Form and Revision: The Example of Watch and Ward

Abstract

H | ENRY JAMES ONCE ADMITTED to Charles Eliot Norton that the subject of Watch and Ward, his first novel, was something slight. But . . I have tried to make a work of art, and if you are good enough to read it I trust you will detect my intention. will be its chief merit. 1 James's remark is baffling, for the certain form is not immediately apparent. From the beginning of his career he had experimented with narrative method, but the technique of Watch and Ward, compared with earlier stories, seems rather conservative. diary of A Landscape Painter (1866) and A Light Man (1869), the sharp compression of time in A Day of Days (1866), the new genre represented by The of Certain Old Clothes (1868) and De Grey: Romance (1868), the varieties of first-person narration in My Friend Bingham (1867), Gabrielle de Bergerac (1869), Travelling Companions (1870), and A Passionate Pilgrim (1871)not one of these did James repeat in Watch and Ward. No structural principle is as obvious as, say, Rowland Mallett as center of consciousness in Roderick Hudson or the dramatic method of Awkward Age, but there is evidence in the novel as serialized in 1871 and in the revisions made for book publication in 1878 that James was working with a definite narrative pattern in mind. One of the characters in the novel, Hubert Lawrence, compares contemporary fiction to 'the underside of a carpet,-nothing but the stringy grain of the tissue-a muddle of figures without shape and flowers without color'. I hope to show that James tried to give shape to his figures, color to his flowers, and to his