumptions could an

American audience be relied on to make? Was there, for that

39 ~oyceWarren, The Arnerican Narcissus (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 4) 251 ~he~rnerican Scene provides conclusive proof James s interest, and his autobiography often suggests h identi ication with "the ot her . " Martha Banta, MIntroduction,"New Essavs on "The American", ed. Martha Banta (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987) 20. Banta discusses various contemporary views of the increased ethnicity of America during the period after the American Civil War. Allusions to the oyster saloon kept by a negro and Mrs. Penniman's avoidance of the Irish slums suggest James's recognition of New York's ethnicity. Although it is written later than the period of Washinqton Smare, The American Scene proves that he was very observant of and interested in the diverse groups that constituted America at the turn of this century. Ross Posnock's The Trial of Curiosity (New York: Oxford UP, 1991) provides the best analysis 1 have found of James's curiosity and comprehension in this respect. 93 matter, a peculiarly American audience at all? James asks precisely this question that "settles into a form which makes the intelligible answer further and further receden in The American Scene:

What rneaning, in the presence of such impressions, can continue to attach to such a term as the 'American' character?--what type, as the result of such a prodigious amalgam, such a hotch-potch of racial ingredients is to be conceived as shaping itself?" The challenge to speculation, fed thus by a thousand sources, is so intense as to be, as 1 Say irritating; but practically, beyond doubt, 1 should also Say, you take refuge £rom it--since your case would otherwise be hard. . . .J t

James does not answer the question; in fact, in Washinqton

Smare he takes refuge £rom it by deliberately turning a deaf ear. In doing so, he surmounts the difficulty, the impossibility really, that the question may present to his writing about America. In Washinqton Square, James solves the problem by adopting an authorial voice that affects belief in a distinctly American identity and in an audience with shared assumptions and traditions. The opening paragraph demonstrates his pretence; here he confidently speaks to

( and about) a unified community:

During a portion of the first half of the present century, and more particularly during the latter part of it, there flourished and practised a physician who enjoyed perhaps an exceptional share of the

'' The American Scene (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1969) 121. consideration which, in the United States, has always been bestowed upon distinguished members of the medical profession. ~hisprofessFon in Arnerica has constantly been held in honour, and more successfully than elsewhere has put forward a claim to the ëpithet of 'liberal.' In a country in which, to play a social part, you must either earn your incorne or make believe that ycu earn it, the healing art has appeared in a high degree to combine two recosnized sources of credit. It belongs to the realm of the practical, which in the United States is a great recommendation; and it is touched by the light of science--a rnerit appreciate in a cornrnunity in which the love of knowledge s not alwss been accornpanied by leisure and opport .ity [emphasis added] . (1)

Of Doctor Sloperrs circurnstances in particular, we learn that in 1835 he "had moved his household goods up tom, as they Say in New York," when "the tide of fashion began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York . . . it is obliged to do." And "al1 good citizensM delight in calling

New York "their fortunate ide" (11)- Again 1 have emphasized James's repeated references to place, his insistence that the distinctive existence of Arnerica, New York, Washington Square be registered. The repetition of place--America, the United States, New York--reinforces Americats particularity as a national entity, and words like "always" and "constantlyu associate it with the old and established. The narrator implies that Arnericans are in confident possession of their world, a world in which there are certain "truths universally acknowledged," certain shared values and standards, even certain inside sayings and expressions. In its urbane familiarity, the authorial voice pretends that there is a cornmon understanding between author and reader:

The manner of the telling of Washinston Sauare is after al1 strikingly affected. It is adopted by James to solve the kind of problems to do with authorial self and audience that the major Arnerican writers found irresolvable. For James, it serves the same purpose as does Washington Square for the people living there. It lays clairn to participation in a civilized and established order of things."

The analogy Stuart Hutchinson draws between the claims of

the narrator and those of the inhabitants of Washington Square is justified by the novelfs first paragraph alone in

which 'claiming' is the key note. The prevalence of the word and its associates is striking: people are laying claims, putting claims forward, justifying daims, making marks and tracing lines for themselves al1 in the space of a

page and a half. 1 count five very specific "claims," but a more general claiming or lending of authority is certainly the narratorfs purpose. In part, the construction and legitimacy of these ciaims are made possible by the novel's place in time. The events of the narrative occur forty years before they are written and well before the destabilizing repercussions of

the Civil War (1861-65). James writes that the Civil War was "a fatal blow to that happy faith in the

uninterruptedness of American prosperity which 1 have spoken

J2 Stuart Hutchinson, Henry James: An Arnerican as Modernist (Totawa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983) 10-11. of as the religion of the old-fashioned American in general . '" Incidentally, several t imes he refers to Doctor Sloper as "old-fashioned,"and he remarks that "Republican simplicity" (10) still exists in New York. 1 argue, therefore. that he deliberately sets the novel forty years earlier, not only because it is a convention of the nineteenth-century realist novel on which Washinston Sauare is modelled, but also because for America the antebellum period is a kind of golden time before the Fall. The horrors of the Civil War and its aftermath had not yet registered their profound effects on the American consciousness. Also, 1840 was a time when the accelerated commercial development of New York was beyinning. The city was still half-metropolitan, half-provincial, its best society operating within established confines, its world able to be comprehended and contained. Supposedly. in 1840, in Washington Square, the "ideal of quiet and genteel retirement" could still be realized. Even though "the commercial turbulence of lower ~anhattan""rnakes itself

43 Hawthorne, 157. Tan Bell, "Money, History and Writing in Henry James: Assaying Washinston Square," Henrv James: Fiction as History, ed. Ian Bell (London: Vision Press, 1984) 11. Bell argues that "tirne is elided in Washinston Sauare" because such elision "defines the industrial production of commoditiesN and is a Yeature of the bourgeois ternperament he [James] analysesu (11-13). 1 am not conviriced by Bell's thesis. 1 disagree with him that "James's indictment of the bourgeois economy. . . is clearly in his characterization of Doctor Sloper," who is "an archetype of bourgeois ternperamentM cunningly figured by James "as a man of science felt and half Dr. Sloper's patients "carne to be over-worked men of businessu (Il), an affectation of stability was still possible. It must be recognized, however, that this affectation

is a pretense, a literary ploy, and not a naive, nostalgic belief in some past social stability. The pretense is thinly disguised and very self-conscious, for the in-the- know voice that makes and invites many cultural and class assumptions and that dominates the tone of the opening paragraphs deliberately calls attention to itself as a construction. The daims made both by the narxator and by the New Yorkers for their own cultural authority, which imply that they possess it and can dispense access to it, are actually contradictory because that to which they lay claim is itself insecure. The basis for the narratorts authoritative marner and seeming confidence in his audience is as shaky as the foundations on which Americans are constructing a national identity. For what is "America" after all? In 1840 the federation of States is not even a century old. The United States is an infant nation and New York is a fledgling city, neither as old nor established as rather than a man of business because the latter would be too reductive an invitation to enjoin 'fictional' and ' realist' cornparisons" (21). Such a reading is forced and, 1 think, reductive itself. However, the article is very useful for its fiscal history of America between 1830 and 1880. Bell provides ample proof the prof ound instability underlying the apparent security the American economy during this period. the youngest European one. The embarrassing presence of pigs and chickens who "disport themselvesrlin the gutter of Mrs. Almond's tlembryonicupart of tcwn betrays the cityfs youth. Washington Square itself has only a "kind of established reposeIt1only the "look of having had something of a social history" (13). It is, as James later says of New York's prosperous upper class, "a society trying to build itself, with every elaboration, into some coherent sense itself, and literally putting forth interrogative feelers, as it goes, into the ambient air. w45 While the narrator's affectation seems to solve the imrnediate problem of authorial uncertainty, it actualiy, very deliberately, calls attention to itself and to the larger underlying problem of America's uncertain identity, a problem that originates in America's apparent acceptance, even promotion, of impermanence.

Continually aspiring to "the new," Arthur Townsend enrhusiastically advances the creed of impermanence or "unsettled possession":

"At the end of three or four years we'll move. That's the way to live in New York--to move every three or four years. Then you always get the last thing. It's because the city's growing so quick--you1vegot to keep up with it. . . . So you see we'll always have a new house; it's a great advantage to have a new house; you get al1 the latest improvements. They invent everything al1 over again about every five years, and itfsa great thing to keep up with the new things. 1

" The American Scene, 159. always try and keep up with the new things of every kind." (21)

Nomads like Arthur, Yarsighted individuals,~repeatedly uproot themselves to keep up with the galloping pace of the move uptown. For Arthur, New York belongs to no structure and is there to be made and re-made. Through him and his reckless belief in American expansionism, James defines New York (and, for that matter, the New World) and identifies the fundamental paradox of the American national identity,

"the essentially invented tat te"^^ which is continually being re-invented and thus continually repudiating itself.

In 1836, an editor of the American Masazine of Useful Knowledse, possibly Hawthorne, compared a print of a building to the edifice itself and rernarked that in the constantly altering cityscape of New York, 'it is a singular truth that the mere shadowy image of a building . . . is likely to have a longer term of existence than the piled brick and rnortar of a b~ilding.~"And much later, in The

American Scene (19071, James expresses the same horror of the American "cult of impermanence"; this time, skyscrapers, those ''ta11 buildings," elicit his profound concern:

Crowned not only with no history, but with no credible possibility of time for history, and consecrated by no uses Save the commercial at any cost, they are simply the most piercing notes in that concert of the

* The American Scene, 77.

" Sante, 6. expensively provisional into which your supreme sense of New York resolves itself. They never begin to speak to you . . . with the authority of things of permanence or even of things of long duration. One story is good only until another is told, . . .-18

The Social Construction of American Realism,

Kaplan says that American realists, and she includes James among them, have such a strong sense of the insecurity of the social world and of the world changing so quickly that they must actively construct accessible, coherent representations of it; "and they do this not in a vacuum of fictionality but in direct confrontation with the elusive process of social change.^^' For James, however, establishing direct, referential linguistic terms to confront and capture this "elusive processu is an impossible, undesirable reduction. He recognizes that the magnitude and pace of the change elude language itself:

He doesn't know, he can't sav, before the facts, and he doesnft even want to know or to Say; the facts themselves loom, before the understanding, in too large a mass for a mere mouthful: it is as if the syllables were too numerous to make a legible word. The illegible word, accordingly, the great inscrutable answer to questions, hangs in the vast American sky, to his imagination, as something fantastic and abracadabrant, belonging to no known language. . . .50

The American Scene, 77.

" Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988) 9.

50 The American Scene, 121-122. 101 Rather than attempting, therefore, to describe a phenornenon which is continually transforming itself and its meanings, James makes the American social reality felt, indirectly, through the narratorts stance and, directly, through structuring and controlling the experience of his characters and their relation to language. Since tlcharacterizationin a novel has everything to do with the structure of reality into which the characters are made to fit/ those in

Washinqton Square must be understood in their relation to their social context. The characters, and 1 will concentrate on Doctor Sloper, Morris Townsend, and, most importantly, Catherine, are informed by the specifically

American situation 1 have discussed, and this relation is the spring of the action. In a society dedicated to constant upheaval, the characters attempt to establish some stability, some sense of place and attachment. Doctor Sloper has "put forward his claim" (6) before the events of the story occur. His practice was already prospering when, at twenty-seven, he married "a very charrning girl, Miss Catherine Harrington, of New York, who, in addition to her charms, brought hirn a solid dowryM and whose affiliation to the best people secured him a well-paying, elite clientele. He married "for loveu; he cultivated his chosen profession with purpose. In addition to his claims made through marriage and profession,

" Hutchinson, 15. 102

Doctor Sloper' s ttamiable,gracef ul , accomplished, elegant " wife gave hirn a son, "a little boy of extraordinary promise." At age three, his son died; and two years later, his wife died too, after the birth of their daughter, a "disappointment" and "inadequate substitute." "The world, which . . . appreciated him, pitied him too much to be ironical" (7), but Sloper, not surprisingly, is embittered by his misfortune and becomes ironical himself. Stuart Hutchinson explains that Doctor Sloper wanted to believe in his world, "a world in which persona1 desire would f ind public fulfilment as expressed in one's profession, one's marriage, and one's familyI1but when it most matters to him, he finds his sense of self and his sense of his world fundamentally undermined.5~ispossessed of his ideals, Sloper refuses to continue expecting:

He satisf ied himself that he nad expected nothing, though, indeed, with a certain oddity of reasoning. "1 expect nothing,Ithe said to himself, "so that if she gives me a surprise, it will al1 be clear gain. If she doesn't, it will be no loss." (9)

He ceases to care, although he continues to observe al1 society's "attendant forms." Along with the wall of stoicism and irony that he builds around himself for his emotional protection, Sloper builds his "handsome, modern, wide-fronted house" in Washington Square, but the wide front does not signify openness, generosity or hospitality. It

'' Hutchinson, 11-12. 103 does not reflect the doctorrs genuine participation in his community. Like his reptation, his cleverness (as opposed to Catherine's great naturalness) , and his ironic marner, his house is merely an aspect of his social front, of the mask which hides his real self--arguably an evil self. His exploitation of his daughter's emotions for his own entertainment prompts critics to reflect on Sloper's particular kind of evil and to compare the Doctor and Catherine to Dr. Rappaccini and his daughter, Beatrice, in

Hawthorne's story "Rappaccini's Daughteru (1844). In Hawthorne's story a scientist uses his daughter for an experiment in which he literally poisons her entire being.

Like Dr. Rappaccini, Sloper is "a scholarly doctorIn "an observer," and a "heartless scoffer." One sister, Mrs.

Almond, f inds him llshockinglycold-blooded, " the other, Mrs . Penniman, remarks on his "hard, intellectual nature;" Catherine feels chilled by his "cold, quiet, reasonable eye." Sloper for whom "paternity was, after all, not an exciting vocation," finds perverse entertainment in clinically observing and manipulating his daughter' s emotions. When Catherine gives a "natural cry of horroru and stands l1staring,""feeling sick and faintu at his cruelly contrived suggestion that her engagement will rnake her impatient for his death, he enioys the point he has made

(86). Of course he does not believe she is impatient; his histrionic remark is designed only to elicit her reaction. To some extent, then, James identifies Dr. Sloper with intellect, with mind rather than heart, and thus, he associates hirn with Hawthorne's "unpardonable sinners," those men who "allow their intellects to become ascendant, their emotions to wither and dien and who "eventually come to regard other human beings as nothing more than objects to be manipulated for the sake of scientific investigation or, at t imes, sheer amusement. But Sloper is not simply a fiend like Rappaccini; he is a much more complex character--socially and psychologically. His cold, ironic, clinical personality is self-protective and part of the social front he creates to hide his great isolation and loneliness (much points to the Doctor's loneliness, and not least that he loved his wife but is without her, with the strong suggestion that he feels responsible for the deaths of his son and her). In the Alps, away £rom the social context that necessitates a veneer, he confesses to his falseness, and, strangely, says that Catherine, who it is clear has never known anything but his mask, ought to know him:

"Yeu try my patience," her father went on, "and you ought to know what 1 am, 1 am not a very good man. Though 1 am smooth externally, at bottom 1 am very passionate; and 1 assure you 1 can be very hard." She could not think why he told her these things. Had he brought her there on purpose, and was it part of a plan? . . . There was a kind of still intensity

j3 Harold Schechter, "The Unpardonable Sin in Washinqton Sauare," Studies in Short Fiction 10.1 (1973): 173. about her father which made him dangerous, but Catherine hardly went so far as to Say to herself that it might be part of his plan to fasten his hand--the neat, fine, supple hand of a distinguished physician-- in her throat. (112)

The passage is sinister: the cold Alpine scene, Catherine's initial fear and unease, the threat of violence, the disturbing undercurrent of incestf5"and most of al:, the unexpected exposure of the doctorfs loneliness and great isolation. Sloper, the victimiser, is also a victim, trapped by his ironic mode of expression. Since "he almost

Y Maxwell Geismar, in his psychoanalytic, biographica study, Henrv James and His ~ult- ondo don: Chatt O and Windus 1964), suggests that in Washinston Sauare "there are compl incestuous and oedipal relationships" and that the "Jarnesi stress on solid (inherited) cash [;SI simply a covering mechanism for the love-hatred-jealousy emotional pattern of a classic father-daughter relationship." Love-hatred- jealousy may certainly be motivation for Sloperfs behaviour; quite objectionably, however, Geismar goes on to put the blame for their relationship on Catherine, the child and victim, saying she has too much "filial devotionM (38-39). The presence, though, of underlying, unrealized themes of incest in James is undeniable (Maggie and Adam Verver are interesting in this light but so are the numerous guardian- ward relationships, Roger and his ward Nora, for instance, in Watch and Ward). Alfred Habegger in Henrv James and the "Woman Businessu (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) traces them, in part, to the influence of Minny Temple, whom James admired for standing up to his father, and to Jamesfs om relationship with his father and brother. 1 will not pursue the biographical implications here. More relevant to rny interest in James's Americanism is that Habegger locates the incestuous insinuations in James's novels in a larger literary tradition in nineteenth-century American novels, written mainly by women. Habegger points out that "in the best-selling women's novels, in the agonists' work, in Alice James's madness, and in James's own narratives we can discern a cornmon passion or yearning, and that yearning is incestuous. To the extent that James's fiction was rooted in American society, it was rooted in incest--in incestuous acts, perhaps, but even more in incestuous daydreamsu (25). 106 never addressed his daughter Save in the ironical formu (la), Catherine, herself "incapable of elaborate artifice"

(24), assumes her fatherrs revelation is "a part of his great subtlety--men so clever as he might Say anything and mean anythingu (114). When he ceases, in a terrifying moment, to be the ironist, ceases to be clever (with its implication of artificiality) and reveals what he alone knows is in his nature, he simply cannot be understood and his irony turns on him. This reversa1 is also his "punishment for the abuse of sarcasm in relations with his daughter," for "there was a good deal of effective sarcasm in her keeping him in the dark, and the rest of the world conspired with her, in this sense, to be sarcastic" (151- 152). Thus he is destined to ignorance and isolation--from his daughter and from his comrnunity. Doctor Sloper's attempts, therefore, to lay claims have been only superficially successful, made at great cost, providing little real sustenance for him. As James is later to rernark, "the whole costly up-tom dernonstration was a record, in the last analysis, of individual loneliness; whence came, precisely, its instant testimony of wa~te.~~' In his isolation £rom a sustaining community, Doctor Sloper is, according to Hutchison, a "representative American.~'~Although he is superficially posited within

'' The American Scene, 159. '' Hutchinson, 12. 107 the world of Washinston Square, the Doctor is nonetheless isolated from it because it has not fulfilled his expectations and he has stopped believing it will. Morris Townsend, by contrast , is placed outside this world and wants to get in. He, too, is isolated from a sustaining community and is, thus, also a representative American. Morris Townsend is a refinement of an earlier figure,

George Fenton of Watch and Ward (1871), James's f irst novef . The fortune-hunter Fenton was "a man of twenty worlds," who "had knocked about and dabbled in affairs and adventures since he was ten years old" and "was invested with a loose- fitting cosmopolitan Oc~identalism.'~A westerner, Fenton carries about him "the native fragrance of another circle" and is "redolent of enterprise, of 'operations,' of a certain fierce friction with rnankind,"" qualities which make him more like Christopher Newman, also a Western Arnerican businessman, than Morris Townsend. James calls both Fenton and Newman "tough1!as if their association with industry and business has made them imperrneable, not Vine," but Fenton's portrayal lacks the sympathy and complexity of the more fully drawn, less caricatured Newman. Fenton remains undistinguished, the stock confidence man with a swindling genius; at the end of the novel, he has apparently duped his own business partner. Curiously, al1 three,

57 Henry James, Watch and Ward (New York: Grove Press, 1979) 78-79. Fenton, Newman, and Townsend (even their names sound similar) have "long legs,"**and James makes much of this: Fenton continually "shuffles" his, implying his dishonesty;

Newman nstretchesu his, suggesting his opemess; and

Townsend "relaxes" his to enjoy the luxuries of the Doctorts comfortable hearth, declaring his indolence. Like Fenton, Morris Townsend has been "knocking about the world and living in far-away landsN (le), with a lack of attachment to his native America that leads Catherine to suggest, "He's more like a foreigneru (22). Nor is his manner conventional: he criticizes Mrs. Alrnond's guests

"very freely, in a positive, off-hand way," in such a way as "Catherine had never heard anyone--especially any young man-

-talku and it strikes her that there is something very theatrical about it. Yet she dubiously adds, "he seemed sincere and natural" (16). Townsend is not natural; he is clever. The terms "natural" and ucleverH are significant opposites in the novel in the way that good and evil might otherwise be. Catherine, of course, is natural--her Aunt Lavinia Penniman fails to Vnake a clever woman of her," as the Doctor asks. Millicent Bell describes "cleverN as "a term of significance

" In fact, many of James's male characters both Arne ric an and ~n~lish,have 1ong legs . Osmond calls Ralph Tou.c he tt a lt long jackanapesv and Merton Densher gives an impres sion O f looking "vague" and "idle" becau se of the "accident, possibly,-of his long legs, which were apt to stretch themselves. " 109 suggesting abilities in the direction of conceptualization, analysis, and expression, which Catherine signally lacks." To be clever, as Morris Townsend and Doctor Sloper are, is to be artificial, "unnatural, unspontaneous, insincere, with

a well-developed sense of the uses of things~~~and 1 would add, of people. Townsend is clever in al1 senses, but part of his cleverness involves, paradoxically, a pretence of naturalness: "He liked everything to be natural." He praises the quality in Catherine and professes to be the

sarne: "'That's what 1 like you for; you're so natural!

Excuse me,' he added; 'you see I'm natural myselfftl(27). He is not, though; his naturalness is part of his social artifice, part of the way he contrives to make room for hirnself in a social context that excludes him and to which he can lay no claim, having neither money nor profession. By spontaneously declaring, "in a comfortable and natural manner, 'What a delightful party! What a charming bouse! What an interesting farnily! What a pretty girl your cousin is! (IS), he makes himself heard and recognized as a member of the assernbled group, as one of the party. Through his apparent naturalness and ease, he attempts to create his own inclusion or belonging. What he actually does, however, is to draw attention to his lack of social place, to his exclusion and his difference. Townsend's self-styled

- - - Millicent Bell, 68. 110 naturalness, for instance, allows Doctor Sloper to determine that he '5s not what he calls a gentleman," that he is 'Iextremely insinuating" and "altogether too familiaru (35) . Austin Sloper is well-qualified to pronounce upon Townsend,

since he has spent "thirty years in observationu (35), thirty years taking care himself to play the gentleman. It seems that Morris confirms the Doctor's diagnosis of him. Even before Sloperfs pronouncement, Morris's integrity is suspect because, at "upwards of thirty," he has no ubusinessu or profession. Catherine has "never heard of a young man--of the upper class--in this situationn (23). James's descriptions of the societyfs values and its rapid movement uptown suggest there are ample opportunities for enterprise and employment. Richard Poirier observes that "in view of this, no young man of any worth could possibly be impoverished or out of a position," and designates him simply as a "neter-do-well."" However, 1 agree with Ian Bell who believes that "to dismiss Townsend as a social climber or a fortune-hunter serves only to fix hirn too unproblernatically.~ Townsend must be understood through his uncertain social positioning, his location in "the interstitial social area" that is "characteristic of a period of intense development and change whereby existing class-lines become bl~rred."~'Bell reads Townsend as "the

- The Comic Sense of Henrv James, 178.

" Ian Bell, 37. victim of the period's transformations as he struggles within its simultaneous promise of economic amelioration and its damnation of chose whom its accelerations leave behind. "6' Morris does want a place: "he's very sociable, and he wants to know everyoneH--atleast "al1 the good ones" (22). ifis rnistake, however, is that he "attempts to project himself into an atmosphere in which he has not a transmitted or inherited property."" Morris's projection of himself into the social world of Washington Square is clear in his appropriation of Sloper's house while the Doctor and Catherine are in Europe for twelve months. Mrs. Penniman presents no obstacle because she enjoys a similar unearned and "uncontested dominion" while her brother is away:

[Morris] was altogether her most frequent visitor, and Mrs. Penniman was very fond of asking him to tea. He had his chair--a very easy one--at the fireside in the back parlour . . . and he used to smoke cigars in the Doctor' s study, where he often spent an hour in turning over the curious collections of its absent proprietor. . . . [AIS a young man of luxurious tastes and scanty resources, he found the house a perfect castle of indolence. It became for him a club with a single member. (109)

'' Ian Bell, 40.

63 Hawthorne, 152. James is referring here to what he considers Hawthorne's unsuccessful attempt- to render the atrnosphere of Italy in The Marble Faun. The allusion to a club is significant? the club--with its exclusive rnernbership, its insistence on form and decorum, and its secret seat of social, economic, political power-- represents the larger society to which Morris is denied access. His attempts to project himself into this world necessarily fail because they are without solid grounding in money or profession (unrealized ability does not count); as false daims, his attempted projections "incur the penalty of seeming factitious and unauthoritative." That he is unsuccessful is figured by his failure to marry and by his shady business, in partnership with a commission-merchant (a kind of middleman who does not produce anything himself) in an office that is "peculLarly and unnaturally difficult to find" (129), if indeed it exists at all.

At the end of the novel, Morris "has never got thoroughly established," because as Mrs. Penniman, with uncharacteristic perception, explains, "he isnrt sufficiently plodding, and that, after all, is what succeeds in this world" (162). That success is guaranteed by plodding is a dubious assertion, especially given the enormous fortunes being rapidly made in land speculation during this period, and it is also doubtful that Mrs. Pennirnan, whose feet seldom touch ground, would advance the

@ The "castle of indolence" may also be an allusion: perhaps to James Thomson' s "The Castle of Indolenceu (1748), a poem in which an enchanter calls men away from getting and spending to partake of pleasurable oblivion. very prosaic ethic of sober industry and dogged perseverance. What she is actually saying has less to do with a work ethic, more with Morris's want of substance. To her ttartificialmindn (29), this suggests a lofty nature, a great intellect, a too-good-for-common-pursuitsaspect. For Catherine, it means his life has been dishonest and empty, and that he is nothing. He has made no place for himself, laid no real, legitimate daims, and thus he has no identity and cannot be recognized:

She would never have known him. . . . It seemed to be he, and yet not he; it was the man who had been everything, and yet this person was nothing. . . . As Catherine looked at him, the story of his life defined itself in his eyes: he had made hirnself cornfortable, and he had never been caught. (166-167)

Catherine is the only character in Washinqton Square who does acquire genuine selfhood, whose clairns to it are legitimate and real. First, she is the only one who is natural, completely without artifice, as her speech and dress reflect. We learn, quite early, that she is "much addicted to speaking the truth," that she is "decidedly not clever" (7), that she is uuncomfortably, painfully shyu and thus "not always understood, " particularly by her father and aunt who "exaggerated the young girl's limitationsu (9) . Although she has an embarrassingly "lively taste for dress," she is "without a grain of coquetryu (11). The artifice that she does not possess herself, she has difficulty recognizing and responding to in others; in relation to the light, clever, unnatural characters around her, she often appears heavy, obtuse, apologetic, and vaguely disoriented. Elizabeth Hardwick describes her as "just raw feeling itself, and literalness,~humbly trying "to make her way through a crushing thicket of casual remarks, hoping to discover a literalness equal to her own and important to her understanding of her situation."" Of course there is no one as literal as she: certainly not Mrs. Penniman, who is "al1 indirection"; not her father, whose ironic mode is the opposite of literal; not Morris, whose speech is insincere and whose writing (in his letter to Catherine) is stylized and hollow; and finally, not the narrator (whom Millicent Bell calls the fifth character), who imitates the Doctorfs irony .

Opposed to them James presents a heroine whose style is so mute and motionless as to be almost a surrender of style--a prxtical and intellectual "innocence" which derives from her inability to employ any rhetoric dictated by social or literary convention, almost an inability to speak or do at all. Out of her dilemma an authenticity of silence emerges, a resistance to the betrayals of expre~sion.'~

Bell adds that the narrator eventually moves out of his customary ironic mode when he speaks of Catherine, becoming

"more and more sober, plain, unmockingu as "one object

65 Hardwick, 28.

66 Millicent Bell, 53. compels his respect, and that is Catherine's love."" 1 agree with Bell and will concentrate on the aspects that define Catherine's character, on her growth through love, and on her significance for questions of America's identity and creative future. Cornelia Pulsifer Kelley, distinguishing Catherine's goodness as her "one outstanding and dominating characteristic," compares her to Balzac's Eugenie Grandet, but concludes that "James's heroine is not a copy; she is the American counterpart," "primarily a creature of conscience, more disturbed by the fact that she cannot decide just where her duty lies than by her love." Kelley maintains that James believed the element of conscience to be "the dominating factor with his co~ntrywornen."~~ Catherine's conscience, her sense of duty, is undoubtedly strong, but it is not her defining characteristic (nor 1 think is it the thing which defines American women for James) . In fact, she explicitly rejects what duty might require of her, saying "1 have been as good as 1 could, but he doesn't care. Now 1 don't care eitherl' (120). When she rnust choose between lover and father, duty does not determine her choice. Love ultimately defines Catherine; courtship is for her a process of self-definition, in keeping with what John Paul

67 Millicent Bell, 73.

Kelley, 280-281. Eakin identifies as James's nbelief that the portrayal of women, especially young women, and the narration of a certain kind of courtship fable about them affords the best available opportunity to assess the national character, to grasp the quality of the moral life of America. M69

Catherine's goodness, her "moral purity" (7) is of course the spring of her being, but she defines herself through love, and love causes her Fnward development, her resistance to her father and her assertion of independence (she even suggests she ought to move £rom the paternal roof}. James Gargano, in his study of Catherine's inner growth, relates her love to her reticence. Much like the experience of Christopher Newman, there is a strong sense that, for Catherine, to talk about her courtship lessens it or betrays it in some way. And again there is the suggestion that what Catherine is experiencing resists language in much the same way as the process of historical change that James attempts to capture involves a transformation of assumptions about meaning and therefore about language too. Catherine's

"diefidence in speech1' (10) is therefore a reflection of her integrity; she stubbornly refuses to attempt to articulate and explain herself (to her father and aunt), not simply because she lacks cleverness in speech but because she does not possess a language to express what she is experiencing

69 ~ohnPaul Eakin, The New Ensland Girl (Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1976) 3. in al1 its aspects and its newness. Thus silence remains the only authentic expression. Herself "quietly quietu(103), Catherine is made very uneasy by her meddling auntts persistent talking about her to Townsend. With unaffected modesty, she objects to the free publicizing of her feeling.

Though she moves "outside" herself in loving Townsend, her love becomes a private possession to be concealed, hoarded, and quietly assessed. Interestingly enough, James consistently links the birth of an inner life with the refusal to share one's thoughts and feelings, with dissimulating withdrawal and even positive deceit . 70

Catherine's evasive, mildly duplicitous answers to her father's questions about Morris mark her initial turning inward. With her love come discoveries about her own inner nature: she finds that "her imagination could exercise itself indefinitelyu and she has "an entirely new feeling, which may be described as a stage of expectant suspense about her own actions" (70). Unlike her father, Catherine continues to lfexpectlland to anticipate with great hopefulness. That she is capable of such discoveries and such depth should not be surprising. The red satin gown that she often wears and which, "for many years, she had coveted in secret," her "secret passion for the theatre" and her taste

'O James W. Gargano, "Washinston Scniare: A Study in the Growth of an Imer Self, Studies in Short Fiction 13.3 (1976): 356. for romantic opera (27) are al1 manifestations of "a rather inarticulate nature" that seeks to be eloquent (10). Although "she was not particularly fond of literature," spectacle--sound and colour--excites her and attests to her vitality and passionate nature. Whether Catherine ever succeeds in truly expressing herself is another matter; what is important is that her awkwardness in speech is not to be mistaken for stupidity, as it is by her father. Gargano explains :

She is waiting to be energized into the susceptibilities and accumulations of a rare nature. In James's fiction, naivete may Wear the look of an empty mind, but it is often the ideal preparation for receiving life fully and impressionably. It is not surprising, then, that Catherine will feel more intensely because so far as strong emotions go, she is not only uninitiated but she literally does not know what to expect of them. Her ingenuousness is the key to her genuineness and her sense of seeing, feeling, judging life for the first tirne."

In her newness and her self-conscious experience of herself through love, Catherine is a particularly American heroine, and even a surprisingly exciting one. While 1 think it is true that she represents what are perhaps the most positive, promising qualities of the American character--its sense of its own newness and possibility, its imagination, its independence of thought, its freedom £rom convention--her story actually holds little promise for the future of that national character. Catherine's hopes are,

" Gargano, 3 56. 119 after all, thwarted and her promise unrealized: "the great facts of her career were that Morris Townsend had trifled with her affection, and that her father had broken its springm (155). 1 disagree with those who daim that the dignity and peace she achieves adequately compensate for her broken heart, and that her charitable works, her role as "kindly maiden-aunt to the Young," by whom she is "greatly liked" (156), and finally, her continued occupancy of the fine "old houseu in Washington Square al1 speak for the fullness of her life. The narrator is explicit about Catherine's essential unfulfillment: "there was something dead in her life, and her duty was to try and fil1 the void." As a woman having "a great disapproval of brooding and moping," Catherine conscientiously "fills the void" but she does so through a sense of duty, not through lcve, and thus her life is a "rigid business," her habits "stiffly maintainedu and her opinions on al1 moral and social manners "extrernely conservative'' (156). Catherine is "neither pitiable nor xidiculous": she does, after all, choose her life and ske chooses to remiln unmarried although she does have offers. Even her choice of Morris for her lover--albeit a rather bad choice--attests to Catherine's ability to exercice her will. In her exercise of choice, there is some small triurnph. But the suggestion of her life's restriction and sterility is too strong to ignore: she is left in the emptiness of her parlour, 120

"picking up her morse1 of fancy-work--for life, as it were." The final subjunctive phrase, "as it were," expresses ambiguity about ulife,M suggests that what she is left with is an illusion of life, implies that it really is not much and that it could have been otherwise. In Catherine's story, throughout her courtship, and in the full-blown developrnent of her love, there is a sense of a person who has arrived, who is ready to take in all, and then at the last minute cruelly denied. Her promise and her potential are ultimately wasted because, without the love that allows her to express herself, Catherine has no life-sustaining purpose. The Awkward Aqe

Catherine Sloper could not be anything but what she

is, and what she is depends, to a large extent, on her

Arnerican milieu and all that goes with it. Whether Catherine recognizes that she is formed by her location and nationality is unimportant. 1 do not believe that she does or that the question could even be posed by her; rny point is that James recognizes and understands it. He deliberately establishes the American context and thematizes its relation to character and the formation of identity. The way in which Catherine's character is realized is central to the novel, but her self-consciousness is not; that is, Catherine does not explicitly ask, "What am I? Of what am 1 made?

How is it that 1 am what 1 am?" Nanda Brookenharn does consider such questions-- questions of identity--and hast moreover, formulated answers before the action (if it can be called action) of The

Awkward Aqe (1899) begins. The germ of The Awkward Aqe, originally conceived as "a real little situation for a short tale," involves a "little London girl who grows up to 'sit with' the free-talking modern young mother--reaches 17, 18, etc.--cornes out--and not marrying, bas to 'be theref--and, though the conversation is supposed to be expurgated for her, inevitably hears, overhears, guesses, follows, takes in, becomes acquainted with, h~rrors.~'This "little situation," however, generates considerable complexity, amply justifying the fuller treatment it gets in the novel, rather than the necessary abbreviation of a tale. James was convinced £rom the start that there was something great in it, "especially if one makes it take in something of the question of the non-marrying of girls, the desperation of

mothers, the whole alteration of manners," and especially if the heroine is "the type of the little girl who is conscious and aware."' Nanda Brookenham is that type. She is a young woman of eighteen or "cal1 it nearly nineteen" although her rnother falsely claims she is only sixteen,' whose "'sitting downstairsfu (Art 100) can no longer be put off. But her appearance in Mrs. Brookenhamfs drawing room in Mayfairfs Buckingham Crescent interrupts the free play of talk there, where a cnarmed circle of friends gather around the lovely, youthful, very clever, very cultivated Fernanda Brookenham. Part of the charm of her "liberal firesidesn lies in the fact that the talk is u'real,"' uninhibited and unsuppressed, its "tone as far as possible removed £rom that

' Henry James, 4 March 1985, The Complete Notebooks, eds. Leon Ede1 and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford UP, 1987) 117-118. ' Notebooks, 118.

Henry James, The Awkward Acre (New York: Scribner, 1908) 18. Subsequent references to the novel are to The New York Edition and will be noted parenthetically. 123 "goodl'talk in which "nothing ugly, nothing harsh or crude" flourishes, but because it is "one thing, and a proper

inexperience anotherm (104)' the presence of a "hovering young fernale," "some vague slip of a daughter" (99) is preciuded.' Nanda, however, has arrived; the awkwardness of her presence is felt. Among the group, Vanderbank, thirty-four, Deputy Chairman of a government office, not rich--or at least without private means sufficiently great to allow him to marry in his social class (127) --figures prominently. He is

"formed for a distinctly higher spheren (1251, an "Apollo in personN (126); he is Mrs. Brookenham's intimate friend,

' In H. G. Wells' Ann Veronica (19091, Hetty Widget is in Nanda's predicament. Since Nanda herself says little about her own view of her situation, Hetty seems an appropriate spokesperson : 'We're handfuls. We're regarcied as inflammable litter that mustn't be left about. We are the species, and maternity is Our game; that's al1 right, but nobody wants that adrnitted for fear we should al1 catch fire, and set about fulfilling the purpose of Our beings without waiting for further explanations. As if we didn't know! The practical trouble is our ages. They used to marry us off at seventeen, rush us into things before we had time to protest. They don't now. Heaven knows why! They don't marry most of us off now until high up in the twenties. Gd the age gets higher. We have to han9 about in the intervals. There1s a great gulf opened, and nobody's got any plans what to do with us. So the world is choked with waste and waiting daughters. Hanging about! And they star thinking and asking questions, and begin to be neither one thing nor the other. We're partly human being s and partly f ernales in suspense. ' (London: J. M. Dent 1993, 117) perhaps her lover,' and he is loved by Nanda, passionately. Others in the group include the Duchess, a formidable woman with "acquired Calabrian sonoritiesM and airs of distinction

(52), whose "standard was of a height--! " (48-49) ; her marriageable niece, Little Aggie, a protected, ingenuous girl whose face "scarce expressed as yet even a

consciousness~ (240); Mr. Mitchett, a very decent young man,

"who, rich as he rnay be, is the son of a shoemaker and

superlatively hideousu (59), and who loves Nanda; Lord Petherton, the Duchess's lover and a hanger-on to Mitchy; Tishy Grendon, Nanda's married friend, whose lemon coloured silk sofa, French mouldings, and French novels lying about in rooms where French fires burn in "low French chimneys"

(383) cry out that Mrs. Grendon's moral standards are probably closer to those of Zola's Nana than to Mrs. Grundy's; and a host of Cashmeres and Donners, al1 involved in their respective extramarital affairs. Finally there is

Mr. Longdon, bewildered, antiquated, al1 kindness, who cornes

to London after thirty yearsf retirement at Beccles, his country estate in Suffolk, to find that Nanda is the

' The Duchess bluntly informs Mr. Longdon that Mrs. Brookenham "wants 'old vanf herself" and, impatient with Longdon's apparent incomprehension, tells him to supply any sense of the word 'wantf "that may rniraculously satisfy fond Engl ish imaginat ionu bbt not to "create ssary obscurit ies by being unnecessarily modest Nonethel ess, the extent of Vanderbank and Mrs. Brookenham's relationship remains obscure. Indeed, the Dcchess confesses that "the situation belongs, 1 think, to an order 1 donft understand" (254). It is enough to know that they have "enjoyed each otherfs dim depthsN (446). 125 reincarnation of her dead grandmother, Lady Julia, the great love of his life.

The Awkward Aqe is, as James States in the preface, "a study of one of these curtailed or extended periods of tension and apprehension" (Art 103). Some of the questions which create the drama and the "tension" are as follows: will Mrs, Brookenhamts circle be broken by its accommodation of Nanda? Will Mrs. Brookenham sacrifice her daughter for her own interests? Will Nanda marry? Will Vanderbank accept Mr. Longdon's offer to settle a great portion of his wealth on him should Van choose to marry Nanda? 1s Nanda, in fact , ''dreadfully damaged and depraved" (84) by her association with her mother and her London set? Al1 the questions, however, involve "such mingled intertwisted strands," in the words of Mrs. Brookenham (571, that they may finally be resolved into one: to what extent is Nanda conscious of and made by her relation to her world? The Awkward Ase is not James's first novel to address this question about a young female character: although she is a child, much younger than Nanda, Maisie's consciousness- -what she knows and how she is made by her complicated relations--is the central concern of What Maisie Knew (1897). Barbara Everett compares What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Aqe:

Maisie is unconcerned with 'knowledge' or even experience--most of what she has, she would conceivably prefer to be without; it is only the avid adults round her who quest for experience, and concern themselves with 'what Maisie knowsr. . . . Its story is only the making and unmaking of Maisie, who finds herself in the losing of others. There is a very striking echo of this ending in The Awkward Aqe. The novel translates what is abstract and schematic in its predecessor into something more socially realistic: for in The Awkward Aser Maisie's inward growing-up becomes a young woman's 'coming- out'. . . . 6

Despite numerous similarities between Nanda and Maisie and their respective situations, there are, nonetheless, important differences. The distinction between the two characters ultimately cornes down to the obvious difference in their ages: Maisie is a child; Nanda, an adolescent. Given her age, Nanda actüally qualifies as a young adult, but she is not unconditionally treated as one, and instead is at a transitional (awkward) age between adolescence and adulthood. The term 'adolescent,' however, is a slippery one.

[Tlhere are also certain conceptual problems which confront anyone interested in adolescent girlhood. There is - . . room for considerable discussion over the extent to which 'adolescenceJ represents a developmental stage with fairly distinct biological or psychological characteristics and the extent to which it represents a social construction, a phase in growth to which certain societies in certain historical periods have attributed particular meanings. Social psychologists in recent decades have tended to present adolescence as a phase in which the growing individual undergoes an often confusing search for persona1 and social identity, for the mature self. But the concept of 'maturity' of mind and behaviour cannot be defined

Barbara Everett , "Henry James ' s Children, Children and Their Books, eds. Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) 329-331. in anything other than a heavily value-laden way. It can carry vastly different connotations, for instance, dependhg on whether it is used by someone inclined to accept the basic features of the existing social order as normal, natural and desirable, or by someone who questions these arrangements.'

While social psychologists have only recently presented adolescence as a developmental stage characterized by a "confusing search for persona1 and social identity," novelists have recognized and presented the stage as such for at least a century: sureiy Pip in Great Ex~ectations, Paul in Sons and Lovers and Stephen in Portrait of The Artist as a Youns Man are examples. However, to represent adolescent sirlhood in the way that James presents Nanda is progressi~e,~given the prevailing attitudes toward girls

and young women at the turn of the century. G. Stanley Hall, author of Adolescence: Its Psycholoqv and the Relation

to Phvsioloqv, Anthro~oloqy,Socioloqv, Sex, Crime, Relision, and Education (1904), was a prominent sociologist of the Edwardian period whose views were, according to Carol

7 Carol Dyhouse, Feminism and the Familv in Ensland, 1880-1939 (Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1989) 122.

1 do not claim that James is the first or the only writer to question or criticize the great limitations placed on young women. Charlotte Bronte also portrays intelligent, self-conscious, perceptive adolescents, who are thwarted and restricted because of their gender. Jane Eyre and Caroline Helstone in Shirley are examples. Perhaps George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver might be cited as another precursor even though George Eliot's treatment of the restriction of young women is not as explicit as that of Charlotte Bronte or of James. Dyhouse, representative and authoritative.' Hall accepts "the existing social order" and endorses the unequal treatment of adolescent girls based on the widely-held belief in their mental inferiority:

Adolescence, Hall maintained, had very different meanings for the two sexes. For the boy, it was a time of ambition, growth and challenge. For the girl, it was a time of instability: a dangerous phase when she needed special protection from society. During adolescence, boys grew towards self-knowledge. Girls, on the other hand, could never really attain self- knowledge. They could never hope to understand much of themselves or the motives for their conduct, for their lives were ruled by 'deep subconscious instincts,' and a girl's self-consciousness was only 'the reflected knowledge others have of her. ' Io

Hall is sexist." His theories are not based on closs,

1 realize that James could not have read Hall at the time of his writing of The Awkward Ase; indeed, although William James rnay have had an interest in Hall's work, 1 think it unlikely that Henry would ever have had occasion to read Stanley Hall. 1 trust the excellent and thorough study of Carol Dyhouse, not to mention the fact of Hall's wide publication, to base rny discussion of prevalent contemporary views of adolescent girls and young women.

lu Dyhouse, 122.

'] In his chapter entitled "The Budding Girl," Educational ~roblems2 vols. (New York: leton, on, 1911) , Hall writes that sirls are "buds that should not blossom for sorne tirne, but çhould be kept as long as possible in the green stage; or, to change from a floral to a fauna trope, they are only squabs and not yet doves, maturing pupae and not yet butterflies, and this calf or filly stage should be prolonged by every artifice." He refers to girls as 'Backfisch,' a colloquial German term for lla fresh fish, just caught but unbaked, though fit and ready for the process. The naivete of instinctive unconscious childhood, like the glinting sheen of sea hues, is still upon the 'Backfischtv (2:l). (At this point, Stanley Hall's language belies a view of adolescent girls that anticipates Nabokov's Humbert Humbert.) impartial observation of adolescent boys and girls; instead, confronted by women's changing social, economic and political status, Hall advocates a reactionary, regressive Victorian prescript, designed to limit and obstruct the growth of girls." As both

The Awkward Aqe and What Maisie Knew prove, James does not endorse this prescript; in fact, the character most closely approximating Hall's description of the adolescent girl, Little Aggie, is ultimately unsympathetic.13 Nanda, by contrast, is able to attain

" Hall's reaction was typical of the period and was often confirmed by the medical profession. In The Female Maladv (Penguin, 1985), Elaine Showalter writes: During an era when the patriarchal culture felt itself to be under attack by its rebellious daughters, one obvious defense was to label women . . . as mentally disturbed, and of al1 the disorders of the 'fin de siecle,' hysteria was the most strongly identified with the £eminist movement. . . . [Dloctors had noticed that hysteria was apt to appear in youna women who were especially rebellious. F. C. Skey, for example, had observed that his hysterical patients were likely to be more independent and assertive than 'normal' women, exhibiting more than usual force and decision of character, of strong resolution, fearless of danger, (145) Showalter also says that James too associated the feminine with hysteria, misquoting his statement in The Bostonians (1886) which reads, "the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it's a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting ageu (London: MacMillan, 2: 137). The statement is not James's but Basil Ransom's; in fact, James (or, more correctly, the narrator) dismisses the remark by saying these are "narrow notions (the rejection of which by leading periodicals was certainly not a matter for surprise)" (138). " Pansy, in The Portrait of a Lady, is the forerunner of Little Aggie, but because we are given a glimpse of Pansy's suffering and because we approve of Pansy's reliance on Isabel to help her escape the imprisonment--mental and 130 self-knowledge, and does understand herself and the motives for her conduct.

Hall need not be entirely dismissed, for he recognizes that consciousness involves "the reflected knowledge of others." A young woman's identity (and, for that matter, a young manfs) , the way she represents herself to others and to herself, is necessarily informed by what others think about her. What they think she ousht to be figures largely. A discrepancy between what she ought to be and what she is may be cause for reflection; but a further complication occurs if there is uncertainty in the 'ought,' if, as in The Awkward Ase, society's values are in transition.

In her discussion with Mr. Longdon about what she is and about what she cannot be, Nanda expresses her ideas with a certain desperation but also with conviction and coherence that develop strength as she goes along, encouraged by Longdon's interested questioning and advanced by her own ever-deepening explanation. There is a distinct sense that Nanda has thought these things before, indeed "£rom the first," as she says, but her ideas gain through their articulation and become, for the reader, a focal point for

physical--enforced by her society, she is a much more sympathetic character than Aggie. A~SO,Aggie's behaviour after her marriage perhaps indicates that her apparent innocence before her marriage was artificial and deceptive. Her remarkably rapid, thorough adaptation to an immoral adult world implies pre-knowledge or at least awareness wisely concealed, Aggie is actually closer to Cecilia in Les Liaisons Danqereuses than she is to Pansy. understanding the entire novel. The important conversation hinges on Longdon's wish that Nanda not atternpt, for his sake, to be like her grandrnother. He assures her:

'1 hope you don't think 1 want you to be with me as you wouldn't be--so to speak--with yourself. 1: hope you don't think 1 don't want you to be frank. If you were to try to apDear to me anything--!' He ended in simple sadness: that, for instance, would be so little what he should like.

And Nanda replies,

'Anything different, you mean, from what 1 am? That's just what I've thought from the first. One's just what one &--isntt one? 1 don't mean so rnuch,' she went on, 'in one's character or temper-for they have, haventt they? to be what' s called "properly controlledu--asin one's mind and what one sees and feels and the sort of things one notices.' (229-230)

Nanda dissociates psychology, that is, one's character, from one's mind, from consciousness. If what one is is "one's mind and what one sees and feels and the sort of things one notices," then one is self-constituting and consciousness is creative. Consciousness involves a continua1 making and creating from an awareness of the world, the visual and tactile world that seems to be external and objective, and from a connection with other selves, what James loosely calls one's relations, including one's society, conversations, exchanges, thoughts, indeed al1 manifestations of relatedness to others. Consciousness internalizes what is external and continually changing and cannot therefore be fixed in the way that Nanda suggests 132 character or temper are. Consciousness is not static, and because consciousness is self-constituting, self or identity enjoys a similar instability, always dependent on changing relations. Longdon, after giving her statement consideration, asks if the things she speaks of depend upon other people; Nanda responds first, indirectly, by an appreciation of him as one of those "other people," implying that if al1 people were as trbeautif~ltfas he (230), one would, in so far as one sees and feels in relation to others and one is "partly the result of other peopleH (230), be also oneself vbeautifulw; then she strikes out, directly, saying "with her strange, cool lirnpidity," "'Granny wasn't the kind of girl she couldn't be--and so neither am 1"' (231). Her meaning is clear: one lives in and is made by one's social, historical, and cultural context- Nanda realizes that she is ''confined by the conditions . . . engaged in the tangle, to which we look for nuch of the impress that constitutes an identity"

(Art 47). The idea is not profound; but Nanda's precocious recognition of it and her frank articulation of her understanding are. After Nandais pronouncement, Longdon, mute, uncornfortable, and "perceptibly colouring," finally exclaims, n'I wish immensely youid get married! His rernark may be read two ways: the first is that he wants her married to fix her, to stop her mobility, indeed to stop the rnobility of her consciousness; or second, he wants her married because he wishes her in a relation in which her best self may be realized. 1 believe it is the second that Longdon wants for Nanda. The two readings are not mutually exclusive; the placing and restricting of marriageable young women is a subject of The Awkward Ase and is closely tied to the question of identity. Nanda's 'coming out' involves numerous conventions and restrictions--she is allowed only the freedom and knowledge that society dictates. Although the unconventional Mrs. Brookenhamfs guardianship of her daughter does not entirely follow society's prescription for the management of marriageable daughters, this prescription is, nonetheless, the standard to which she and Nanda must answer and by which they are judged. A contemporary observer of upper-class English society describes the accepted type of the English girl. His comments are worth noting in detail because they so clearly expose a convention that Nanda's character and behaviour defy:

The English girl has always been dependent upon her mother to get her a husband. You do not hear in London

of a girl's coming' OU t. You hear of her being brought out. If the girl doe s not marry dur,ing her f irst or second season, it is the mother who is pitied. . . . The girls seem to have less interest in-the business than the mother. They seldom have the air of being on active service. They are not asked to take part in the manoeuvres. . . - Their role is passive. The mothers would be horrified if they saw their daughters thinking and acting for themselves. So, 1 suppose, would the eligible young men. . . . Life does-not begin with the English girl on her coming out. She is still in the niirsery or the school-room, is still the bread-and- butter miss, still the nonentity, still the shy, silent, unformed creature she was. She has no conversation, or none that does not require drawing out. . . . She knows that she has been taken to market. . . . She has been taught to be timid. Opinions, ideas, initiative of her own . . . any knowledge of the world or of life--al1 these things are to her forbidden. . . . Her incapacities are hereditary; her notions are purely conventional; Mrs. Grundy is the Deity who rules over her Uni~erse.'~

The universe in which Nanda is situated is a privileged, highly mannered, very restricted one; moreover, as both James and George Smalley insist, it is peculiarly English. In the preface to The Awkward Aser James compares national forms concerning the handling of the awkward presence of young, unrnarried womsn like Nanda, in adult circles accustomed to uninhibited conversation. He contrasts the self-conscious, embarrassed English practice with "the perfect system on which the awkward age is handled in rnost other European societies," particularly the French, who "al1 analytically, have conceived of fifty different proprieties, meeting fifty different cases" to shield female adolescence from corrupting talk and influences. The

American system, if opposite to the French, is equally simple: it is based not in precaution and exclusion but in the "'basic' assumption that the female young read the newspapersu (Art 104), that they have a developed knowledge

l4 George W. Smalley, "Notes on Social Life,' London Letters, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1891) 2: 101-104. of adult affairs, and therefore that no alteration of the conditions of intercourse is required. The American theory tco is that al1 talk should be suitable for young ears. Between the French and American extremes, James positions the English:

[Ilt threw again into relief the inveterate English trick of the so morally well-meant and so intellectually helpless compromise. . . . Nothing comes home more . . . to the observer of English manners than the very moderate degree to which wise arrangement . . . has ever been evoked; a fact indeed largeiy explaining the great interest of their incoherence, their heterogeneity, their wild abundance. [The American] system allows as little compromise as the French; it has been absolutely sin~le.. . . The English theory may be in itself almost as simple, but different and much more complex forces have ruled the application of it; so much does the goodness of talk depend on what there may be to talk about. There are more things in London, 1 think, than anywhere in the world; hence the charm of the dramatic struggle reflected in my book. . . . The circle surrounding Mrs. Brookenham, in my pages, is of course nothing if not a peculiar, even a 'particular' one. . . . (Art 104-5)

The compromised, incoherent English system, therefore, causes awkward and difficult social relations both for the adults involved and when the young woman is as intelligent, advanced, and aware as Nanda is, for the young woman too. Kence Nanda's tendency to be frequently evasive and reticent is the result of her position as ambiguous partipant in the adult world. James's emphasis on the peculiarity of Mrs. Brookenham's set and its particular problems hinges on the fact of its being English and situated in London. 136

1 will return later to an analysis of Nanda and her awkward situation; but first, since James pronounces that the charm of his drama depends on it occurring in London, I will discuss the implications of Nanda's being a Londoner. As Smalley, an American and outsider like James him~elf,'~ points out, al1 sets have their peculiarities of rnanner and speech, but those he observes in London at the turn of the century are especially exclusive and difficult to penetrate:

If tnere be anything true of al1 sets, it is that each has certain shibboleths of its own. Each speaks a language of its own, or at least has its own topics as well as topics which are more or less common to all. Nothing is more characteristic of society than that it takes so much for granted, but each coterie takes different things for granted; has a different slang, if such a word may be applied to the talk of those who dwell in these elysian regions. . . . The conversation, indeed, is seldom monotonous or on one topic only, but whatever the topic may be the talk is full of allusions, of unfinished sentences, of hints, of phrases and references that are simply incomprehensible to the outsider. . . . Yes, and in London . . . you want a pilot among the shoals and quicksands far more thaz in deep wâter. l6

The importance of Loridon in The Awkward Ase may easily be overlooked since there are few specific references to or descriptions of places in the city itself. Those few references include Mrs . Brookenham's reflections from her window on the prospect of Buckingham Crescent (40), her

l5 In praise of James' s deep acquaintance with the Engl ish mind, Smalley says that "a better not ion of what the best English talk is like may be had from his books than is to b e gained elsewhere, unLess you visit Engl and" (65). description of seeing Lady F~MYlike "a very large blind person in the middle of Oxford Streetn (2801, the narratorts comment that an afternoon in August is "hot and the London air heavyn (281), and the mention of Nanda's afternoon with

Mr. Longdon in South Kensington Museum (287). Although London is seldom directly treated, it is, nonetheless, central to the novel and functions in two ways.

First, like New Yor~in Washinqton Square, London is the actual social and physical setting for the novel, the place where the particular problerns posed by Nanda's coming out, "this crisis, and the sense for it in those whom it most concernsl' (Art 100) , can occur:

We are shut up wholly to cross-relations al1 within the actiori itself; no part of which is related to anything but some other part--save of course by the relation to the total of life. . - . I saw the point of my game al1 in the problern of keeping these conditioned - relations crystalline- at the same time that 1 should, in emulation of life, consent to their being numerous and fine and characteristic of the London world (as the London world was in this quarter and that to be decyphered) . (xx)

The story depends on such topical social phenornena as the London 'squashf and the London season; in fact, the ten books of the novel, each named for a character, cover eighteen months, the first four books in London during the 'season,' the second three between London and two countryhouses during the summer 'off season,' and the final three back in London for the next season. The squash, as the season is "elegantlyv called in London, is "an elbowing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mobn (20). Smalley holds that "the greatest interest of London is the sense the place gives of rnultitudinous life," and the "rush and crush of these weeks of fashionN are "a phase of greatest

intensity."" Of course, providing social venues for the corning out of young marriagea~lewomen is an important function of the London season. London therefore signifies as an historically real setting and as part of the "prime propulsive force of The

Awkward Asc." In his comrnents on the "scant but quite ponderable gerrn" of the novel, James ernphasizes the centrality of his "particular London impression":

The seed sprouted in that vast nursery of sharp appeals and concrete images which calls itself, for blest convenience, London; it fell even into the order of ch€ minor 'social phenornena' with which, as fruit for the observer, that mightiest of the trees of suggestion bristles. ft was not, no doubt, a fine purple peach, but it must pass for a round ripe plurn, tne note one had inevitably had to take of the difference made in certain friendly houses and for certain flourishing mothers by the sometimes dreaded, often delayed, but

never fully arrested coming- to the forefront of some vague slip of a daughter. . . . One haà been present again and again at the exhibition 1 refer to--which is what 1 mean-by the 'coming straight' of this particular London impression. . . . (Art 99-100)

The city functions in a second, less literal way as well. London, or more precisely the activity of walking or wandering in the streets of London, figures as a metaphor for consciousness itself: consciousness, perception, and the

" Smalley, 43. 13 9 acquisition of knowledge are represented as a kind of path- finding. In its complexity, density, and intricately crisscroçsing map, London is a spatial equivalent of the cornplicated paths and intersections of James's characterst relations with each other. When the somewhat bewildered Mr. Longdon gathers that Mrs. Brookenhamts coterie is "a little sort of a set that hang very much together," Mitchy adds that they are "a collection of natural affinities," "not a formal association nor a secret society--still less a 'dangerous gang' or an organization for any definite end," with Vanderbank a "great figure" among thern before whom Mitchy "grovelsu (124-125). Perplexed and slightly ernbarrassed by such confidences, Longdon "turns awayu and "rather aimlessly wandersv; arrested again by Mitchy's attempt to explain Vanderbank's position in the group, Longdon "once more sidles awayu (125-126). That Longdon is thinking deeply is figured by his wandering: physical mobility bespeaks mental mobility. Wandering is thinking. Later, Longdon's extreme interest in Nanda causes him to "quietly wacder awayu and trying to figure her out, he remarks that he's always liked too much to see where he's going (150). While Longdon, Nanda, and Mitchy await Vanderbank in his rooms, Van asks why they are Ithuddled there as if [they] were on a street-crossingtt(133) . Little Aggie, of course, "waits for the word of directionm (93) . Vanderbank pointedly remarks to Longdon, "Wetrelost--and you find usm (35). Complicated relations, perceptions, situations--al1 that a deepened consciousness depends u~on-- are throughout the novel realized in terms of the city, of wandering, of losing one's way, and of iinding onefs wal-. In the preface, James anticipates the novelfs metaphorical use of London as a olace of mystery and danger, of labyrinthine paths and tangles that represent thought processzs, by referring continually to his revived interest in and rereading of the novel as taking Voot~teps,~ "following critically, frorn page to page, even as the red Indian tracks in the forest the pale-facen (Art 115). He speaks of the novelist as the "crouchingu hunter or tracker whose purpose it is " ' to haunt, to startle and waylayHt (110) the reader, who "can't . . . find [the] way at all," who is tllostin the tangle of the forest" 16.' He

'' In "Flickerbridge," one of the stories collected in The Better Sort (New York: Scribner, 1903), James again uses the metaphor of walking and Éinding ways as a figure for London life: "The British capital was a strange, grey world to him, where people walked, in more ways than one, by a dim lightM (144). And in The Winss of the Dove (1902), Miily Theale's "big dim experimentM--tosomehow live while facing death--begins with her wandering "the grey immensity of London. "She passed along unknown streets . . . [she] only wanted to lose her way . . . she stopped and chose her direction in which she quite lived up to his injunction to rejoice that she was activeu (New York: Scribner, 1908, 1: 247-249).

l9 Images of the crouchino hunter and the Indian trackex in the forest evoke not London but the Upper New York State of James Fenimore Cooper. However, the urban stalker who haunts, startles, and waylays is a prominent figure in the late-Victorian imagination. Popular contemporary narrative attests to the fascination with such mysterious stalkers (and murderers) as Jack the Ripper. refers to Nanda's situation as one which seems "to a

careless eye so to wander and sprawl" (115); he describes the conversation between Vanderbank and Mitchy under Mr. Longdon's roof as a "nocturnal passageH illuminated to bring

the two men to safety by Vlares of the exhibitory torch

through the labyrinth of mere imrnediate appearancesn (117). The images accumulate and are consistently those of wandering, of losing one's way, and of finding pachs. To walk out, to wander, in London means to be conscious and to explore the implications of consciousness; moreover, it implies acquaintance with secret, even forbidden sexual knowledge. In City of Dreadful Deliqht: Narratives of Sexual Danser in Late-Victorian London, Judith Walkowitz analyzes

the way the city "helped to inspire a range of explorations into consciousness and identity" and specifically the way

London was traditionally Che landscape--real or imaginary-- for urban male spectatorship, personal adventure and self- creat ion :

Throughout the Victorian period, it had been the prerogative of privileged men to move speedily as urban explorers across the divided social spaces of the nineteenth-century city, to see the city whole, and thereby to construct their own identity in relation to that diversity. However, in London in the 1880s, the prevailing imaginary landscape of London shifted £rom one that was geographically bounded to one whose boundaries were indiscriminately and dangerously tran~~ressed."

The contesting of city terrain, Walkowitz argues, comes about mainly because middle and upper-class women entered

the public sphere, as "shopping ladies," club members, charity workers, political activists and "New Women,"" making their physical presence felt in city streets. In short, women began to walk, unescorted, about the city. In

"A London LifeN (18881, the young American heroine, Laura Wing, staying with her wealthy, married sister "fran the first established her right to tread the London streets alone," and accompanied by a young American man, she goes

£rom her sister's house to St. Paul's "in a romantic, Bohemian manner . . . walking the short distance to the Victoria Station and taking the mysterious underground railway."" Laura's behaviour, however, is exceptional; she remarks, "'if we were both English--and both what we are, otherwise--we wouldnft do this"' (151). Her sister is

Judith Walkowitz, Citv of Dreadful Deliqht: Narratives of Sexual Danser in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992) 9-10. " The term referred in the early 1880s to a small percentage of independent, advanced, comparatively well- educated urban women who, although their number was small, nonetheless had considerable influence on women and on perceptions of women. By the 1890~~the term and "new wornen" were widespread . -11 Henry James, "A London Life," The Cornplete Tales, ed. Leon Edel, 12 vols. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1964) 7: 138, horrified that Laura has been %nocking about in cabs"

(162). Such manifest independence is laden with implications:

By ventuxing into the city center, women entered a place traditionally imagined as the site of exchange and erotic activity, a place symbolically opposed to orderly domestic life, where, to quote Roland Barthes, ?subversive forces, forces of rupture, ludic forces act and meet." This cityscape of strangers and secrets, so stimulating to the male flaneur, was interpreted as a negative environment for respectable women, one that threatened to erase the protective identity conferred on them by family, residence, and social distinction^.^

In tlEnglishHoursu (1891), James compares the city to a monsteG4 saying,

She is like a mighty ogress who devours human flesh; but to me it is a mitigating circumstance--theugh it may not seem so to everyone--that the ogress herself is human. It is not in wantonness that she fills her maw, but to keep herself alive and do her tremendous work- She has no time for fine discriminations. . . . It is not to be denied that the heart tends to grow hard in ber Company. . . to live with her successfully is an education of the temper, a consecration of one's private philosophy. . . . She may take away reputations, but she foms character. She teaches her

Walkowitz, 46. '' James's comparison of London to a monster is perhaps typical of contemporary rhetoric used to describe the city and its dangers. Walkowitz remarks that Vnonstrous metaphors" were used by newspapers in 1888 to describe the sex crime, murder mysteries of London's Jack the Ripper. She records the Dailv Teleqraph: "we are left. . . to form unpleasant visions of roving lunatics distraught by homicidal mania or bloodthirsty lust. . . or finally we may dream of monstres [sic], or ogres" (197). Clearly London itself is figured by or at least associated with the monstrous. victims not to "rnind," and the great danger is that they shall learn the lesson too well."

Familiarity with the "mighty ogress," London, destroys reputations but builds character--an acceptable, even desirable outcome for a man, but certainly not for an upper or rniddle-class woman, for whom respectability and reputation were indispensable .'6 Thus while it is natural for Vanderbank to walk alone in London--the novelfs first sentence informs us "Save when it happened to rain Vanderbank always walked home" in "the ernpty streetN-- natural for him to be "out every night" (2061, and equally acceptable for Nanda's brother Harold to "run aboutu (48) as he chooses, such independent behaviour in upper and middle- class wornen is closely scrutinized and usually criticized.

Nanda does, however, go about London on her own, is often "on the loosetl(199) as Mrs. Brookenham, with no real disapproval, remarks, adding that Nanda is thoroughly "the modern daughter" (199) . As such, Nanda, to a large extent , selects her own friends, makes her own arrangements,

"English Hours," Collected Travel Writinss: Great Britain and Arnerica, 2 vols. (New York: The Library of America, 1993) 2: 30-31. That Christina Light in The Princess Casamassima often walks ünaccornpanied through London streets seeking fresh encounters with the "peoplet1is part of the eccentricity and "extravagance of her attitudeM (Art 74). While she is by no means an exernplar of appropwiate conduct for young ladies, we must remember also that Christina is a married woman and, as such, enjoys a more uncensured freedom in conduct and movement than a young unmarried woman like Nanda does. 145 casually accounts for her movements, and has her om latch- key, that "symbol of bachelor independence."" The first thing remarked on when she arrives, unescorted, at Vanderbank's rooms to meet Mr. Longdon is the "singular effect of her self-possession'' (130), an attitude that is literally true, for Nanda has walked there alone, and much

is made of that by Mitchy and Vanderbank. Mitchy, amused, at first does not believe Nanda has been sent off alone and wonders what Mrs. Brookenham's "idea" can be (1311, and although Vanderbank says it is "jolly" of Mrs. Brookenham to let Nanda corne by herself, he clearly finds it unusual as well. The narrator remarks that "it might have been apparent . . . that [Vanderbank] found nothing wonderful in her daughterrs unsupported arrival" (133); the "might have been apparent" implies Vanderbank certainly does find it strange, but he conceals his surprise and his disapproval of

Mrs. Brookenharn's "systemu from Mr. Longdon. For other members of Mrs. Brookenham's set, Nanda's independence causes considerable amusement, concern and meddling. Mr. Cashmore, punning on Mrs. Brookenham's remark that keeping track of the whereabouts of her daughter or trying to enter into her life is like attempting to "get into a railway train while it's on the rush," asks if Nanda is %O 'fast'" (165). Of course the lecherous Cashmore fully intends the sexual innuendo. The Duchess wonders when

'' Walkowitz, 71. Nanda is ever home, upbraids Mrs. Brookenham for her

materna1 irresponsibility (531, criticises Nanda's

friendship with the %O immensely initiated" Tishy Grendon, suggests that Nanda is already too "fearfully exposedu to

marry well, and even implies that Nanda may ~e a bad

influence on her own ward, Little Aggie (57). Self- righteous and self-aggrandizing in her om role as moral

guardian, the Duchess naturally attributes the "SO serious

matter of Nanda's exposure" (100) to "the peculiar range of aspects and interests she's compelled to cultivate by the

special intimacies that Mrs. Brook permits herv (112). The extent of Nanda's exposure and knowledge is symbolized by the illicit French novel, unsuitable reading material for a young unmarried woman. Nanda lends the book

to Tishy Grendon and writes its owner's name, Vanderbank, in its cover, thereby proving that she herself has read it. The novel, passing as it does through numerous hands--Van's, Mrs. Brookenham's, Nanda's, Tishy's, and, in a manner, Little Aggie's--becornes a symbol for sexual play and knowledge. For instance, when Aggie, married to Mitchy,

sits on the "small volume in blue papertl (431) to keep it from Lord Petherton who pulls her off the book, the comments elicited by their game are charged with sexual meaning:

Aggie, overnight become udeliciously cleveru (4281, explains, "it was a real pull. But of course . . . from the moment one has a person's nails, and almost his teeth, in 147 one's flesh--1" (431). It is clear that she is no longer a 'tabula rasaf but has instead llgrown hectic overnight with prurient s~ribblings.~'~Adeline Tintner explains the significance of the book:

The book in its bodily presence and the manipulation it receives from al1 the characters enters the novel as a character itseli or, rather, is a measure against which the conflicts in this society are set. . . . The "beastly thing in motionw has galvanized al1 the characters and revealed their erotic concerns. The French novelts passage through their hands has been a rite by which the degree of their persona1 and sexual relations is indicated?

Nanda's reading of the French novel, her knowledge of the erctic liaisons of her mother's cosmopolitan clique, and her independence in the city cause the Duchess and others to claim that she is too fearfully, prematurely exposed and, therefore, spoiled for marriage. The Duchess warns:

'Men, after all, the nice ones--are not on the lookout for little brides whose usual associates are up to snuff. It's not their idea that the girls the; marry shall already have been pitchforked--by talk and contacts and visits and newspapers and by the extraordinary way the poor creatures rush about a~dal1 the extraordinary things they do--quite into evervthinq.' (57)

But the Duchess mistakes cause for effect. Nanda's precocity derives from much more than her knowledge of her

'8 Cynthia Ozick, What Henry James Knew (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993) 125.

" Adeline R. Tintner, The Cosmopolitan World of Henry James (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1991) 157-158. married friends and thsir affairs: that Nanda "knowsflmerely attests to what lies beneath in Nanda--a mind that is thoughtful, observant, I1rnost acutew (225), and capable of making "fine distinctions" (223). To realize that Nanda possesses a highly evolved consciousness, one need only compare her to little Aggie, to whom adults talk baby-talk, calling her "you dear strange 'ickle' thingH (931, even though she is seventeen or eighteen (16). Aggie's exaggerated density disallows even the most banal conversation; Longdon gives it up because "she understood too littleu (239). Indeed, Aggie seems to have no thoughts at all: she is "impartial;" her expression is "a general blind senseu (97); her face has "al1 the elements of play1' but "they had nothing to play withu (240). Compare her to

Nanda :

Nanda, beside her, was a Northern savage, and the reason was partly that the elements of that young lady's nature were almost indecorously active. They were practically there for good or for ill; experience was still to corne and what they might work out to still a mystery; but the sum would get itself done with the figures now on the slate. On little Aggiets date the figures were yet to be written; which sufficiently accounted for the difference of the two surfaces. Both the girls struck him as lambs with the great shambles of life in their future; but while one, with its neck in a pink ribbon, had no consciousness but that of being fed with the small sweet biscuit of unobjectionable knowledge, the other struggled with instincts and forebodings, with the suspicion of its doom and the far-borne scent, in the flowery fields, of blood. (238-239) 149 The image of lambs and blood is portentous: both young women are made commodities on the marriage market and thus both are cornpared to lambs, but the pink ribbon around Aggiers neck says that she will be nurtured and petted while Nanda is the lamb for slaughter. Nanda will be sacrificed, and, what is more, she knows she will be. Nanda is throughcut the novel "poor Nanda/ yet there is no reason she should be--she possesses al1 the obvious advantages including intelligence, beauty (although not

"staring glaring obvious knock-down beautyu (25) ), social and class status. Nonetheless, Nanda's "indecorously active" consciousness and her mother's machinations consign her to her doom. Early in the ncvei, Mrs. Brookenham playfully but very pointedly remarks to Mitchy that as a consequence of her own cynicism, she has sacrificed Nanda.

Later the Duchess puts it clearly to Mr. Longdon, saying that Mrs. Brookenham rnust sacrifice either her daughter or what the Duchess euphemistically calls I1her intellectual habits," of which Mr. Vanderbank is "one of the most cherished, the most confirmedu (255) . Before the entire group at Tishy Grendon's Party, Mrs. Brookenham, who could have amicably agreed with Vanderbank that the French novel is luno worse than anything elseuu(433 ) and consequently minimized Nanda's and everyone's awkwardness, instead with calculated, exaggerated, materna1 concern, challenges Nanda and deliberately compromises her. In another scene, Mrs. Brookenham contemplates throwing Nanda to Mr. Cashmore because her purity will improve his reptation and prevent his wife, Lady Fanny, from finding a pretext to "boit." Cashmore means nothing to Mrs. Brookenham; still she considers implicating her daughter in what is clearly an undesirable situation. By mere association, the entirely guiltless Nanda is again compromised, for Mrs. Brookenham makes certain that Vanderbank knows every particular of Cashmore's infatuation with Nanda. The "so unutterably 'betet as a feeling of jealousyN (306) can be attributed to Mrs. Brookenham, her protestations to the contrary. Although she manages to check herself, she becomes sharp and bitter at "the sight of a freedom in her daughterfs life that suddenly loomed larger than any freedom of her ownu (327-328). But Mrs. Brookenham is not a villain: in fact, the difficulty of her position, her own unhappiness and loneliness, and her intelligent, perceptive interest in life around her make her a rather sympathetic character. Vanderbank describes her: "'There she is, like the moon or the Marble Arch. . . . One can talk with her for a change.

Shets fine, fine, fine'" (508). It is true that Mrs. Brookenham does sabotage Nanda's happiness, but in part she does so merely by being for her daughter "herself, poor thing, her virtue and her morality" (310-311). That is, by the "ludering English planu (311), Nanda can be no better or no worse than her mother; with "so perverseu (310), so intelligent, so unhappy a mother, Nanda can't be "reallv nice" (311). But "she can't help it" because "[elverything, literally everything, in London, in the world she lives in,

is in the air she breathes--so the longer she's in it, the more she'll knowN (380). To a great extent, then, Nanda's fate seems to be determined by the manipulations of her mother, presumably in her daughter's interest, and by the

London set to which Nanda is exposed. Yet in fact, Nanda's imagination and profound understanding of herself and her social function prove that she actively determines her own course. Like many Jamesian heroines--Isabel Archer, Fleda

Vetch, and Milly Theale among them--Nanda seerns to renounce her own happiness, willingly to sacrifice herself. She loves Vanderbank, but she gives him up--in fact, she sends him, after long absence, back to her mother; she is a

"modern daughter" (166) who enjoys freedom and independence in London, her home, but she willingly forfeits that for a retired life in Beccles with Mr. Longdon, who is at least forty years older than she. Her renunciation, if it is that, is painful to her. In the final scene, the most dramatic and moving of the entire novel, Nanda collapses, "choked with a torrent of tears," and, before Longdon, sobs

"in a passion as sharp and brief as the flurry of a wild thing for an instant uncagedn (540). Images of suffocation and defeat abound in the final pages: Nanda makes a "smothered soundImher "consenting retreat" 3s like the

"snap of a sharp tensionu (535-5361, her smile is "strained"

(539), Longdon's sorrow is "barrenu and helpless (540-541). Perhaps these images encourage critics to view the resolution of The Awkward Aqe as despairing and hopeless. John Kimrney believes Nanda's "going to Beccles may be going to a garden of Eden, but she is bringing with her a tragic view of life."'' Cynthia Ozick says Nanda's decision to go to Mr. Longdon's house, "never again to leave [hirnl--or to -be left" (541), "holds out suicida1 peace: renunciation, a radical swerving £rom hope. Agreeing to enter that house of relinquishment (and moribund refinementb-this time never to leave it again--she is hurried into a final Storm of grief. Ozick relates the novel's ending to unhappy events in James's own life, including his disappointment over the failure of his play, Guy Domville.

After the cataclysmic turning point of Guv Domville, hidden knowings are everywhere in James--notably in What Maisie 6ew 897) and "The Turn of the and culrninating i the last great pair of c~ns~iratorial-wos, The Winqs of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl ( 04) . The recurrence, in his own sensibility, of t paternal vastation, the recognition

of an immutable deprivation ( l1the essent ial loneliness of my lifen), the nearby explosions of suicide and

30 John Kimmey, Henrv James and London (New York: Peter Lang, 1991) 139. Kimmey's assessrnent of the novel as a whole is harsh and unfounded: Vt is, in a sense, another cage novel of the decade that lacks expansiveness, variety, and fundamental human interest" (141). On the contrary, human interest is paramount in The Awkward Aqe.

31 Ozick, 131. self-immolation, the "horrible hoursN themselves--al1 these pitchforked James out of the Victorian and into the modern novel. He broke down both social and narrative forms and plummeted, sans the old fastidiousness (and optimism) into the smoldering detritus of exhausted ways. It is probable that The Awkward Aqe is a novel that knows far more than its author knew, and holds more secrets of panic, shame, helplessness, and chaos than James could candidly face.3'

Ozick's rhetoric is overwrought. The "paterna1 vastation" refers to Henry James Senior's vision of a deathly presence which caused him to fa11 into great depression and necessitated his taking a restorative cure at a European waterhole where his condition was identified as a Swedenborgian "vastation." The term is specific to psychology and refers to a stage in a regenerative process, one involving a profound sense of the abyss, followed by purgation and subsequent illumination.33 As a highly controlled, cleverly ironic, and ultimately affirmative novel, The Awkward Aqe is not evidence of its author's plunge into the abyss. Nor does James, whose felicitous and innovative choice of a dramatic, ironic form in the marmer of "the ir~geniousand inexhaustible, the charming philosophic 'Gyp'" (Art 106),'" "plummet into the smoldering

33 Leon Edel, The Life of Henri. James, 5 vols. (London: Rupert Hart Davis, 1953, 1962, 1963, 1969, 1972) 1: 32.

3J In The Cosmopolitan World of Henry James, Adeline Tintner traces the influence on James of Gyp, the pen name of Marie Antoinette de Riquetti de Mirabeau, Comtesse de Martel de Janville, a fashionable writer in France during detritus of exhausted waysu in The Awkward Aqe or in the

novels that follow it. 1 disagree too with Ozick's unsupported daim that the novel "knows far more than its author knew." Its writing proves that James hows and faces it dl; so does Nanda. Because consciousness and understanding are represented

as an evolving process, it is important that much be kept

hidden and indeterminate, but indeterminacy does not mean that Nanda (or James) is unable to face herself or her

relation to the world. Knowing is reflective and interpretative; it must be worked through. Thus, the

narrative mut expose the configuring activity, the composing power of consciousness and interpretation, which becomes the central action of James's narrative? The characters and narrative itself must 'hang fire' and must be at least temporarily indeterminate and evolving if James's purpose is to be realized. Al1 cannot be revealed, defined, and explained at the outset. In The Awkward Aqe, the configuring activity of consciousness is effected almost

exclusively through dialogue, whlch functions not only as the narrative method of the novel but also as an enactment of the novel's central idea.

the 1890's. Gyp's social sketches about sophisticated, privileged cliques took the form of little plays admired for their witty dialogue and levity. '' Paul B. Armstrong. introduction, The Challense of Bewilderment (Ithaca: Corne11 UP, 1987). The intricacies of Jamesian dialogue exhibit al1 of the complications of gamesmanship, and these in turn reflect the paradoxical combination of community and separation which makes others both a resource and a problern for understanding.36

And Austin Warren puts it thus:

The dialogues exhibit the conscious mind working hard and critically scrutinizing al1 available facts, examining sernantically the import of words. This work of intelligence is for James a social act. There is much about ourselves and others which can be got at only this ~ay.'~

In dialogue the characters work out their relationships with each other and project interpretations that reveal their individual consciousnesses- Neither individual consciousness nor that consciousness shared by the group (shared consciousness is partly what makes it a group) is discrete: in these dialogues self is both separate from but intricately tied to others. Mitchy declares they "share and share alike--one beautiful intelligencet1(297), meaning that together they have a shared intelligence and they also possess separate, individual intelligences that they share with or give to others, as they choose. Vanderbank's peculiar case with Mr. Longdon, for instance, provides them with "a problem for understanding." Vanderbank explains:

36 Armstrong , 5 6.

37 Austin Warren, Raqe for Order (Chicago: U of Chicago Pt 1948) 147. 'What & splendid, as we cal1 it, is this extraordinary freedorn and good humour of our intercourse and the fact that we do care--so independently of our persona1 interests, with so little selfishness or other vulgarity--to get to the idea of things.' (301)

He goes on to Say that perhaps they pay for their sincere pursuit of "the truth of the case" in their self- consciousness. Then he completes Mitchy's question,

"'Besides, how can we be properly conscious of each other--?"' by saying, "'without my finding myself for instance in you and Mrs. Brook? We see ourselves reflected-

-wetreconscious of the charming whole"' (302-303).

As they adopt each other's phrases and cornplete each other's thoughts, the dialogue seems to take on an independent life that transcends the separate identities of the speakers. It transports them out of their individual subjectivities and into the 'we- subject' of their talk."

The usual conceptual dichotomies--self and other, subject and object, inner and outer, the mind and the world--are bridged by the constitutive power of their dialogue. In dialogue, they analyze the world, admittedly a circumscribed one (but the point is depth not breadth), and themselves. In Thinkinq in Henrv James, Sharon Cameron explains, "the analysis of the world is, also necessarily . . . equivalent to the analysis of one's consciousness of it"; thus, "the subject, when it is constituting the object, also

'' Armstrong , 5 5 . 157 constitutes itselV3' Meredith Anne Skura makes the same point when she States, ~Consciousnessof being a self with something to express cornes about through the ministrations of others recognized as separate from the self. Thus the private experience of self-consciousness is not possible without the public social contexts, structures and responses that define the individual."" At the beginning of the novel ("frorn the £irstu),Nanda recosnizes and explains to Mr. Longdon the symbiotic relation of self and other, of consciousness and the world; by the end of the novel, however, Nanda enacts that relation. Hers is the experience of achieving self - understanding and realization by understanding others. While her self-consciousness is a value in itself, the question of what the self should do with itself necessarily involves for Nanda the problem of how to be with and for others. By the final book, waiting in state for her expected guests to come to her where she presides in her chamber overlooking the city, Nanda is in full oss session of the answer to the question and the solution to the problem:

"Hasn't it come out al1 round now that 1 know everything?"

(524). She has fully evolved and is capable of sharing her

" Sharon Cameron, Thinkinq in Henrv James (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989) 23, 25. " Meredith Anne Skura, The Literary Uses of the Psvchoanalvtic Process (New Haven: Yale UP, 1981) 173. understanding with Mr. Longdon, for she knows that he will be interested in her interests (527). Nanda's interests are many, al1 of them intertwined. She will help Mitchy and Aggie by involving herself in their lives, by helping Aggie "to find out what sort of person she isu because llit was carefully, elaborately hidden £rom her [Aggiel--kept so obscure that she could make out nothingN

(528) . With kindness and grace, Nanda also eases Vanderbank's awkwardness. Her extraordinary effort with him, once again, breaks dom the barrier between self and other so that Nanda feels she changes places with him:

It appeared to corne out with them rather clearer than before that he was embarrassed enough really to need help, and it was doubtless the measure she after an instant took of this that enabled Nanda, with a quietness al1 her own, to draw to herself a little more of the situation. . . . To force upon hirn an awkwardness was like forcing a disfigurement or a hurt, so that at the end of a minute, during which the expression of her face became a kind o f uplifted view of her opportunity, she arrived at the appearance of havi ng changed places with him and of their being together precisely in order that he--not she--should be let down easily. (500-501)

Nanda smoothes the situation, makes theirs an actual exchange, by subsuming Vanderbankfs awkwardness. She thus facilitates his unembarrasred return to her mother, who is convinced that Vanderbank %ad done more for her than anyone, because it was [he] who had really brought her outu

(507). Mrs. Brookenham realizes herself through Vanderbank, just as Nanda is realized in the final book through her

interaction with Mitchy, Vanderbank, and, most

significantly, Mr. Longdon. With al1 three, the relation is explicitly based in promises and assertions of trust. While

the broken promises in The American and Washinston Square are perhaps the sources for renewed, if rather damaged, personhood, the firm trusts of The Awkward Aqe function both to express the individual and to affirm society and community. This novel ends not with renunciation but with affirmation. Nanda goes forward +,O Beccles, knowing what she is and sure of how she is to be with and for others.

Longdon takes her as she is (543)--withal1 her knowing, al1 that makes her "the horrible impossible" (541). Their eyes, which prove their mutual understanding, meet; their stature is "alrnost equal" (542); their kisses--his on her forehead, hers on his cheek--are solemmly exchanged. Longdon's simple alteration of Nanda's final words, "There 1 am," to "There we are" (545) proves the truth of Nanda's original idea: self is made by its relation to others, is "partly the result of other people," and when the connection is understood, the best self can be fully realized in its relation to community. The Winss of the Dove

Like Nanda , Kate Croy in The Winqs of the Dove (1902)' is a Londoner. Kate, however, is a wornan old enough (she is twenty- f ive) to enj oy a more uncensured independence t han Nanda does, and Kate's self-knowledge and her capacity to act on that knowledge are greater than Nanda's. There is something vague, ethereal , poetic about Nanda (partly because she is the incarnation of her dead grandmother); she floats in and out of salons and scenes, never really clarifying herself or her desires until the end of the novel. In The Wings of the Dove, Milly Theale, who belongs in James's line of American innocents, is more like Nanda. Milly is ethereal, romantic and passive, while Kate Croy is full of purpose and practicality. Kate is not like Catherine Sloper either. Whereas Catherine willingly would have forfeited her fortune without substantially compromising herself, Kate needs money and position to realize her fullest potential. Like Catherine and numerous other Jarnesian women, though, Kate is frustrated in achieving private fulfilment through love; and she is thwarted in her endeavour to reconcile her public and private selves. Kate fails. We cannot even be sure that

Al1 references to the text are to The New York Edition (New York: Charles Scribner's Son's, 1909), Volumes 19 and 20, and will be noted parenthetically. her attempts at self-realization allow her a fuller understanding of herself or of the world, as they do for Christopher Newman, Isabel Archer, Nanda Brookenham, or Lambert Strether, for instance. Kate loses- And in this novel, more than any other, it is questionable that there is anything gained at all. Although private desire and public pressure conflict and cause Kate's dilemma and her interna1 division, she nonetheless tries to accommodate and reconcile the demands of both spheres. She attempts to realize her potential in the private sphere, through her love for Merton Densher, and in the public sphere, through marriage, wealth and position. She will not, though, marry anyone other than Densher, who is poor. Circumscribed by her own relative poverty and knowing how insupportable that condition is, Kate requires a rich Merton Densher, and to secure hirn, she works out a pkn, characterized by most critics as a cold-blooded, unethical cafculation, whereby Densher will make love to and marry Milly Theale, the wealthy American "princess." Milly is dying, and as a widower, Densher would in a short time inherit Milly's immense fortune and share it with Kate herself, as his second wife. The plan hinges on deceiving the unusually perceptive Milly about the nature of Kate and Densher' s relat ionship; they must conceal their secret engagement f rom her, as well as their love for each other. 162 In Henry James: the Drama of Fulfilment, Kenneth Graham

writes :

James was a post-Romantic, a Victorian, an early modern, and an American; and on at least four counts, therefore, it is not surprising that his books should be concerned with the fulfilrnent and frustration of the individual. . . . The prime interest is not that some types or races corne nearer to fulfilling themselves than others, but that in the to-and-fro between thern we see the desire or the need of all individuals for a fuller quality of being. At its highest, even, the desire is for that ultimate integration within the self, and between the self and the world, that is one of the latent aspirations of human consciousness-- including the consciousness of the reader who has been trapped by sympathy into experiencing the particular book.

Milly Theale, the doomed American "princess," is usually

considered the central character in The Winqs of the Dove and made the focus of critical commentary.' Critics concentrate on Milly for obvious reasons--because James himself says she is the "central figure," "the heroine," "my

young woman" (An 288-3061, because she is another in the line of fictional Minny Temples who apparently preoccupy

Henry James: The Drama of Fuifilment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1375) xi.

Historically, criticism divides into two main camps:- the Milly-lovers and the Kate-sympathizers (like the admirers of Milton's Satan, they are drawn to her vitality, her ambition and her great potential). Among those who - focus their attention and their syrnpathy on Milly are Laurence Holland, F. O. Matthiesson, Dorothea Krook and Nicola Bradbury. F. W. Dupee, on the other hand, sees Kate as the main character. And in The Great Tradition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954), F. R. Leavis praises Kate as "a person of such proud and admirable vitality," while Milly is the "great disabling failureu of the novel (192). 163 ` am es', and because Milly is unusual and interesting in so many ways . She is dying of a rare, rnysterious disease. Her illness, never named, is probably tuberculosis (the disease that Minny àied of), even though Kate says, "Not lungs, I

think" (20: 53). Kate, however, does not know; Milly evades al1 questions and conceals al1 details about her second visit to Sir Luke Strett. James drops hints which convince me that it is a disease of the lungs: in the preface he describes Milly Theale as "enqaqed with elements amid which she was to draw her breath in such painH (Art 294), and he compares our view of things through Kate to "our drawing breath through the young woman's [Kate's] lungsn (Art 3041, both images irnplying the insufficiency of Milly's lungs.

' In the preface, James States that the novel "represents to my memory a very old--if 1 shouldn't perhaps rather Say a very young--motive . . . that of a you~gperson conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condernned to die under short respite, while also enamoured of the world; aware moreover of the condemnation and passionately desiring to 'put in' before extinction as many of the finer vibrations as possible, and so achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the sense of having livedH (288). Minny Temple, whose early death marked the end of James's own youth, was like this character and probably James's strong memory of his cousin in particular formed his "motive." The view, frequently expressed by Leon Edel, that throughout his career James never got over Minny Temple's death and continually used her as the mode1 for his American "princesses" perhaps helps to account for James's treatment of Milly. Possibly her association with Mimy explains why Milly's consciousness isn't explicitly represented: perhaps James was reluctant (as he was with the memory of his mother) to render the interior life of a character whose real-life original was for him a private and sacred memory. Leon Edel speculates that Constance Fenimore Woolson, who committed suicide, or James's sister, Alice, are also likely models for Milly. 164

When Milly bravely predicts, "I think 1 could die without its being noticedu (19 :228) , she means that she will hide the symptoms of her disease: The won't smell, as it were, of drugs. She won't taste, as it were, of medicine. No one will know" (20: 53). Since tuberculosis causes fits of coughing and bouts of fever, it is plausible that between acute attacks a remarkable woman like Milly, with her

"ferocity of rnodesty" and "intensity of pridev (20: 54), could conceal her sickness. In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag discusses how consumption, the nineteenth century wasting disease, was seen to make wornen more ethereal, more spiritual, more interesting and how it functioned as a contradictory, complex metaphor to describe, on the one hand, passion (in the fevers and inward burning) and on the other, sexual innocence (in association of tuberculosis with bodily frailty, spirituality, and early death) .5 Miily is interestirq, therefore, because she is sick. In his preface, James comments on the idea of making his protagonist sick, saying, "as if to be menaced with death or danger hadn't been from time irnmernorial, for heroine or hero, the very shortest of all cuts to the interesting stateH(Art 289) .

Illness as Meta~hor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978) . Excepting her cornpanion, Susan Stringham, Milly is cornpletely without family or attachment, having lost "parents, brothers, sisters, almost every human appendage, al1 on a scale and with a sweep that had required the greater stage." Also she is wealthy beyond rneasure. Even her appearance is unusual: her hair is ~exceptionallyred," her "clothes were remarkably black," her face is "irregular" with "too little mere conventional colour and conventional line." Indeed, Susan Stringham attaches herself to Miily because the girl is strange: "She was alone, she was stricken, she was rich, and, in particular, she was strange--a combination in itself of a nature to engage Mrs.

Stringharnfs attention. But it was the strangeness that most determined our good lady's sympathyu (19: 105-6). Unusual and interesting as she is, Miliy Theale is not, in my view, the character who "traps the reader by sympachy into experiencing the book." Dying and deluded, she is overshadowed for me by Kate Croy. It is Kate's consciousness, not Milly's, to which we are admitted; moreover, Kate is the more fully realized, hurnan character. We are not as close to Milly as we are to Kate partly because Milly's presentation is "at second hand, as an unspotted princess is ever dealt with . . . through the successive windows of other people's interest in her" (Art

304-6). Despite James's insistence that indirectness was the best approach to deal with Milly, her realization as a character suffers by it. F. R. Leavis says, "A vivid, particularly realized Milly might for him stand in the midst of his indirections, but what for his reader these skirt round is too much like emptiness; she isn't there, and the

fuss the other characters make about her as the 'Dove' has the effect of an irritating ~entimentality."~Milly ends up being too unspotted, too irritatingly good, too sacrificing, too transcendent.' Although she is as "wonderful" and

"fine" as any of James's later characters, Kate is spotted-- she is more human than Milly (despite the preeminent fact of Milly's rnortality). Kate's presentation is at first hand,

and, as James says, it uabsofutely declined to enact itself Save in terms of amplitude. Terms of amplitude, terms of atmosphere, those terms, and those terms only, in which images assert their fulness and roundness, their power to revolve, so they have sides and backs, parts in the shade as

true as parts in the sunN (Art 296). The amplitude and atmosphere of Kate's presentation make her a heroine of greater Lnterest and syrnpathy than Milly. In fact, Kate is more the heroine than Milly because we are closest to Kate,

Leavis, 192-3. ' In Meaninq in Henry James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991), Millicent Bell deals succinctly and sensibly with Milly's identification with Christ. Bell warns that allegorical readings are unnecessary; instead, James's uses the vocabulary of a religious tradition to reinforce Milly's role as "the representative of disinterested love, even sacrifice" (294-299). Kate's is the central consciousness, and the novel begins and ends with Kate.

However, 1 don? intend to subordinate the importance of Milly or, for that matter, of Merton Densher. Milly is, as James would have it from the begiming8, the subject at the centre of the action; she is the "doven of the title, the subject that makes the story possible, and the object of other characters' manipulations. Even though she does not really & anything except die, Milly' s existence alone, her just beinq Milly is essential to the story. Kate is a woman of action and to a great extent the dichotorny of being and doing that James raises in The American is represented by the characters of Milly and Kate. Without Milly there is neither plot nor plotting; but as the preface indicates, James recognizes serious problerns in the presentation of his

"superficially SG absent" heroine (295) . He admits that the second half of the novel, the part that really focuses on

Milly, is "false and deformed" (302) and he notes "how, again and again, 1 go but a little way with the direct--that is with the straight exhibition of MillyN (306). He ends the preface apologetically, "without having brought the full

As early as 1894, James asked in a notebook entry, "isnrtperhaps something to be made of the idea that carne to me some tirne ago- and that 1 have not hitheïta made any note of--the little idea of the situation of some young creature . . . who, at 20, on the threshold of a life that has seemed boundless, is suadenly condemned to death (by consumption, heart-disease, or whatever) by the voice of the physician." The Corn~leteNotebooks, ed. Leon Ede1 and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford UP, 1987) 102. quantity to light" (306). It is tempting to think that Kate, whose consciousness he built up and really showed, became for James a more vital, full-blown chara~ter,~and

that he rezlized she usurped Milly's position as the central

figure. 1 agree with Mary Doyle Springer who holds that James's plan for "concentric circles, moving £rom the outer circles where we become thoroughly absorbed with Croy and Densher inward where James is preserving his chosen heroine . . . is no recipe for producing main-ness," and that "Kate Croy and Merton Densher seem simply to have wearied of being frame characters to the 'princess' and have

taken over the central area.ll'" 1 hesitate, however, tc give Densher the same daim to centrality as Kate--he has it only in so far as he is connected to her, as into Katefs "'ken' that Merton Densher is represented as swimming" (Art

299). Kate and Densher have a "practical fusion of

Laurence Holland quotes James's original tribute to Kate--the only time James speaks in the first person--in the f irst American edition (New York: 1902) : "It was not until afterwards that, going back to it, I was to read into [Kate's] speech a-kind of heroic ring, a note of a character that belittled [Densher's] own incapacity for actionu (2: 241). Kate has just expressed her willingness to "do what 1 don't like"; so "James's intervention at this point to pay tribute to Kate, in the unrevised version, would implicate hirn explicitly in the plot, thus associating hirn intimately with Kate and Densher's deed. Although "1" was subsequently revised to "heu in the English and New York Editions, the tribute nonetheless bring; "an important matter, Katets heroism, into definite focus." The Expense of Vision (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964) 285-6.

'O Mary Doyle Springer, A Rhetoric of Literarv Character (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978) 162-3. 169 consciousness,~"practical" because it is more efficient for

James to present Densher in his connection to Kate than to develop his relations and environment separately and at length. Thus, James notes that he has only an "occasional need" to see through Densher's eyes (Art 305).

Although Kate is the character who manifestly seeks, in Kenneth Graham's words, "that ultimate integration within the self, and between the self and the world," al1 three characters, Kate Croy, Milly Theale, and Merton Densher, must work out their destinies and their identities. Merle A. Williams says, "Each must seek to compose his or her own identity in response to a series of taxing social encounters, to find an appropriate accommodation between the intimate sense of selfhood and the demands imposed by a

range of public roles. tl'l These roles involve dissimulation and deception. In this novel, as in the others 1 have discussed, and indeed in al1 of James, speech (and silence), knowledge and duplicity are related. This chapter analyses the kinds of dissimulation practised by the three main

" Merle A. Williams, Henrv James and the Philosophical Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993) 90. Although it is t rue that al1 three characters are engaged- - in the struggle ident ified by Williams, his comment actually appl .es most to Kate, whose circumstances impose the most obvious demands and create the most taxing social encounters. 1 will discuss this point in further detail in my treatment of Katefs role playing. 170 characters and the relationship between dissimulation and identity. Dissimulation, the hiding behind a false appearance, is a major motif in this novel. The implications for questions of identity may seem obvious. That is, if people lie about themselves, they are deceiving others about their true nature and creating a false identity. And if people lie themselves, they are practising self-deception that denies their "realU self. And finally, both types of deception are immoral. But as this novel proves, deception cannot be understood as simply as that. In The Winss of the Dove, James distinguishes between kinds of deception; Millyrs pretence that she is not dying, for instance, is a necessary one for her to live and thus has not only validity and logic but also, as Kate declares, "beautyH (20: 53) . She justifies her deception on the grounds that she practises it only on herself: "strange . . . yet lawful, al1 the same--werenttthey?--those experiments tried with the truth that consisted, at the worst, but in practising on one's selfm (20: 142). On the same grounds, Susan Stringham's assistance in "promoting her [Milly'SI illusionu (Art 291) has a similar validity because her complicity is kind, altruistic and sustaining. To some extent, so is Katers:

Kate's predicament in the matter was, after all, very much Mrs. Stringham's own. . . . It might be declared for Kate, at al1 events, that her sincerity about her friend, through this time, was deep, her compassionate imagination strong; and these things gave her a virtue, a good conscience, a credibility for herself, so to speak, that were later to be precious to her. She grasped with her keen intelligence the logic of their common duplicity, went unassisted through the same ordeal as Millyfs other hushed follower, easily saw that for the girl to be explicit was to betray divinations, gratitudes, glirnpses of the felt contrast between her fortune and her fear--al1 of which would have contradicted her systematic bravado. That was it, Kate wonderingly çaw: to recognise was to bring down the avalanche. (20: 140)

"Their common duplicity" refers not only to that shared by Susan Stringham and Kate but also to that tacitly agreed upon by Kate and Milly. Paradoxically, Kate and Milly's dissimulation involves a pretence of taking off masks. Although they pretend to be intimate, frank, and confiding with each otner, this is actually when their pretence is the greatest, for "when they called each other's attention to their ceasing to pretend, it was then that what they were keeping back was most in the air." They resort to "chatter" and to "broken talk, brief and sparingly allusive, [which] seems more to cover than to free their sense" (20: 138-40). As part of her guise of frankness, Kate seems to "let herself go, could, in ircny, in confidence, in extravagance, tell you things she had never told beforen (19: 276). Kate practises a clever substitution of important confidences: one way to keep a secret is to tell a different, second secret. Of course Milly sees through Kate's performance, but the suppression of the truth works to Milly's advantage as well as Kate's. By keeping the truth unspoken, Milly 172 avoids dealing with it and with death, since it amounts to the same thing. However, their linguistic evasions more obviously serve Kate; if the %valancheu is brought down too soon, her plan will fail. Despite the sincerity and compassion of her feeling for Milly, Kate's participation in their shared duplicity is nonetheless ultirnately motivated by self- interest and is, therefore, morally cornpromised and less valid than Susan Stringer's complicity in ~illy'spretence.

Most people would also agree chat Kate's deliberate misleading of Milly about her love for Densher is unscrupulous. And Densher's evasiveness on the subject of his relation to Kate is also, strictly speaking, unethical since a suppression of truth constitutes a lie: "everything was acting that was not speaking the particular word." But " [w]ouldnr t it be virtually as indelicate to challenge her as to leave her deluded?" (20: 76) . Perhaps Kate is right when she tells Densher that Miliy "never wanted the truthIt :

'She wanted vou. She would have taken from you what you could give her and been glad of it, even if

" In "The Will to Believe,'l an Address to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities (1896), liam~amessays, "Bi01ogical y considered Our minds are ready to grind out fa1 sehood as veracity, and he who sr 'Better go without belief forever than believe a lie! merely shows his own preponde rant private ho rror of becoming a dupe Fo r mY own part , 1 also have a horror of being duped; but 1 can bel i.eve that worse things- than being duped may happen to a man in this world." she had known it false. You might have lied to her from pity, and she have seen you and felt you lie, and yet--since it was al1 for tenderness--she would have thanked you and blessed you and clung to you but the more. ' (20 : 326-7)

Kate describes it as the "proper liev (20: 68) ; proper in the sense that it is appropriate for their scheme, proper in that it is discreet, or proper in that it may Save Milly and is therefore morally justifiable? The moral implications of deceit in this novel are not clear cut. In fact, moral ambivalence and subtlety are the reason that this novel, in particular, invites so much speculation about motivation, alternative roles and arrangements, and al1 the other "what if's?" Densher and Kate constantly rehash and reconstruct their roles and their motives, trying to understand them by every 1 ight . Milly's own choice to pretend that she does not know the real state of the lovers' relation is morally ambivalent. 1 am convinced that well before Lord Mark blunderingly tells her Milly does know. Soon after meeting Kate, Milly senses that Kate and Densher are lovers: "Twice over, thus, for two or three hours together, Milly found herself seeing Kate, quite fixing her in the light of the knowledge that it was a face on which Mr. Densherts had more or less familiarly rested and which, by the same token, had looked rather more beautifully than less, into his own." This sense becomes for Milly "the thing," "the unspokenn

(19: 189-90). Later, she "more and more uncomfortablyU finds herself knowing that Densher's presence is "something that was perversely therev in Kate: "'1s this the way she looks to hirn?' she asked herself--the perversity being how she kept in remembrance that Kate was known to himu

(19: 225) . When she sees "in a quick glimrner" Katers "other identity, the identity she would have for Mr. Densher," she is "necessarily disturbedM and although she tries to shake off "the obsessionn (19: 232-31, she nonetheless will not allow Kate to accornpany her on her second visit to Sir Luke Strett. Later, she has the "stranqe sense,' lasting "as üsual . . . but fifty secondsu that Kate is the "peculiar property of somebody else's vision" (19: 257). Such realizations occur with increasing frequency as her friendship with Kate grows :

Then indeed, with small delay, [Milly] sufficiently saw. The conscious eyes, the added advantage were but those [Kate] had now always at command--those proper to the person Milly knew as known to Merton Densher. It was for several seconds again as if the total of her identity had been that of a person known to hirn.

Finally, coming upon them together at the National Gallery, surely Milly must openly admit to herself what she already intuitively knows. Yet she refuses to force the lovers' admission. To remain in the dark, to pretend to believe in Kate's indifference to Densher, allows Milly to hope (for marriage to Densher, of course) and therefore to live. Even though she elicits our sympathy and even though she does not intend to harm, Milly's blindness is dishonest and manipulative, her delicacy self-serving. Thus to sorne extent, she must share the blame for and the ethical repercussions of the dissimulation practised by al1 three of them. How, though, can we blame Milly when her life itself depends on the lie? To accept and openly admit her knowledge is to forfeit her chance for life, to Vurn her face to the wall." So even if she does know, is Milly rnorally to blame for maintaining a pretence of innocence if that pretence sustains her? In Truth in American Fiction, Janet Gabler-Hover explains that death is itself "a lie violating the truth of human life" and ~hat''Milly, in order to live at all, must live as if she were not to die. Thus Millyfs lie is, in a sense, not a lie because her life, wnile she is living, is a countermand to death. . . . In The Winqs of the Dove, James distinguishes, then, between human lies and an existentialistically [sic] deceitful evasion of death that rnakes it in fact possible to live."I3 She explains the difference between Milly's deceptions and Kate's as follows:

Milly's "deceits," however, differ radically from Katefs because they are existential in nature; they involve the issue of how one creates freedom and

l3 Janet Gabler-Hover, Truth in American Fiction (Athens, Geor.gis: U of Georgia P, 1990) 198-9. Although found Gabler-Hoverfs distinctions useful, her comparisons Kate to Tom Sawyer as "the doers" and, in their "paralysing passivityu of Densher to Huck Finn are rather extravagant (see pages 210-11). identity within the boundary of restrictions; not how one denies those restrictions but how one dynamically interacts with them to alter the undesirable aspects of one's future such as impending death or thwarted love interests. Milly does not believe Kate for purposes of self-delusion. She does so with the pragmatic attempt of validating her faith in the future possibilities for her life . ''

If Millyrs attempt to create her freedom and identity is "pragmatic," is it so different from that of Kate, whose u£uture possibilities~ also depend on pragmatic creativity? To distinguish between Katers and Millyrs deceits on the basis of rnorality, to Say Millyrs dissimulation is acceptable because she is dying and wants to live while Kate's is not because she is merely poor and in love, reduces their complex identities (they become like allegorical figures in a morality play who are judged according to what they represent) and misses the remarkable parallels in their situations. Threatened by imminent death, Milly creates herself, as dove and princess, to get what she needs (love and Densher) in clrder to live to her fullest potential; circumscribed by poverty, Kate creates a false self, or at least hides an important truth connected to herself, to get what she needs (money) in order to live to her fullest potential. The equations are strikingly similar and so are the two women: self-reliant, imaginative, perceptive, both are "formed at once for being and for seeing" (19: 33). Both want to "live," which Kenneth Graham describes as Vhe urge of any personality to expand itself, to experience fully, to intensify its awareness and al1 its contacts with the w~rld.~'~The difference is that Milly has money, which gives her, £rom the beginning, the freedom that, for Kate, is a goal. When one is as immensely rich as Milly, Susan Stringham observes, "It had to be the thing you werel1 (19: 121) . "Millyts range was thus immense; she had to ask nobody for anything, to refer nothing to any one; her

freedom, her fortune and her fancy were her law" (19: 175) . Although she is dying and, in an absolute sense, under the strictest constraint possible, Milly is free to create any

identity she chooses, any one that will serve her best, except the one that is most true. The nihilism of that truth precludes its practical application. Milly's

situation comprises three points. One, self is never known to others, except negatively, as an absence. She tells

Susan Stringham, [Y]ourllnever really know where 1 am.

Except indeed when I'm gone; and then you'll only know where

I'm notn (19: 200). Two, the self is unknowable even by oneself: "One never knows oneself," she tells Lord Mark (19: 222). And thres, self or true identity is revealed when it admits death: she tells Sir Luke Strett, III like you to see me just as 1 amf1and "1 feel myself, this way, with you, just as 1 am" (19: 239-40). Milly is dying, that is the only "inner truth about the girlu (20: 203). In this

" Graham, 163. 178 essential truth, she identifies herself with the Bronzino, the woman in the portrait, so like Milly, being "dead, dead, dead," Since the truth of Milly's identity is a nihilistic and thus unacceptable one, she must create functional identities for herself. She is not unlike Kate in that, from the beginning, she realizes the usefulness of assuming various roles and appearances. She is no less conscious than Kate of "values" that might be "workedu to advantage. When she meets Densher in London, she recognizes irnmediately the great usefulness of playing at being "the American girl."

She has "the quick perception that what would be of most service was, so to speak, her own native wood-note." Her "resenres of spontaneity, if not cornicalityn are "cash in hand" which finds Nemployment.N She takes "the tone of New York, llpr~p~~e~[luncheon] as the American girl," and she

vstop[s] then being Americanu (19: 295-9) as deftly as she has initially assumed the role and acted the part. Ironically, Killy receives her greatest inspiration £rom Kate's provocative answer, "'Because you're a dove.' With which she felt herself ever so delicately, so considerately, embraced; not with familiarity or as a liberty taken, but almost ceremonially and in the manner of an accolade, partly as if, though a dove who could perch on a finger, one were also a princess with whom forms were to be observed" (19: 283). The roles of both dove and 179 princess crystallize for her here, although she bas been perceived earlier by Mrs. Stringham as a princess. But Susan Stringham's exaggerated view, at the beginning of the novel, of Milly as a fragile princess speaks more for Susan's romanticism than it does for Milly's character. Actually, Milly is a "robust and extraordinary character," an independent, frank, observant young woman, whose intelligence is "livelyu and "ironical," whose conversation

"exhibits something of Kate's range and flexibilit~. "16 She is not Susan Stringham's frai1 princess, but it is apparent that the role of princess appeals to Milly. She likes the consideration shown her, likes the obsenrance of forms, likes to hold court. The Palazzo Leporelli in Venice, "historie and picturesque . . . with servants, frescoes, tapestries, antiquities, the thorough make-believe of a settlemenc. . . she now--her part of it was shameless--appropriated and enjoyedu (20: 135) . Similarly, the idea of the dove appeals to Milly. As the symbol of transcendental suffering, the dove implies purity, peace and gentleness; protected by Aphrodite, it is associated with love. Milly consciously decides to becorne a dove. That will be her identity, and she makes sure she gets it right, in the same way that she establishes herself in a setting suitable for and reflective of her self-styled

~icolaBradbury, Henry James: The Later Novels (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1979) 92 -4. 180 role as a princess. She "would have to be clear as to how a dove would act." She prepares speeches and answers that will seern "the most dovelike" and she "studied again the dovelike." Most tellingly, she sees "straightaway the measure of the success she could have as a doveu (19: 284). After she learns of Kate and Densher's secret engagement £rom Lord Mark, she holds a dinner party "under some supreme idea" that Densher recognizes is "the character that had already several times broken out in her and that she so oddly appeared able, by choice or by an instinctive affinity, to keep down or display." The character is the

American girl and the supreme idea is to show herself as the dove. To do that, she exchanges her "hitherto inveterate black " for "a wonderful white dressu and "let loosen in it, she "diffuse[s] in wide warm waves the spell of a general, a beatific mildnessV (20: 213-5). Her supreme idea is successfully realized: Densher sees that "Milly was indeed a dove; this was the figure" (20: 218) . In her death that identity becomes fixed. By dying, "al1 her little pieces had now then fallen together . . . like the morsels of coloured glass that used to make the combinations, under the hand, in the depths of one of the polygonal peepshows of childhoodu (19: 243-4). Sir Lukets image of the kaleidoscope is useful for distinguishing between identity in flux, with the coloured chips still in movement and not forming a final coherent design, and fixed identity, the end of the process that gives a completed picture. By dying, Milly stops the revolutions of the kaleidoscope, thus fixing the picture. Her identity outlives her in the form of memory in a way that the identity of a living (therefore changing) person's cannot. With her memory-her fixed identity--Densher falls in love.

Milly's identity as a dove presents a number of problems though, some connected to the dove's important biblical associations. The dove is a symbol not only of peace, gentleness and love1' but also of the Holy Spirit,'' conferring grace and light on Christ and associated with blessing and forgiveness. The temptation to understand Milly through the biblical symbolism of the dove as the Holy

Spirit is very strong: at her death, the legacy she has undoubtedly willed to Densher attests to her forgiving him ând blessing his marriage to Kate. The Holy Spirit, however, is also associated with impregnation (of Mary) and fecundity, as well as with Pentecost, the gift of tongues and the militancy of the proselytizing Christian. None of these associations fits with Milly, so she cannot be understood solely as the dove that is the Holy Spirit. is fair to conclude that the dove image does not have a

" In Matthew 10: 15, Christ instructs his twelve disciples: "Behold, 1 send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves . "

l8 In John 1: 32, the Spirit descends from heaven "like a doveH and abides on Christ. symbolic association that is single in its significance. Moreover, Milly's position and motivation lend considerable complexity and perhaps irony to her identity as the dove. While she may indeed exude "wide warm wavesn of "beautific mildness," it must be noted again that Milly self- consciously adopts the role of the dove at Katers promptrng and that Densher remarks that she is able to keep it down or display it. The self-consciousness with which Milly constructs and fixes her identity compromises the very characteristics by which she wants to be known: is she pure and innocent if she designs herself as such? 1s she sacrificing if her sacrifice is self-serving? 1s she gentle if her love destroys Densher and Kate? Can she be sirnultaneously wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove?'" In the preface, James describes Milly as a "Lorelei," a siren of German legend who entices Rhenish boatmen to their destructicn, and he compares her influence to "the whirlpool rnovement of the waters produced by the sinking of a big vesse1 or the failure of a great businessN whose "strong narrowing eddies, the immense force of suction . . . makes immersion inevitablen (Art 293) . These images give Milly considerable responsibility for the loss and destruction of

the novel's ending. Millicent Bell recognizes the potentially dark side of Milly's construction of her identity:

l9 see Matthew 10: 15, quoted in note 17. More darkly, James also saw (as with Isabel) that the delusions of freedom could convert even his virtuous heroine to the role of her opposite; Milly "plots" against Kate as much as she is plotted against by Kate. . . . Isabel may have been as guilty as Osmond and Madame Merle in stimulating their schemes by her desire to endow Osmond with the power to act that she herself is incapable of exercising. Her passivity-- which cause [sic] her to resemble naturalismfs passive victim character--makes ber, paradoxically, irresistible. So, Milly may, ultimately, be both dove and eagle, holding the other two chief characters in her power. Her generosity and her need as well as her wealth have created the plotters' plot as much as they themselves. Not only have these operated as temptations impossible to refuse, but it is her design- -cal1 it love and sacrifice--thather bequest to Densher finally imposes although it seems most to fulfill the aim that Kate and Densher have worked for. 'O

Milly's "impulse to wrest from her shrinking hour still as much of the fruit of life as possible . . . can take effect only by the aid of others"; thus "appealed to, entangled and coerced [emphasis] as they find themselves" (Art 291) , others become involved in her ucommunities of doom." Even though he insists that the complication is mostly the work of other hands, James States parenthetically that Milly's own are "imbrued too, after all, in the measure of their never not being, in some direction, generous and extravagant, and thereby provoking" (Art 293) . His use of "provoking" does not mean only "causing sornething;" undoubtedly it also means here "incensing to anger." Milly iç, in my view, provoking because, innocently or knowingly (in the final analysis, it does not matter which), she is

'O Bell, 302. 184 the cause of the great waste of Kate's talent for life and of the extinguishing of Kate and Densher's love for each other. Milly dies, leaving Densher pathetically in love with her memory and effectively tying Kate's hands. As Kate knows, because "it's what [she has] to see and to know," they are unable to "really & anythingu (2: 395). The Winss of the Dove invites continua1 speculation on what might have been. Had Milly left Kate and Densher no rnoney or even something less than a fortune, they would have ended together. Had Milly confwonted the lovers and blamed them for their deceit, she would have thrown them together agàin to fa11 back on each other, renewing their loyalty and love for each other. Or had Densher proposed marriage when Milly, even after she has had the truth £rom Lord Mark, receives him to give him precisely that opportunity, Densher, Kate, and Milly herself would ultimately gain. Milly would have loved and therefore lived as Sir Luke prescribed, and eventually Kate would have got the pearls that represent the wealth she covets. Even at the end, Densher wonders, "What a person she [Kate] would be if they had been richu (2: 394). And had Densher the courage to open his own mail instead of allowing Kate's decisive throwing of Milly's letter in the grate, then Milly's intention in giving the undoubtedly stupendous legacy would have been clarified, for the "part of it missed forever was the turn she would have given her actn (2: 396). Although al1 of James's novels elicit similar speculation (What if Isabel had married Lord Warburton? What if the ghosts are real in The Turn of the Screw? What if Maggie, not Charlotte, had accompanied the Prince to the house-party at Matcham?), there are more "what if'st1in The Winqs of the Dove specifically because of the undisclosed contents of the two letters, the first from Milly on Christmas Eve, the second from her solicitors in New York two months later. As in The American, James gives close attention to the physical details of the letters: Milly's letter has her "fine charactersu; it's a "sacred scriptu that Densher holds behind his back for the better part of his exchange with Kate. They both stare at it; they talk about it; Kate says that to hold it is to know; then she tosses it unopened in the fire, preventing any confirmation of what she thinks she knows (2: 386-7). Although Christopher Newman has difficulty reading the rnurdered marquis' scribbled note, he knows its contents and does

"force meaning" from it before he burns it- Kate breaks the seal and reads the letter from New York, thus proving her avarice and failing Densher's test, but Densher does not allow her to inform him (or the reader) of its contents. Al1 we are given is the fact of a lllongenvelope, substantially filled, which he had sent her enclosed in another of still ampler makeu (2: 397). What the letter actually contains becomes less important than the way in which Kate and Densher receive it. Allon White daims that the hidden knowledge contained in the letter only takes on significance in relation to the way it is contained--%ts enclosure rnay be as important as, or more important than, the enclosed":

We have no better representation of this than the letter--or what James calls the ucommunicationtf--sent to Merton Densher £rom Milly Theale at the end of The Winqs of the Dove, and which Kate Croy burns unopened. Those last few chapters of The Winqs of the Dove are as oblique and elliptical as anything which James ever wrote, and it is very difficult indeed for a reader to fathom exactly what is taking place. In this respect Densher's received 'communication' is a perfect index of the way in which communication as such operates in the novel .''

White says communication works to conceal knowledge. If the contents of the letters are sealed, the receiver remains uncomprornised. "Overt representation becomes a source of moral danger, and it is only by staying as far outside communication as possible, by remaining outside the letter, that one might ' get off . ' fi " By refusing to know, then, Densher protects his innocence; he keeps his hands clean in an attempt to redeem himself for his involvement in the

" Allon White, The Uses of Obscurit~ (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) 20-1. White, 21-2. entire affair.l? tIis love for Milly's memory also works to redeem him. The receiver who hurries to open the letter, however, reveals herself as vulgar (and since it arnounts to the sarne in James, immoral) .

But Kate is not vulgar; 1 find her creative, intelligent and practical. If Milly's character and the identity she creates for herself turn out to be "almost literally . . . without practical application to life,u'4 Kate's is preeminently practical. From the beginning Kate is occupied with what she might do to make her circumstances fit her potential. "She waited, Kate Croy," the opening words of The Winss of the Dove, encapsulate Kate's condition--active waiting--from start to finish. In the first scene, ostensibly she is waiting in the shabby little parlour on Chirk Street for the appearance of Lionel Croy, her father; but Kate's state throughout the novel involves waiting: for her marriage to Merton Densher, for her Aunt Maud's approval of a union with Densher, for the death of Milly Theale, for her plans to corne to fruition. Really

Kate is waiting for the opportunity, for the best venue, to express herself, one that will allow the integration of her

Sally Sears points out that "Merton has his own, rather unpalatable way of drawing ethical lines and splitting moral hairs" (85). She calls him a prig. In his shirking of responsibility and his sanctimoniousness at the end of the novel, Densher may deserve Sears' label. '' F. O. Mattheissen, The James Familv (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), 200, quoted in Bell, 291. Mattheissen says this of Minny Temple. 188 public and private identities and one that will fulfill her sense of herself, a sense that is only beginning to define itself at the start of the novel. The opening scene is worth close study because it provides important dues to Kate's psychology. Although she is apparently merely waiting for her father to come downstairs, Kate's waiting signifies something deeper and is representative of the greater postponements, deferrals, and disappointments occurring in her life. She moves restlessly around his "vulgar little roorn," walking out to the small balcony and turning back into the room, paralleling her movement into herself and her thoughts. James irnplies both her physical and mental perambulations when he writes,

Each time she turned in again, each time, in her impatience, she gave him up, it was to sound to a deeper depth, while she tasted the faint, flat emanations of things, the failure of fortune and of honour. If she continued to wait it was really, in a manner, that she might not add the shame of fear, of individual, personal collapse, to al1 the other shames. (19: 3-4)

She looks about the room, her vision going from the "sallow prints on the walls" to "the knitted white centre-piece wanting in freshnessu to her face in the mirror, at which she stares "too hard indeed to be staring at her beauty aloneM (19: 3-5). Although she has cause to be vain about her appearance, Kate looks at her reflection out of neither vanity nor boredom, but rather in an attempt to find something--some answer or truth--that she knows, even before her interview with her father, will not be satisfied by him, for she is reminded that "there is no truth in him" and "he dealt out lies as he might the cards from the greasy old

The conditions on Chirk Street are, in every sense, much too irnpoverished for Kate. Kenneth Graham writes:

If the limiting life of Chirk Street is impossible for Kate Croy, in what direction does her fulfilment lie? It lies, to begin with, in her sense of her own energies and her own identity: the confidence that she has a self to fulfil. Hence the importance of Kate's first action of looking at herself in the mirror, and finding the hint of a 'meaningr for her life in the fact that she can make out her own charm and presence ."

Kate's sense of her ow-n identity, however, is not necessarily as straightforward or escablished as Graham implies. James frequently uses the conditional subjunctive to describe her state: "If she continued to wait it was really, in a manner, that she might not add the shame of fear, of individual, persona1 collapse, to al1 the other shames." "[Tlhe girl's repeated pause before the mirror and the chimney-place might have represented her nearest approach to an escape from them." "[Ilf she saw more things than her fine face in the du11 glass of her father's lodgings, she might have seen that, after all, she was not herself a fact in the collapseM (19: 5-6). The numerous

II if s II and "might have's" undermine the confidence that

Graham, 167. Graham ascribes to Kate. Although she attempts to find meaning in her reflection, questions bristle in Chirk Street, not answers. In fact, Kate is not certain of herself, of her identity, or of the course she ought to take. Instead, she is trying out various ways of thinking about herself and of presenting herself--to others and also to herself. Lionel Croy ironically points this out: "You can describe yourself- -to- yourself--as, in a fine flight, giving up your aunt for me; but what good, 1 should like to know, would your fine

flight do me?" (19: 15). If Kate can describe herself to herself, then she is able to stand at some distance from herself. She ushows herself" her own reflection in the glass (19: 3) as if she were somehow situated outside herself looking in, as if she were two people. She "tries to be sad, so as not to be angry" 1:4 attempting to manipulate her feeling as if she, again, stands at some distance from herself and can thus elicit and control emotions that are usually not contrived in this way but are felt spontaneously. It is clear that she is acutely self- conscious, and more than that, as this first scene suggests, Kate's is a divided or split self. This doubleness hinted at in Kate is exploited more fully in James's late tales, such as "The Private Lifeu

(1892), "The Great Good Place1' (1900), "The Beast in the

Jungleu (1903), and "The Jolly CornerN (1908) in which the 191 possibility of a second self--a 'Doppelganger' or alter ego- -and a life that might have been lived is the theme."

Strether in The Ambassadors (1903) is also very conscious of the life he has missed, the one he might have lived. To some extent, Kate is haunted by her sense of what she miqht be (a sense that takes very definite form when she sees Millyfs pearls), and if she has a ghost, if there is anything that dogs her steps, it is her father's dishonour, which, she says, is "a part of meu (19: 68). But Lionel Croy's "poisonous influence" on Kate, the way in which the "image of her so compromised and compromising father was al1 effectively to have pervaded her life, was in a certain particular way to have tampered with her spring" is not show by James. He admits that he fails in "making good one's dream of Lionel Croy," llpoorbeautiful dazzling, damning apparition that he was to have beenu (Art 297-8). Kate's intense consciousness of her divided self, therefore, should not be exaggerated. She does not have a ghost; she

" Of these late tales involving the alter ego or doppelganger, Donna Przybylowicz in Desire and Re~ression (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1986) says that "the central consciousness is not only dissatisfied with his present identity but is also involved in the symbolic recapture and reconstruction of accomplished facts or in the creation of a suppositional past never experienced. This situation is manifested in the objectification of self which becomes an increasingly obsessive concernu (4). This objectification of self, it seems to me, occurs in The Winqs of the Dove and is characteristic not only of Kate but also of Miliy who consciously creates her own identity and of Densher who, at the end of the novel, reads himself as if he were a character in a book (20: 324). In al1 three cases, a distance from or objectification of self is implied. 192 merely has a heightened sense of the interna1 division that is common, in varying degrees of intensity, to everyone:

So profound, moreover, and lasting is this our intrinsic dualism and duplicity--(and I use the term here, not in its usual moral sense, but in a higher signification, which is purely psychological and metaphysica1)--sodeeply is th3s dualism rooted in our consciousness, that even when we are , or at least think ourselves, alone, we still think as two, and are constrained as it were to recognize our inmost profoundest being as essentially drarnatic."

Kate's conscious dualism is very practical because it gives her great clarity of vision and allows her to project herself into different roles so that she can try out various lines in creating an individual life for herself.

In Hannah Arendt's formulation Kate manifests the unstable, multiple self that attempts to achieve a ternporary stasis in an identity that is a "performative production." In this Eirst scene with her father, she proposes their trying out the father-daughter relationship to make it "worktl for them, even though there is no paternal love or duty, no actual feeling between them. Kate says, "Don't put it to me therefore as monstrous that the fact that we're after al1 parent and child should at present in sorne rnanner count for us. My idea kas been that it should have some effect for

" Friedrich Schlegel, The Philoso~hyof Life and the Philosophv of Lansuase, trans. A. J. Morrison (London, 1847) 389, quoted in Allon White, The Uses of Obscurity (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) 26-27, translated l66n. each of usu (19: 15). as if the appearance of the relationship will somehow make it real and rneaningful.

1 disagree with Sally Sears' daim that Kate's offer to stick by her father is an "attempt to maintain her integrity. literally her wholeness, of self.n28The offer may indeed be sincere and, in hindsight, could have saved her from the plotting that later may seem to compromise her, but by offering to stay with him, Kate is atternpting to realize a potential self, not to maintain one ready-made and cornplete. The novel is clear that, at twenty-five, Kate is "on the verge of discovering her selfhoodN; she finds the world "different . . . from her rudimentary readings" and she makes 'tdiscoveriesevery day some of which were about herself and others about other peopleN (19: 28). Her identity is not established or final, and Kate is as new and open to the possibilities in herself as Milly is on the crest of the Swiss Alps. Sears' claim. however, presupposes a wholeness or cornpletion of self and suggests that Kate has an isolated, autonomous self, a unitary core of being, that she must preserve beneath her exterior. While 1 am reluctant to discard entirely this nineteenth-century conception of self (because I am convinced that James partly

" The Neaative Imaqination (Ithaca: Corne11 UP, 1968) 69. believes in its existence"), 1 do not believe that it can be usefully applied to Kate, who throughout the novel is trying out various roles and identities--daughter,sister, niece, lover, friend, London society girl. She is the person Paul Valery describes: "he is not sure of being positively some one, he disguises and denies, more easily than he affins, himself. 30 Indeed Kate is extremely accomplished at disguise and role-playing because she has been forced to practise dissimulation even before the action of the novel begins- Sears' idea cf integrity or wholeness, in which interiority is matched by appearance, has not been the principle of Kate's past. Not without sympathy for her nor a certain admiration for her spirited loyalty, we hear her telling

Densher how, at fifteen, she helped her mother to maintain a faise front about her father's wickedness:

"That was che way I knew it was true, though 1 recall my saying to her then that of course 1 knew it wasn't.

19 In Desire and Repression {Alabama: U of Alabama PI 1986), Donna Przybylowicz says that in James, "one discovers, on the one hand, a desublimation of desire and a dissolution of the stable self and, on the other, the belief that nothing can annihilate the identity of an unchanging, autonomous will: heterogeneity of desire is juxtaposed to the dictatorial insistence on a describable unified self" (24). James has it both ways, but since 1 am unable to describe unequivocally Kate's unified self, seeing instead evidence of her division, 1 have concentrated on that aspect of identity. "Fragments from 'Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci, Selected Writinss (New York: New Directions, 1950) 93. She might have told me it was true, and yet have trusted me to contradict fiercely enough any accusation of him that I should meet--to contradict it much more fiercely and effectively, 1 think, than she would have done herself . (19: 67)

And very early in the novel we are told, "It wouldn't be the first time she had seen herself obliged to accept with smothered irony other people's interpretation of her conduct. She often ended by giving up to them--it seemed really the way to live--the version that met their convenience" (19: 25-6). (The great facility with which she

is later able to give Milly her "convenient version" should not, therefore, be surprising.) In her wish that "if she had only known [the world] sooner she might have arranged herself more to meet itN (19: 281, Kate is like Eliot's

Prufrock, who "prepare [s] a face to meet the faces that you meet." She is an expert actress, likened to "plasticw in her ability to shape herself for others, to seem to become what they want her to be:

That was the story--that she was always for her beneficent dragon, und& arms; living up, every hour, but especially at festal hours, to the uvalue" Mrs, ~owder-hadattached to her. High and fixed, this estimate ruled, on each occasion at Lancaster Gate, the social scene; so that our young man now recognized in it somethinq like the artistic idea, the plastic substance, irnposed by tradition, by genius, by criticism, in respect to a given character, on a distinguished actress. As such a person was to dress the part, to walk, to look, to speak, in every way to express, the part, so al1 this was what Kate was to do for the character she nad undertaken, under her aunt's roof, to represent . (20: 34) 196 In the perfection with which Kate executes her performance for her aunt, Kate is truly her protege, for Maud Lowder herself is "with almost no inward but with the finest outward resonance" (19: 168) . Ironically, Milly, at once the object of Kate's greatest deception, the solution to her problems, and the obstacle to her fulfilment, is brilliantly perceptive about Kate's identity and her roles. Milly says to Lord Mark,

"[S]hefs better than any of you. She's beautiful" (19:

164). Milly has such perception because sbe herself is very conscious, which means, as she explains to Lord Mark, that she has imagination (19: 162). Lord Mark does not have imagination. Almost irnmediately, Milly recognizes several important characteristics of Kate's identity: first, she recognizes Kate's acting as such; second, she sees that behind the act is Kate's intense consciousness of evervthinq; third, she senses an "objectiveu quality in Kate that makes her seem to "lose her identity" and become unknowable; fourth, she recognizes the great potential in Kate waiting to be realized; and finally, she understands that she cannot name or describe what Kate is, "Save for the lame enhancement of saying she was lovely" (19: 213).

Kate had for her new friend's eyes the extraordinary and attaching property-of appearing at a given moment to show as a beautiful stranger, to cut her connexions and lose her identity, letting the

imagination- for the time make what it would of them. . . . [S[he had looked then other and, as Milly knew the real critical mind would cal1 it, more objective. . . . She became thus, intermittently, a figure conditioned only by the great facts of aspect, a figure to be waited for, named and fitted. This was doubtless but a way of feeling that it was her essence to be peculiarly what the occasion, whatever it might be, demanded when its demand was highest. There were probably ways enough, on these lines, for such a consciousness; another of them would be for instance to Say that she was made for great social uses. (13: 212)

Kate herself is acutely aware of her "valueu for other people, aware of how she exists for them, and aware of her own division. To her sister, Marian, who is modelled along the lines of Anne Elliott's equally selfish and petulant sister, Mary Musgrove, in Jane Austen's Persuasion, Kate is

"reduced to mere inexhaustible sisterhood." She reflects:

[Tlhe moral . . . was that the more you gave yourself the less of you was left. There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you p.^' They did that without tasting. There was no such misfortune, or at any rate no such discomfort, she further reasoned, as to be forrned at once for being and for seeing. You always saw, in this case, something else than what you were, and you got, in consequence, none of the peace of your condition. However, as she never really let Marian see what she was, Marian might well not have been aware that she herself saw. Kate was accordingly, to her own vision, not a hypocrite of virtue, for she gave herself up; but she was a hypocrite of stupidity, for she kept to herself everything that was not herself. (19: 33-41

Kate dislikes the state into which she is forced by Marian's selfishness and uimpossible daimsu (19: 65), impossible

" In the 1902 edition, from which the Penguin edition (1965) was published, "youN was originally "onew in these sentences. Actually, "onen better fits the form of the moral statement. 198 because "should she behave, as she called it, decently--that is still do something for others--she would be herself

wholly without supplies" (19: 29. She sees herself as the

'IkidH that her sister and father, in their desire to profit, will sacrifice to the "lioness" Aunt Maud, I1Britannia of the

Market Placet1(19: 30) '' who holds the purse strings and wants a marriage between Kate and Lord Mark. Kate knows too that if she holds out, if she "prefers an ideal of behaviour" and refuses her aunt's tacit bribe, she appears to compromise the prospects of her widowed sisterfs four

"greasy" children (19: 65), for whom she does not much care but for whom Marian attempts to make her feel a share of

responsibility- Al1 this Kate knows and musc keep to herself even while she recognizes that none of it is really herself; thus, in keeping up the pretence that she does not completely see through her sister (and her father and, indeed, her aunt and Lord Mark too), she calls herself a

"hypocrite of stupidity.It Of course, Katefs seeming stupidity is a defense against the pressure of her oppressive and menacing

circumstances. Her pretence to her relatives is a dodge that buys her time to figure out what she must do to satisfy her "narrow little family feeling" and to have Densher and wealth. For her removal to Lancaster Gate has literally

" In Meanina in Henry James, Millicent Bell treats commodity and money metaphors in The Winqs of the Dove. brought home to her the necessity of wealth: "she saw as she had never seen before how material things spoke to her" (19: 28). The bright, ironic terms in which she expresses what other people wish for her--wealth and position--reveal that she also wants it for herself:

"Of course it [family feeling] holds me. I t' s a perpetual sound in rny ears. It makes me ask myself if I've any right to persona1 happiness, any right to anything but to be as rich and overflowing, as srnart and shining, as 1 can be made." Densher had a pause. "Oh you might by good luck have the personal happiness too." Her immediate answer to this was a silence like his own; after which she gave him straight in the face, but quite simply and quietly: "Darling!" (19: 71-2)

Her refusal to compromise, to accept less than everything, is Kate's great strength. That and the distance integral to her character combine to create her "strangely attractive brutalityu" (and, ultirnately, if she must be judged on such terms, her irnmorality), which allows her easily to pretend, consciously (again she speaks of seeins herself) to act for others. She thus bravely asserts, "1 shall sacrifice nobody and nothing, and that's just my situation, that 1 want and that 1 shall try for everything. That," she wound up, "is how 1 see myself. . . acting for thern" (19: 73). Millicent Bell believes that because Kate's

"outstanding and admirable feature [is] her 'lucidity,' she does not collapse before the unpleasant facts but acts as

33 Graham, 192. she must to make the best of them, knowing, without self- deception, what must be given up as well as what must be done to gain her ends. "" Presumably Bell means that Kate

knows her morality must be given up if she is to achieve complete self-gratification. Arguably, morality does not, at least initially, concern Kate; it becomes important only after Miiiy dies and then only because Densher makes her feel a certain shame for her avarice. With great

consistency, lucidity, and practicality, Kate is honest to herself and to Densher about what she wants, and does not attempt to conceal from herself or £rom him the lengths she will go to get it. Morality is just not the issue for Kate, any more, it could be argued, than it is for Milly. The difference is that Kate's eyes are wide open while Milly wears protective blinkers. Unlike Milly, Kate does not lie to herself; there is no willing indefiniteness permissible in Kate's pragmatic vision of reality as she bravely strives to assimilate her desires, her subjective self, with the world's limiting objectivity. Bell explains:

In Kate James created a representative of that modern pragmatic consciousness in which distinction between the dictated and the freely chosen course has begun to disappear--the will fused with a conscious recognition of conditions that impose themselves and dictate the kinds of accommodation that make for survival, She sees the limits of free will in a universe dominated by objective conditions. Her practicality is confirmed by the most absolute of tests in the complacency with which she can dismiss sexual

" Bell, 305. jealousy as a dispensable emotion; she does not balk at the condition necessary to success, that her own lover make love to another woman.35

Undoubtedly Kate is a pragmatist, but the kind of self- serving practicality she exhibits is not especially "modern," as Bell calfs it. Her lack or, more likely, suppression of sexual jealousy recalls that of Sarah, who sends Abraham to Hagar, and for whom the end also justifies the means. It is not absolutely clear, anyway, that the proposed marriage between Milly and Densher is necessarily to involve sex. Miily is quite ill, after all. In his notebook entry of November 3, 1894, James dismissed the idea of their having sex for several reasons:

[FI or the poor girl, even if he loved her, has no life to give him in return: no life and no personal, no physical surrender, for it seems to me that one must represent her as too il1 for that particular case. It has bothered me in thinking of the little picture--this idea of the physical possession, the brief physical, passional rapture which at first appeared essential to it; bothered me on account of the ugliness, the incongruity, the nastiness, en somme, of the man's 'having' a sick girl: also on account of something rather pitifully obvious and vulgar in the presentation of such a remedy for her despair--and such a remedy only .j6

Ruth Yeazell remarks that "the sexual reticence of the late fiction is in direct proportion to the felt presence of sexuality as a force at the very centre of human life. . . .

Bell, 305. [SI exual knowledge becomes the major mystery, the hidden knowledge which the Jarnesian innocent must at last confront. "'' It is not essential though that Milly's confrontation with sexual knowledge be itself sexual; the essential and, for James, unusually explicit sexual relation in the novel is Kate and Densher's, and their passion for each other is, as Yeazell says, a force at the very centre of their lives. Her love for Densher is certainly the driving force behind Kate. If it were not, she could easily secure the wealth she needs by complying with her aunt and rnarrying Lord Mark (or, since he is so unpalatable, some other titled Englishman). And indeed it is not difficult to see why Aunt Maud thinks Merton Densher unworthy of Kate:

Distinctly he was a man either with nothing at al1 to do or with ever so rnuch to think about; and it was not to be denied that the impression he might often thus easily make had the effect of causing the burden of proof in certain directions to rest on him. It was a little the fault of his aspect, his personal marks, which made it almost impossible to name his profession. He was a longish, leanish, fairish young Englishman, not unamenable, on certain sides, to classification--as for instance by being a gentleman, by being rather specifically one of the educated, one of the generally sound and generally civil; yet, though to that degree neither extraordinary nor abnormal, he would have failed to play straight into an observer's hands. He was young for the House of Cornmons, he was loose for the Army. He was refined, as might have been said, for the City and, quite apart from the cut of his cloth, sceptical, it might have been felt, for the Church. On the other hand he was credulous for diplomacy, or perhaps even for science, while he was

37 R. B. Yeazell, Lanquaqe and Knowledqe in the Late Novels of Henrv James (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976) 20. perhaps at the same tirne too much in his mere senses for poetry and too little in them for art. You would have got airly ne:ar hirn by making out in his eyes the poteztial recognit ion of ideas; but you would have quite fa1 en away again on the question of the idea. s themselve He suggested above al1 , however, that wondrous youth in which the elements, the metals more or less precious, are so in fusion and fermentation that the question of the final stamp, the pressure that fixes the value, must wait for comparative coolness. (19: 47-9)

I quote, at some length, James's description of this "bland

Hermesu as he calls Densher (Art 298) because it is decidedly undescriptive. If Kate can appear to Milly to

"cut her connexions and lose her identityw for minutes at a

time, Densher seems not to have an identity to lose. Like his deliberately indefinite, contradictory catalogue of Christopher Newman's traits, here James gives us an accumulation of negatives that is equally unamenable to classification or definition of Densher. James tells us

what he is not, what he rnight have been said to be, and what he could not be, but never what he iç. Nor does Densher's

occupation, journâlism, define him: his "part tirne" ernployment allows him to "loiteru during the day and James's

off-handedly mentions that he "passed the best hours of each

night at the office of his newspaper" (19: 47). Given James's opinion of journalists, Densher's profession does

not recommend him.38

" Neither the biographer-journalist in The As~ern Papers nor George ~lackin ~he-~everberatorfares well. Both journalists are opportunists, who hurt others by their want of either scruples-or delicacy. From the description, though, Densher combines thoughtfulness with great indecisiveness--not a promising combination, but one that makes Kate and hirn strangely compatible. Ideally, her clear-sighted practicality would balance his comparative vagueness. Their difference makes the match:

Any deep harmony that might eventually govern them would not be the result of their having much in common- -having anything in fact but their affection; and would really find its explanation in some sense, on the part of each, of being poor where the other was rich. . . . Merton Densher had repeatedly said to himself--and £rom far back--that he should be a £001 not to marry a woman whose value would be in her differences; and Kate Croy, though without having quite so philosophised, had quickly recognized in the young man a precious unlikeness. He represented what her life had never given her and certainly without such aid as his, never would give her; al1 the dim things she lumped together as of the mind. (19: 50)

The ugly, incongruent image of Kate's fflumpingtogether" Densher's qualities of mind suggests both their foreignness to her (she calls them "mysteriousv 19: 51) and their vagueness. If Kate could name or explain the dirn tnings, assuredly she would, for she tells Milly, "One knew people in general by something they had to show, something that, either for them or against, could be touched or named or proved" (19: 178). She does not know Densher by any of the criteria listed; she knows hirn because as lovers they share a "common consciousness,~Vhat of persons . . . infinitely engaged together" (20: 10). As well, both are engaged in the pursuit of identity, a pursuit that Kate images as her 205 climbing a ladder against a garden wall. "On reaching the top, she had found herself face to face with a gentleman engaged in a like calculation at the same moment, and the two inquirers had remained confronted on their ladders" (19: 53) . They rernain face to face like this throughout the novel in which images of faces, facing and facades proliferate. The most striking image is, of course, Millyls turning her face to the wall as a metaphor for her losing her will to live. Densher and Kate look into each other's faces (recognizing and knowing the other), they see things unspoken in faces (understanding hidden truths), Kate puts a face on things (interpreting events), they face circumstances and people (confronting), Kate puts a face on for people (acting or dissirnulating), and faces are an index of consciousness. Densher has an impression of Kate's great talent for life, her wonderfully protean, multi-faceted consciousness, from her face:

[Densher] stood before [Kate] a moment, taking in again the face she put on it and affected again, as he had already so often been, by more things in this face and in her whole person and presence than he was, to his relief, obliged to find words for. It wasn't, under such impressions, a question of words. (20: 93)

His love for her is passion and feeling, not words, even though he goes on to Say, in words, that he will do anything for her and he makes her swear that she does "like" him (20: 93). In the great range and changeability of her 206 personality, Kate promises a love that, like consciousness, continually renews itself. It is her capacity to be ever- new that most satisfies Densher:

"Al1 women but you are stupid. How can 1 look at another? You're different and different--and then you're different again. . . . The women one meets--what are they but books one has already read? You're a whole library of the unknown, the uncut." He almost moaned, he ached, £rom the depth of his content.

Kate responds, again revealing al1 her love in her face bef ore she gives hirn the words :

She took it from him with her face again giving out al1 it had in answer, and they remained once more confronted and united in their essential wealth of life. "Tt's you who draw me out. 1 exist in you. Not in others." (20: 61-2)

Like Catherine Earnshaw, Kate defines herself through love and integrated doubleness of identity. She is able to work out her identity and her future through her relationship with Densher. Their perfect communion, proven by the shared understanding and easy intimacy of their talk, is vitaliy important for her sense of herself, so that while theirs continues to be a ~consciousnessmeeting and promoting consciousness~ (20: 1791, Kate has a "profound sense, not only of her own inalienable identity, but also of the reality of her bond with her lover."39 Through love,

- -

'51 Williams, 103. 207

then, Kate's (and Densher's too) potential might be realized and her best self, expressed and continually renewed. Why, then, if it is as fine, as deep, and as extraordinary as James presents it, does their love fail them? In fact, their love is not the problem; their circumstances are, They are isolated from a sustaining community and quite alone against the pressures of the world; their meetings are founded on an unhealthy secrecy which they try to make a source of joy but which is worn out and oppressive for a couple ready to be openly joined in the public sphere; and they have no money. The impossibility and strain of their situation makes them ripe for the plot against Milly that will inevitably destroy their love. Even though their sexual passion remains and right up to the end Densher feels "the need to bury in the dark blindness of each other's arms the knowledge of each other that they couldn't undou (20: 392), there can be no doubt that their love is completely lost. The painful, stiff politeness that hides the animosity behind their final encounters, Densher's gallant and very sorry pronouncement that he would marry

Kate "in an hour," and Kate's final words, "we shall never be again as we were" (20: 405) attest to that loss. Again, recognition is registered in their faces, for " [il t had corne to the point really that they showed each other pale faces, and that al1 the unspoken between them looked out of their eyes in a dim terror of their further con£licttl(20: 401). They will, of course, avoid that dim terror by separation. Doing so, they forfeit the potential identities they might have realized through their fused consciousness as lovers. At the end of the novel, Kate is no longer, for Densher, part of hirnself nor is she rare or different or deep; instead "she gave him the impression of a contact rnultitudinous as only the superficial can ben (20: 394)-

At the close of the novel, Kate is back where she started.,enmeshed in the shabbiness of her family's unhappy circumstances, staying indefinitely with her whining sister, joined by her dishonoured father, who cries often. No wonder she has become "poor Katen (20: 396). And for us, as for Densher, to talk about her situation, her identity, and what will become of her, is prohibited (20: 395). Although we know she has her freedom (without love, what can that dc for her?) and she may indeed accept Densher's offer of Milly's legacy, we are denied the privilege that we have enjoyed al1 along of seeing events and relations througn her eyes: Kate's consciousness, and thus the identity she might work out, are closed to us in the final chapters. Her initial confident assertion that "[Slhe hadn't giveri up yet, and the broken sentence, if she was the last word, would end with a sort of meaning" (19: 6) is proven untrue."

Kate's comparison of herself to an incomplete sentence, one that will somehow get worked out and will have meaning recalls Christopher Newman's attempts to force meaning £rom words. Here, however, Kate herself is the text--%he was the last wordN--andshe is also the reader Although, technically, she does speak the last words of the novel, in her (courageous) atternpt to manipulate and force her story (ultimately a love story) , Kate fails to provide meaning for her life and fails to realize her best self.

In fact, Densher has the last word and his attempt to read meaning is perhaps more successful than Kate' s :

He nimself for that matter took in the scene again at moments as from the page of a book. He saw a young man far off and in a relation inconceivable, saw him hushed, passive, staying his breath, but half understanding, yet dimly conscious of something immense and holding himself painfully together not to lose it. The young man at these moments so seen was too distant and too strange for the right identity; and yet, outside, afterwards, it was his own face Densher had known. He had known then at the same time what the young man had been conscious of, and he was to measure after that, day by day, how little he had lost. (20: 342-3)

Kis is not a love story; he sees only his own face. And in seeing it, from the distance that time, remorse and reflection have afforded him, he recognizes his identity. At the same moment as he sees himself, he knows what he has been conscious of. Identity, then, is only what one is conscious of. Densher's recognition is sadly solipsistic: even when life is experienced by the fine consciousnesses of those like Kate, Milly, and Densher, the self remains painfully alone.

who wonft give up until she finds rneaning; thus she figures her life as the sentence that is to be given meaning by her effort. Conclusion

The final pages of James's novels rarely offer resolutions or certainties: the endings leave us with an indefinite sense of the characterfs future and with the feeling chat the character is at some sort of crossroad in life, where as Susan Stringham puts it, "the margin flood[s] the text (19: 199). The only certainty we have is that something has happened, something that has made a great impression on the character, something that has increased his/her self-knowledge. Not only has he/she been intensely conscious of the experience, but also the character nas consciously created it and understood it in such a way that the experience has affected his/her very being. What the character will & with that understanding, though, is neither certain ncr even relevant. Do we, for instance, envision Merton Densher bringing his deepened understanding to his next relationship?' With whom? Do we ever think of Densher in a relationship with someone other than Kate Croy?

The idea is impossible. Densher's beinq, not any fantasies of his future doinq, is what finally matters. But the nature of that being is undefinable. We can Say only what it involves: solitude, clarity, and creativity. The theme

' 1 use the example because Sally Sears in The Nesative Irnasination speculates about Densher in this way. I think such speculation as hers is misleading. 211 of self-knowledge, of discovering who one is, is central in James's fiction, but it is deeply ironic, uncertain, ambiguous, unsettled. Densher ends in isolation, reconstructing his past, going over his role in the plot

against Milly, ioving lier memory, and creating himself again. And clearly implied in this activity is his withdrawal from society. In his isolation, Densher is like other heroes in James's late works: Strether in The Ambassadors, John Marcher in "The Jolly Corner," Spencer Brydon in "The Beast in the Jungle," and Ralph Pendrel in The Sense of the Past

are alone. In some way al1 are dissatisfied with their present identities and are engaged in the recapturing of their pasts and in the construction of what might have been. Marcher, Brydon, and Pendrel are involved in the search for alternative identities and lives that might relieve their sense of despair and isolation. Identity becomes for them a conscious creation in the face of loneliness. James hirnself became increasingly solitary after his

move to Lamb House in Sussex. From 1905 to 1909, he worked unceasingly on collecting and revising his novels and tales for the New York Edition. During this time, he had fewer visitors than usual; not only was visiting less convenient in his country location than in London, but also many of his

friends had died. James too became unwell in 1909 and withdrew himself from society and his daily routines. His illness seemed to stem from depression and loneliness, and he wrote to his brother William that he was "solitarily worried and depressed." It is likely, therefore, that James's own sense of isolation informs his late works, where it seems most pronounced; hut isolation is not a characteristic exclusive to his late work. Christopher Newman ends up alone, Isabel Archer is isolated, and so is Catherine Sloper. Nanda

Brookenham is perhaps less alone and more an integral part af her cornmunity, but this is because she consciously refuses to isolate herself until she restores the relations of that community. At the end of his novels, James seldom offers a Jane Austen kind of marriage that might represent a character's integration in a community and realization of a social and individual identity. Even when it does occur, marriage does not counter isolation. Basil Ransom and Verena Tarrant's elopement in The Bostonians does not promise compatibility, nor does the engagement of the " indestruct ibly gayN Felix Young to du11 Gertrude Wentworth in The Europeans. Isabei's marriage ends in her complete alienation from Osmond; Maggie and the Prince's is strained to the breaking point while Adam Verver and Charlotte Stant are exiled to American City where there can be little doubt of their isolation from each other and from a sustaining community. 213

Does James believe, therefore, that ultimately we are alone and that, because consciousness and self are constantly in flux, al1 things are replaceable by other

things? Probably. While there is in James a persistent desire for wholeness and coherency, there is at the same time the recognition that the activity of consciousness has no end. Because consciousness is flux, self is always making itself and identity is elusive and changeable. Identity is a site of struggle in James's characters and understanding thern as they are engaged in this struggle, is central to appreciating James's fiction. Moreover, it is their engagement in this essential struggle that makes his characters so good, so complex, so expressive of our own condition; it is why, as Howells puts it, James "so unerringly impart[sl a feeling of character." The struggle for identity, for realizing the self, is never finally settled (except, as in the exarnple of Miiiy Theale, by death). Thus the only way to arrive at self definition or identity is through the recognition that it & changeable, that the only constant, the only fundamental permanence is consciousness itself. Paul Valery writes:

The human characteristic is consciousness; the characteristic of consciousness is a process of perpetual exhaustion, of detachment without rest or exclusion from everything that cornes before it, whatever that thing may be--an inexhaustible activity, independent of the quality as of the quantity of the things which appear and by means of which a man of intellect must at last bring himself deliberately to an unqualified refusal to be anything whatsoever.'

The attraction of being nothing whatsoever is great; for, like George Dane in "The Great Good Place," one could be released from the burden of identity into a state of "pure existenceu or pure consciousness--in Adam Verver's formulation, released "to the blessed impersonal whiteness for which his vision sometimes ached." The temptation to "take a rare moment 'off"' is undoubtedly great, but like Adam Verver, James is "surrounded and committed"

(23: 126-7). He is "surrounded" by life from which he takes his direct impressions and "committedtlto his responsibility as an ârtist to be finely conscious, to be "one of those people on whom nothing is lost." And just as Adam Verver monumentalizes himself by collecting and building his "palace of art," an aesthetic representation of himself and his life, James creates his own edifice, his own monument. With The Novels and Tales of

Henrv James, New York Edition, in which he gathered, selected, and revised the work of a lifetime, James consciously constructs and fixes his identity as an author and artist. In doing so, he disproves Valery's claim that the man of intellect, he who knows that consciousness is the only permanence and that consciousness is an inexhaustible

Selected Writinqs (New York: New Directions, 1950) 92. 215 activity, must refuse to be "anything whatsoever." James, preeminently, indefatigably conscious, has permanent identity--1s irrefutably somethinq whatsoever--in the existence of his art. Works Consulted

James, Henry. The American. New York: Norton, 1978. The American Scene. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1969. The Art of the Novel. 1934. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1984. Autobioqraphy. Ed. F. W. Dupee. New York: Criterion, 1956. The Bostonians. London: MacMillan, 1886. A Bundle of Letters. Boston: Loring, 1880. The Complete Notebooks. Eds. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

The Com~leteTales. Ed. Leon Edel. 12 vols. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1964. "English Heurs." Collected Travel Writinss: Great Britain and America. 2 Vols. New York: The Library of America, 1993. 2: 13-263. Hawthorne. 1879. Ed. Tony Tanner. London: MacMillan, 1967.

Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. 4 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974, 1975, 1980, 1984.

Letters. Ed. Percy Lubbock. 2 vols. New York: Scribner's, 1920.

The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James. 24 vols. New York: Charles Scribnerfs Sons, 1907-1909. Partial Portraits. London: MacMillan, 1888. Selected Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987. Washinqton Sauare. Ed. Gerald Willen. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1970.

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Dewey, John. Experience and Nature. New York: Norton, 1929. Dupee F. W. Henry James. London: William Sloane, 1951. Dyhouse, Carol. Feminism and the Familv in Enqland, 1880- 1939. Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1989. ---. Girls Growins Up In Late Victorian and Edwardian Ensland. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.

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Hall, William F. "James's Conception of Society in The Awkward Ase." Nineteenth Centun Fiction 23 (1968): 45-47. Hall. G. Stanley. Adolescence: Its Psvcholosv and the Relation to Physioloqy, Anthropoloqy, Socioloqy, Sex, Crime, Relision, and Education. New York: Appleton, 1904. --- - Educational Problerns. New York: Appelton, 1911.

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Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. 2 Vols. 1911. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1956. Hutchinson, Stuart. Henry James: An Arnerican as Modernist. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 1983. - - - . "Henry James: The American City and the Structure of Experience." The American City: Literary and Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Graham Clark. London: Vision Press, 1988. 198-215. Jameson, Fredric. "The Ideology of The Text." Salmaqundi. 1975-76. 204-246. Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. Kazin, Alfred. A Writer's American Landscape in Literature New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. Kearns, Michael S. Metaphors of Mind in Fiction and Psvcholosv. Lexington: U cf Kentucky Pt 1987. Kelley, Cornelia Pulsifer. The Earlv Developrnent of Henry James. 1930. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1965. Kimmey, John. Henry James and London. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Krook, Dorothea. The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henrv James. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1962,

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