Codes of Intimacy: Love, Chance, and Masculinity in Henry James's Confidence

Abstract

Codes of IntimacyLove, Chance, and Masculinity in Henry James's Confidence Karin Hoepker (bio) Setting aside older quarrels over the boundaries of a naturalist canon, this essay argues for a more comprehensive understanding of post-Civil War literary production which traces lines of connection between realism, naturalism, and sentimental fiction. I read Henry James's Confidence (1879), a novel disregarded by critics for more than a century, as a complex text that programmatically investigates codes of intimacy and familiarity against the background of a transatlantic economy of risk, globalization, and uncertainty. As a story of male friendship and romance, jealousy, miscommunication, and a social experiment gone wrong, Confidence explores the late nineteenth-century semantics of love that paradoxically demands both serendipity and inevitable necessity. The novel's often overlooked sharp satirical humor dissects a psychosocial construct of masculine individualism which struggles to maintain a sense of agency within an emerging "age of capital" (Levy 189). Nancy Walker and Donna Campbell have long made convincing arguments for a reevaluation of literary production in the late nineteenth century that revises the lines of distinction drawn between realism, naturalism, and sentimental writing as both heavily gendered and sustaining a prejudice against literature as a marketable commodity. Along similar lines of traditional canonization and bias against the popular and sentimental, Henry James's critics have ignored Confidence as one of his lesser works. Written for profit, tailored to please the tastes of a broader readership, it has, almost by default, been deemed devoid of artistic value. I propose to suspend such categorization and focus on the cultural work of the novel instead. I am interested in what Confidence might tell us about the function of fiction in a late nineteenth-century socioeconomic paradigm of increased social complexity, functional differentiation, and [End Page 1] what kind of impact a pervading logic of market speculation has on contemporaneous codes of familiarity and intimacy. The social system of a capitalist market casts subject relationships in a new light; mutual assessments of value dominate and threaten to overwrite previous narratives of intimacy, familiarity, and ideational values of friendship with a transactional agenda. Speculative capitalism becomes part of the field of invisible forces to which the human subject is exposed and thus also forms one of the "insults" (as Freud had famously called them) to human self-perception and individualist fantasies of control, which naturalism eventually comes to highlight.1 Nineteenth-century literary production centrally engages in an exploration of coping mechanisms, in strategies of complexity reduction, and in efforts of managing the emerging threats of uncertainty and social change. Literary texts address the increasing sense of fragmentation of reality as it is individually and collectively experienced and, more specifically, respond to a crisis of knowledge production and masculinity.2 In this context, Henry James's Confidence engages with issues of masculinity within a broader field of complexity and uncertainty. The novel employs a seemingly conventional sentimental plotline of love and romance to reframe problems of subjectivity, intimacy, and knowledge production. To that end, Niklas Luhmann's discussion of love and trust in modern societies as increasingly differentiating socioeconomic systems provides a conceptual frame for a new reading of Confidence. Luhmann's reflections on the semantics of love help foreground the cultural work of James's text as a forerunner of "naturalist sentimentalism" (Sawaya 56); they highlight how Confidence uses an aesthetics of the sentimental to dismount narratives of individualism and autonomous agency and rejects simplistic ideas of causality and determination. Tapping into the rich resources of sentimental aesthetics and the novel of manners, James employs codes of intimacy at the core of romantic love to question predominant discourses of individualism that are an intricate part of novelistic writing of his time. Confidence targets capitalist fantasies of entrepreneurial individuals as well as realist narratives of individual agency and experience. It humorously exposes the latent sentimental economies of such narratives and the gendered and classist rhetoric that primarily serves the economically privileged figure of the male dilettante. As Confidence pairs romantic narrative and marriage plots with the specters of lost friendship and divorce, it highlights themes of speculation, uncertainty, and confidence as part of a broader engagement with systemic...