Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity Stuart Burrows (bio) Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity, by Leland S. Person; pp. vii + 206. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, $38.50. Henry James's place in the roughhouse of twentieth-century American fiction has always been somewhat uncertain, his rococo style and claustrophobic psychological realism at odds with the stylistic swagger of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Indeed, as early as 1907 critic H. G. Dwight declared James a "woman's writer," who "no man was able to read." Leland Person's new book reads such crass judgments literally, as it were, in order to map the ways in which "James illustrates the ambiguities and confusions—the multivalence—of gender and sexuality" (7). "Repeatedly," Person asserts, "James demonstrates the instability of gender identities" (7). In contrast, the argument of Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity is itself remarkably constant, namely that "James delights in positioning his male characters in such ways that their gender and sexual orientations are reversed, ambiguous, and even multiple" (14). [End Page 530] Person's analysis follows in the footsteps of the work of Eve Sedgwick, Michael Moon, and Hugh Stevens, critics who have overturned traditional understandings of James as somehow "lacking" in masculinity. Such analyses, Person suggests, depend upon "a notion of normative male identity from which James...can only deviate" (6). Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity uses Kaja Silverman's psychoanalytic approach to James as its primary analytical model, though Person rightly criticizes the limitations of any model which "does not account for the playfulness and slipperiness—the verbal performance—of James's language" (6). He is to be applauded for his attention to Jamesian form, although the cost of such close reading is occasionally evident. Aside from a brief tour of a few of the many writers who directly confronted the question of masculinity in the 1890s, Person is unwilling to engage with the fascinating historical background to James's exploration of masculinity. The one moment Person does venture outside the text, in an analysis of the ways James's complex critical engagement with the work of George Sand shaped his late novels, the result is highly illuminating. Sand's flamboyant persona—she regularly impersonated a man, and was often mistaken for one—offered a template, Person suggests, for James's exploration of the compositional possibilities offered by "suspending" his principal characters "between genders, neither masculine nor feminine" (4). Sand forced James "to disassociate 'masculine' from 'male' and thus from himself—in other words, to interrogate a monolithic masculinity and to accept the possibility of a plurality of masculinities from which he might continually improvise his own" (4). These are the very lessons, Person suggests, which the hero of The Ambassadors (1903), Lambert Strether, learns from Madame de Vionnet, lessons such as the "art of taking things as they came." Strether experiences the same transformation that Madame de Vionnet has already produced in Chad Newsome, that "miracle almost monstrous" which, according to Person's reading, echoes the "monstrous vitality" James found so irresistible in Sand. Such a claim allows Person to depart from negative readings of Strether's famous renunciation and instead find his determination "not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself" liberatory rather than pitiable, in that Strether thus evades the grasp of society's compulsive heterosexuality. Such an evasion represents James's paradoxical attempt to render in fiction his admiration for Sand's success at "making acquaintance with life at first hand" (qtd. in Person 25). The most impressive reading in the volume, however, is that of The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Person tracks James's repeated use of the term "gentleman" to describe all the major characters of the novel, including, of course, Gilbert Osmond, and links this to contemporary interest in defining the term (though once again the historical context is examined too briefly). Ralph's famous consumption is wittily linked to what Person calls his "consumptive" relations with those around him, and Ralph's use of Isabel as a surrogate self is read as an example of cross-dressing, a sign that the young Mr. Touchett...