HENRY JAMES: THE SHORTER FICTION Also by N. H. Reeve NEARLY TOO MUCH: THE POETRY OF J. H. PRY NNE (with Richard Kerridge) THE NOVELS OF REX WARNER Henry Jatnes The Shorter Fiction Reassessments Edited by N. H. Reeve Lecturer in English University of Wales Swansea First published in Great Britain 1997 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-25373-9 ISBN 978-1-349-25371-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-25371-5 First published in the United States of America 1997 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-16487-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Henry James: the shorter fiction, reassessments 1 edited by N. H. Reeve. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-16487-4 (cloth) I. James, Henry, 1843-1916-Criticism and interpretation. 2. Short story. I. Reeve, N. H., 1953- PS2124.H467 1996 813'.4---dc20 96-9800 CIP Text © Macmi lIan Press Ltd 1997 with the following exception 'The Jolly Comer' © Barbara Hardy 1997 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1997 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence pemlilting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 06 OS 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 Contents Notes on the Contributors vii Preface ix 1 Through 'Glasses', Darkly 1 Adrian Poole 2 Displays of the Female: Formula and Flirtation in 'Daisy Miller' 17 Ian F. A. Bell 3 Wall to Wall: Figuring 'The Aspern Papers' 41 Rod Mengham 4 'The Strength of Applied Irony': James's 'The Altar of the Dead' 60 Geoff Ward 5 'The Birthplace' 77 Tony Tanner 6 From Washington Square to The Spoils of Poynton: Jamesian Metamorphosis 95 Millicent Bell 7 The Master and the 'Queer Affair' of 'The Pupil' 114 Philip Horne 8 Living Up to the Name: 'Mora Montravers' 138 N. H. Reeve 9 He Knew That He Knew What He Knew: Critical Preaching and Literary Practices of Henry James, Jr 156 Marjorie Kaufman 10 James and the Limitations of Self-Therapy 171 William Veeder v Contents 11 'The Jolly Corner' 190 Barbara Hardy General Index 209 Index to James's Works 212 vi Notes on the Contributors Ian F. A. Bell holds a personal Chair in Literature at the Depart­ ment of American Studies at the University of Keele. His publica­ tions include Ezra Pound: Critic as Scientist and Henry James and the Past: Readings into Time. Millicent Bell is Professor Emerita at Boston University, and the author of Meaning in Henry James, Edith Wharton and Henry James, Marquand: An American Life, and Hawthorne's View of the Artist. She has also edited Hawthorne's novels for the Library of America, New Essays on Hawthorne's Tales, and The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. Barbara Hardy is Emeritus Professor of the University of London and Honorary Professor of the University of Wales, Swansea. She teaches part-time at Birkbeck College. She is the author of books on Jane Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, and concepts of narrative and lyric. Her most recent books are Forms of Feeling in Victorian Fiction; a memoir of childhood, Swansea Girl; London Lovers, a novel, and Henry James: The Later Writing. Her next book will be Shakespeare's Storytellers, and she is working on a second novel, a book on Dylan Thomas and a collec­ tion of essays on Thomas Hardy. Philip Home is a Reader in English Literature at University Col­ lege, London. He is the author of Henry James and Revision: The New York Edition (1990). He has edited James's A London Life and The Reverberator and The Tragic Muse. He is presently editing a new selection of James's letters. Marjorie Kaufman is Professor Emeritus of English on the Emma B. Kennedy Foundation at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts. She has published on Henry and William James, Ellen Glasgow, Willa Cather and Thomas Pynchon; edited and introduced The Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell; and is always at work on a biography of Henry James's imagination. Rod Mengham lectures in the Faculty of English at Cambridge, where he is also Director of Studies in English at Jesus College. He has published The Idiom of the Time: The Writings of Henry Green (1983), Wuthering Heights: A Critical Study (1988) and The Descent of Language: Writing in Praise of Babel (1993). He has also co-edited The vii Notes on the Contributors Violent Muse: Violence and the Artistic Imagination in Europe 1910- 1939 (1994), and is currently working on an edition of Forster's short stories and on books about Edward Upward and about con­ temporary poetry. Adrian Poole is Reader in English and Comparative Literature and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His work on Henry James includes a book, Henry James, and editions of The Aspern Papers and Other Stories and What Maisie Knew. He has written on other nine­ teenth-century authors such as George Eliot, R. L. Stevenson, Hardy, Gissing and Kipling. He is also the author of a book on Greek and Shakespearian tragedy, and co-editor of The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation. Tony Tanner is a Professor of English and American Literature and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. His most recent book is Henry James and the Art of Non-Fiction (1995). William Veeder is a Professor of English at the University of Chicago, and a former president of the Henry James Society. In addition to Henry James: The Lessons of the Master and The Art of Criticism (edited with Susan M. Griffin), he has written and spoken on a variety of James's texts and topics. He is currently at work on an essay on The Turn of the Screw and a book on James's fiction of the later 1890s. Geoff Ward is Professor of English and Head of Department at the University of Dundee. His principal publications include Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets (1993), Language Poetry and the American Avant-Garde (1993), and The Bloomsbury Guide to Romantic Literature (1994), and many articles on modern and American topics. viii Preface Cynthia Ozick suggested, in her 1987 essay 'What Henry James Knew', that of all the classic modernists it was James who was least diminished by the receding of modernism's initial impact, and that in the fresh perspectives opened up by that recession the interest and significance of his work had effectively increased. Recent years have certainly seen the publication of many substan­ tial new studies of James: Philip Horne's Henry James and Revision (1990), for example, Ian F. A. Bell's Henry James and the Past (1991), Tony Tanner's Henry James and the Art of Non-Fiction (1995), Adrian Poole's Henry James (1991), Millicent Bell's Meaning in Henry James (1991), to mention only some of those written by contributors to this volume. James's major writings continue to be keenly examined from virtually all the positions available to contemporary criticism and theory. But it would be fair to say that his shorter fictions, the tales and nouvelles, 112 in all, the 'multitude of pictures of my time' which he was so proud to have produced, tend for the most part to be summoned as incidental witnesses in the interrogation of larger works, rather than explored at length and for their own sakes. Old favourites - 'The Turn of the Screw', Daisy Miller - are regularly reprinted and discussed. Others are occasionally sounded for tre­ mors of the intimate, problematic or occluded elements of James's universe, in the tradition of reading which 'The Figure in the Carpet' both invokes and parodies. But the bulk of his huge output, stretching across a lifetime's writing, from' A Tragedy of Error' in 1864, to his final revision of 'Glasses' in the winter of 1915-16, would seem still to await rediscovery by contemporary readers. There are of course exceptions to this relative dearth of attention. T. J. Lustig's Henry James and the Ghostly (1994) discusses in fasci­ nating detail all James's ghost stories, together with the more gen­ eral significance of the ghostly in his work. George Bishop, in When the Master Relents (1988), studies a more random group of neglected stories which seem in his view to challenge, by their incommensur­ ability, the accepted Jamesian canon. Most powerfully influential, perhaps, has been Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick's reading of 'The Beast in the Jungle' ('The Beast in the Closet', collected in her Epistemol­ ogy of the Closet [1990]), which aimed to uncover what she saw as ix Preface the homosexual anxiety informing James's text, and which has become one of the benchmarks of 'queer theory'.