Kristevan Readings of Female Subjectivity in Henry James's Late

Université de Montréal Eventual Benefits: Kristevan Readings of Female Subjectivity in Henry James’s Late Novels par Viken Tufenkjian Département des littératures et de langues du monde Études anglaises, Faculté des arts et sciences Thèse présentée à la Faculté des études supérieures en vue de l’obtention du grade de Philosophiæ Doctor (Ph.D.) en études anglaises Septembre, 2015 © Viken Tufenkjian, 2015 Résumé “Eventual Benefits: Kristevan Readings of Female Subjectivity in Henry James’s Late Novels” examine la construction de la subjectivité féminine dans les romans de la phase majeure de Henry James, notamment What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove et The Golden Bowl. Les personnages féminins de James se trouvent souvent dans des circonstances sociales ou familiales qui défavorisent l’autonomie psychique, et ces subordinations sont surtout nuisibles pour les jeunes personnages de l’auteur. Quant aux femmes américaines expatriées de ces romans, elles éprouvent l’objectification sociale et pécuniaire des européens : en conséquence, elles déploient des tactiques contraires afin d’inverser leurs diminutions et instaurer leurs individualités. Ma recherche des protocoles qui subventionnent l’affranchissement de ces femmes procède dans le cadre des théories avancées par Julia Kristeva. En utilisant les postulats kristeviens d’abjection et de mélancolie, d’intertextualité, de maternité et de grossesse, du pardon et d’étrangeté, cette thèse explore les stratégies disparates et résistantes des femmes chez James et elle parvient à une conception de la subjectivité féminine comme un processus continuellement ajourné. Mots clefs : Henry James, Julia Kristeva, subjectivité féminine, objectification, abjection, intertextualité, maternité, pardon, étrangeté i Abstract “Eventual Benefits: Kristevan Readings of Female Subjectivity in Henry James’s Late Novels” examines the constitution of female subjectivity in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. In these five novels of James’s major phase, female characters often find themselves in social or familial circumstances inimical to the autonomous psychic growth. Such subjections are particularly devastating for the children or adolescents of the first three novels. Likewise, James’s expatriate American women negotiate social and pecuniary objectifications by the Europeans they encounter; consequently, they deploy counteractive tactics to surmount their diminution and install their selfhoods. My investigation of the protocols subsidizing the enfranchisement of these itinerant women proceeds in the framework of Julia Kristeva’s theories. Recruiting her postulates of abjection and melancholia, intertextuality, motherhood and pregnancy, forgiveness and foreignness, this dissertation scrutinizes the disparate and resistant strategies of James’s female characters and arrives at a conception of female subjectivity as a continually deferred process. Keywords: Henry James, Julia Kristeva, female subjectivity, objectification, abjection, intertextuality, motherhood, forgiveness, foreignness ii Table of Contents Introduction: Looking for Julia Kristeva in Henry James’s novels . 1 Chapter One: Debilitating Knowledge and Appropriative Doings in What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age . 24 Chapter Two: Textual Subversions and Promissory Revisions in The Wings of the Dove and The Portrait of a Lady . 75 Chapter Three: Silenced Motherhood and Calculated Forgiveness in The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove . 133 Chapter Four: Ambitious Foreigners and Refracting Acquisitions in The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl . 166 Conclusion: Signposts . 199 Works Cited . 207 iii Abbreviations of Works by Henry James AA The Awkward Age AM The Ambassadors AN The Art of the Novel GB The Golden Bowl MK What Maisie Knew PL The Portrait of a Lady WD The Wings of the Dove iv For Garabed and Arpiné v Acknowledgments I am indebted foremost to my research director Dr. Michael Eberle-Sinatra, for his expert guidance of my project and for the encouragement he accorded to me to present parts of this dissertation at academic conferences. Many thanks also to the faculty of the department with whom I studied over the years, particularly Professors Andrew Miller, Joyce Boro, and Heike Harting, who saw me through the initial stages of my studies at Études anglaises. Finally, my gratitude goes to family members and friends, whose support and patience motivated me to complete this dissertation. vi Introduction Looking for Julia Kristeva in Henry James’s novels After his discouraging foray into the theatre in the mid-1890s, during the second half of the decade Henry James reverted to writing tales and novels, the forms that had afforded him a popular reputation prior to the public denigration of his play Guy Domville.1 The return would become the marker of the transitional period in his career, presaging what F. O. Matthiessen termed his “major phase” (Matthiessen 1944), during which James penned the novels now widely held as his most accomplished. The crowning achievements of The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl were yet to come;2 in the intervening years, James produced tales and novels in which he revisited subject matter and themes he had previously engaged, but now he deployed a fresh approach to their treatment. In the 1880s, James’s fiction had featured expatriate Americans endeavouring to institute the processes of their individuation while confronting European values and culture; these negotiations did not always culminate in comfortable resolutions. In the novels of the transitional period, I see James reprising this blueprint with an important involution: the abstraction of dislocation. Simply put, the anxieties of his fin-de siècle characters spring not necessarily from geographic displacement, but from a malaise invoked by the impossibility to establish themselves with relative surety in native settings. This intellection amplifies the characters’ isolation and interiority, which James conveys by dwelling longer in their consciousness, thereby underscoring their sense of disconnection. To complicate matters, James frequently renders them almost powerless to contend with their stultifying relations, due to their inexperience or very young age. In fact, several major characters in James’s novels of this period are children 1 At the premiere performance of Guy Domville on January 5, 1895, the audience expressed its vociferous disapproval of the play, producing in James profound disappointment (Martin and Ober 1). A week later, James wrote to his brother William that the play had become a “shipwreck” (Lubbock 233). 2 The Wings of the Dove was first published in 1902, The Ambassadors in 1903, and The Golden Bowl in 1904. All three novels were revised when published in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, now commonly known as the New York Edition (1907-09). Citations of these novels in this dissertation are from the latter. 2 or adolescents.3 James had previously both situated them at the forefront in his fiction, in such works as Daisy Miller (1878), and relegated them to the background in the function of a foil to the protagonist of the story, as is Pansy Osmond to Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady.4 In the transitional novels, James no longer assigns his young female characters complementary roles but thrusts them into prominence, and he unfurls their psychic lives in the spotlight.5 This is especially true of Maisie Farange in What Maisie Knew and Nanda Brookenham in The Awkward Age.6 The historical context of these novels is framed by the pressures the Woman Question exerted on Victorian socio-cultural and economic ideals, and by the consequent emergence of the New Woman in the last decade of the nineteenth century. These disputations aimed to overthrow institutionalized molds of femininity by offering women the alternate progressive model of a combative, stern identity they could embrace, if they were to achieve greater social justice. The New Woman debates inevitably found their way to the literature of the period. Marcia Jacobson submits, “One ... form in which the New Woman could be exhibited was the novel that contrasted the New Woman and her traditional sister” (107-08). James’s engagement with these issues dates back to the 1880s, notably in The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians (1886), and it is carried forward to the novels of the transitional period, but 3 Several children in James’s tales and novels of the1890s suffer exploitation or neglect by their parents or parental figures in their lives. Morgan Moreen in “The Pupil” (1891), Effie Bream in The Other House (1896), and Miles in “The Turn of the Screw” (1898) all die in their respective stories. 4 The Portrait of a Lady was first published in 1881. For the New York Edition, James revised the novel substantially. Unless otherwise specified, all citations of the novel in this dissertation are from the latter edition. 5 Kaja Silverman suggests that James’s interest in nascent subjectivities constitutes a major strain in his works: “It seems to me that subjectivity in James’s corpus is bound up in some very fundamental way with the primal scene–that that scene indeed constitutes one of his authorial phantasmatics, if not indeed the primary one” (“Too Early/Too Late” 159). 6 James published What Maisie Knew in 1897 and The Awkward Age in 1899. Both novels were included in the

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