Evil in Stevens’ “Esthétique du Mal” and Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima

Abstract

Evil in Stevens’ “Esthétique du Mal” and Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima Kathryn Chittick A RECENT SPECIAL ISSUE of The Wallace Stevens Journal (Spring 2010) undertook to explore the affinities between Henry James and Wallace Stevens, studying among other topics the relationship between art and life in the aesthetic outlook of both authors (see MacLeod). This essay continues that exploration by juxtaposing two specific works that highlight these fastidious writers’ engagement with world events: what emerges from this is a discussion of the role of art in the modern world as it engages with evil, which is represented in each case by violent political upheaval. In approaching a topic so traditionally central to American literature as the question of evil, Stevens in “Esthétique du Mal” (1944) and James in The Princess Casamassima (1886) place the discussion in a contemporary context of international war and terrorism, respectively. Just as Stevens’ poem was set against the background of the American campaign in Italy toward the end of World War II, James’s novel came out of the Irish terrorism of the 1880s, when British government leaders in Ireland were murdered by the Fenians, dynamite was laid in the London underground, and bombing attempts were made on Scotland Yard, the House of Commons, and the Tower of London. In neither work is there any hope that evil can ever be definitively vanquished, nor is there any Dantesque sense of a comedic progress toward a divine or absolute good. The only approach toward redemption turns out to be self-referential, as both writers intricately measure the potential of art itself to counteract the evil typified by modern destructiveness. Both works remain in this underworld of terrorism and war, which is made particularly unpleasant by acutely contemporary detail. Milton J. Bates remarks that “Esthétique du Mal” is not a poem one turns to even now “for comfort” in a time of crisis (“Pain” 169). Its response to geopolitical events, moreover, is notoriously indirect. At the same time, Jacqueline Vaught Brogan argues that “Esthétique du Mal” is “a poem that acutely needs to be read in its historical ‘moment’” (71). Alan Filreis, nonetheless, usefully reminds us how painstaking one needs to be in discussing specific historical events in the context of Stevens’ poetry (Wallace Stevens 39–40; “Historical” 213), and Bates warns us that those Stevens poems “written [End Page 175] in response to specific historical events are among the least specific” in their references (“Soldier” 208). In one of his undated aphorisms, Stevens himself simply wrote that “Esthétique” could be seen as “the measure of a civilization” (CPP 910), and Bates usefully argues that Stevens was more interested in history’s “moral possibilities” than in its political intricacies (“Soldier” 204). Stevens’ responses to the changes experienced as his country went into wartime modes of production and rationing can be found partly in “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas” and “Repetitions of a Young Captain.” Commenting on these, James Longenbach notes that “During the war years, Stevens began to use the words real and fact with increasing urgency” (202). In May 1941, six months before the United States entered World War II, Stevens delivered a lecture at Princeton University, entitled “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” in which he testified to the “pressure of reality” on the mind of the poet (CPP 654). In his lecture, he argued that there was more than one sense of what he termed reality: the reality that had become “violent” in Europe and “spiritually violent” everywhere (CPP 659), and “the reality that is taken for granted,” that is, the reality of “the comfortable American state of life of the eighties, the nineties and the first ten years of the present century” (CPP 658). Against the contemporary upheaval in Europe, he juxtaposed the values of the “comfortable” Edenic America he remembered from his own childhood and youth. Those 1880s wistfully recollected by Stevens, however, the same years when James wrote The Princess Casamassima, were in fact also a time of considerable violence throughout Europe. While writing his novel, James spoke of his deep interest in watching the dramatic spectacle of...