List of Abbreviations Henry James CS—Complete Stories. 5 vols. Library of America. New York, N. Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1996–99. CTWGB—Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America: English Hours, The American Scene, Other Travels. Library of America. New York, N. Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1993. CTWTC—Collected Travel Writings: The Continent: A Little Tour in France, Italian Hours, Other Travels. Library of America. New York, N. Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1993. HJA—Henry James: Autobiography. Ed. Frederick W. Dupee. London: W. H. Allen, 1956. HJL—Henry James: Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. 4 vols. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1974–84. IT—Introduction. The Tempest. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Ed. Sidney Lee. 1907. LCEL 1205–20. LCEL—Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Literary Criticism. Vol. 1. Library of America. New York, N. Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984. LCFW—French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Literary Criticism. Vol. 2. Library of America. New York, N. Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984. LL—Henry James: A Life in Letters. Ed. Philip Horne. London: Allen Lane, 1999. N—The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. NY—The Novels and Tales of Henry James. New York Edition. 24 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907–9. PA—Preface. The Ambassadors. 1907–9. LCFW 1304–21. PAD—Preface. ‘The Altar of the Dead’. 1907–9. LCFW 1246–68. PAP—Preface. ‘The Aspern Papers’, ‘The Turn of the Screw’, ‘The Liar’, ‘The Two Faces’. 1907–9. LCFW 1173–91. PDM—Preface. ‘Daisy Miller’, ‘Pandora’, ‘The Patagonia’, ‘The Marriages’, ‘The Real Thing’, ‘Brooksmith’, ‘The Beldonald Holbein’, ‘The Story In It’, ‘Flickerbridge’, ‘Mrs. Medwin’. 1907–9. LCFW 1269–86. PGB—Preface. The Golden Bowl. 1907–9. LCFW 1322–41. PLM—Preface. ‘The Lesson of the Master’, ‘The Death of the Lion’, ‘The Next Time’, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, ‘The Coxon Fund’. 1907–9. LCFW 1225–37. PPC—Preface. The Princess Casamassima. 1907–9. LCFW 1086–1102. PR—Preface. The Reverberator, ‘Madame de Mauves’, ‘A Passionate Pilgrim’, ‘The Madonna of the Future’, ‘Louisa Pallant’. 1907–9. LCFW 1192–1207. PRH—Preface. Roderick Hudson. 1907–9. LCFW 1039–52. PSP—Preface. The Spoils of Poynton. 1907–9. LCFW 1138–55. PTM—Preface. The Tragic Muse. 1907–9. LCFW 1103–19. 164 List of Abbreviations 165 PWM—Preface. What Maisie Knew, ‘The Pupil’, ‘In the Cage’. 1907–9. LCFW 1156–72. Other AS—Americans on Shakespeare, 1776–1914. Ed. Peter Rawlings. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999. AF—Americans on Fiction, 1776–1900. 3 vols. Ed. Peter Rawlings. London and Vermont: Pickering and Chatto, 2002. WJ1—William James. Writings, 1878–1899. Library of America. New York, N. Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1992. WJ2—William James. Writings, 1902–1910. Library of America. New York, N. Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1987. OED—Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd edn. 1992. Note All references to Shakespeare are to: The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd edn. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. Notes Introduction: ‘We Want None of Our Problems Poor’ 1 See Silverman for a discussion of James and more conventional (Freudian) senses of the primal scene. 2 Roosevelt regarded the Civil War as the principal agent of a national unity predicated on the memories, and on the history, fabricated in its name: ‘The captains and the armies who, after long years of dreary campaigning and bloody, stubborn fighting, brought to a close the Civil War have likewise left us even more than a reunited realm. The material effect of what they did is shown in the fact that the same flag flies from the Great Lakes to the Rio Grande, and all the people of the United States are richer because they are one people and not many, because they belong to one great nation, and not to a contemptible knot of struggling nationalities. But besides this, besides the material results of the Civil War, we are all, North and South, incalcula- bly richer for its memories’ (‘True American Ideals’ 744). See Robert Penn Warren’s observation (as evidence for the prevalence of the myth, rather than of the fact): ‘The Civil War is, for the American imagination, the great single event of our history. Without too much wrenching, it may, in fact, be said to be American history. Before the Civil War we had no history in the deepest and most inward sense’ (3). The drift of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s comments on the Civil War in The Gilded Age is broadly comparable in substance to James’s, but they are entirely negative in cast, projecting the war in destructive rather than constructive terms: ‘The eight years in America from 1860 to 1868 uprooted institutions that were cen- turies old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly on the entire national charac- ter that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations’ (228–9). It is interesting to note that in Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, the Civil War continues to be regarded as a paradigm shift for America: ‘The war was fought to preserve the system of government that had been established at the nation’s founding….And the system was preserved; the union did survive. But in almost every other respect, the United States became a different country. The war alone did not make America modern, but the war marks the birth of modern America’ (ix). For the purposes of my argument, it is less that this was, or could have been the case, more that it is a common, and usable, perception. 3 James had distinguished non-combatant company, of course: ‘Henry Adams anxiously watched the grand spectacle from London….William Dean Howells, his literary plans momentarily “deranged” by Fort Sumter, sailed for Venice in November 1861 and served there as United States consul gen- eral until his return in 1865. And Mark Twain, after a brief and not entirely creditable or credible few weeks as a lieutenant in a Rebel company of Home Guards, defected and accompanied his abolitionist brother to Nevada’ (Aaron 91–2). 166 Notes 167 4 Leon Edel gives a detailed account of the incident, correcting in the process James’s skewed sense of the dates in his Notes of a Son and Brother; see Henry James: The Untried Years (167–88). But this date has been disputed by Hoffman (530). 5 Aaron also writes of James ‘trying to screen the story of his nonparticipation behind a fog of words’ (107–8). 6 I agree with much of Savoy’s discussion of the ‘the hermeneutic desire awak- ened by queer figuration’ in James, although I see the queerness as a means of staging fundamental issues of epistemology, language, and representation to which gender and sex are subordinate. 7 For Rebecca West, in the first book-length study of Henry James, the ‘obscure hurt’ was literally an accident that simply prevented James from fighting: ‘he sustained an injury so serious that he could never hope to share the Northern glory’ (20); Edmund Gosse agreed: ‘Henry James’s health forced him to be a spectator of the war’ (21). But a view developed in the 1920s and 1930s that James had been castrated in 1861. Edel challenges this, concluding that it was nothing more than a back injury which became chronic. James elucidated the ‘hurt’, Edel believes, as an ‘unconscious identification’ with a father whose leg was amputated as a result of a fire- fighting accident (Henry James: The Untried Years: 180). Similarly, R. W. B. Lewis has observed that ‘the painful incident had an almost uncanny fami- ly aspect to it. Young Henry James may or may not have known about the nocturnal occasion when his grandfather feverishly worked the pumps on the Albany wharf in a dangerous and unsuccessful effort to save his shops from being gutted by fire. But his father’s cork leg was a daily reminder of the catastrophe that befell Henry Senior when he attempted to put out a sta- ble fire’ (117). Eakin is right to describe Edel’s ‘well-intentioned attempt to demystify the hurt’ as ‘wrong-headed’, but not because the obscurity of the hurt is constituted merely by the raft of psychoanalytical complexities for which he pitches (‘Henry James’s “Obscure Hurt”: Can Autobiography Serve Biography?’ 689). The possible psychological dimensions of the accident are difficult to deny, but that is not the same as categorizing it as a ‘psycholog- ical event’ (108), or an ‘inward psychological reality’ that exceeded ‘the capacity of autobiographical discourse to express it’ (Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention 113). On the origins of the castration theory in the 1920s and 1930s, see Haralson, Henry James and Queer Modernity (194–200). Stephen Spender suggested that the rumour of ‘castration seems exaggerated and improbable’ (37n), but Glenway Wescott was more confident in his belief that James’s ‘pre-Civil-War accident’ had resulted in castration or some form of impotence (523). The rumour was prevalent enough in the 1920s, as Haralson observes, for Ernest Hemingway’s manuscript to link the mutilated Jake of The Sun Also Rises with Henry James (Henry James and Queer Modernity 194). Halperin sees the ‘hurt’ as more psychic’ than ‘physical,’ and his emphasis on James’s pas- siveness is exactly what I want to oppose (‘Henry James’s Civil War’ 25).