“Call Me Isabel”: Reverberations of James’s Archetypal Plots in the Lives of His Readers

Abstract

Henry James’s archetypal moral structures entangle readers in mise en abyme that parallels Jung’s “collective unconscious.” James’ fiction uses ekphrasis to capture moments of transferable reality, as in Lessing’s Laocoon . My Hollywood childhood, resembling Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust and Fitzgerald’s The Love of the Last Tycoon , invokes Christina Light from Roderick Hudson , Pansy and Isabel from The Portrait of a Lady , and Maisie from What Maisie Knew . My archival research on William Wetmore Story and His Friends entangled me in plot templates from The Aspern Papers , “The Turn of the Screw,” and “The Jolly Corner.” Rivalry from my discovery of Waldo Story and Bindo Peruzzi de’Medici embroiled me in the moral ambiguity of The Ivory Tower .