Henry James's Feminist Afterlives: Annie Fields, Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras by Kathryn Wichelns

Abstract

Reviewed by: Henry James's Feminist Afterlives: Annie Fields, Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras by Kathryn Wichelns Leonardo Buonomo Kathryn Wichelns. Henry James's Feminist Afterlives: Annie Fields, Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 178 pp. $99.99 (hardcover). In Henry James's Feminist Afterlives, Kathryn Wichelns provides an original contribution to Henry James scholarship by examining James's complex treatment of gender issues through the figures of three women authors—Annie Fields (1834–1915), Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), and Marguerite Duras (1914–1996)—who variously engaged with him and/or his work. For these women, writes Wichelns, James "is a male author who closely explores women's inner lives, as they negotiate existing ideas about gender and selfhood during the unprecedented transformations brought about by the late nineteenth-century period" (2). Spanning different historical periods, cultural contexts, languages, as well as genres (letters in the case of Fields and Dickinson, drama in the case of Duras), Wichelns argues cogently for a combined feminist and queer reading of James's work. By delving into the social and historical milieu in which each of these women authors operated, Wichelns calls attention to the ways in which their relationships (whether real or vicarious) with James offer us insights into his stance on femininity, masculinity, and societal conventions and norms. In the first chapter, which serves as an introduction, Wichelns notes that her chosen material has received scant attention either because it is not easily accessible (James's letters to Annie Fields) or because its relevance to James studies has been underrated (Dickinson's epistolary references to James's The Europeans and Duras's French-language stage adaptations of James's "The Beast in the Jungle" and The Aspern Papers). While James's epistolary communication with Fields will become more widely available as the publication of The Complete Letters of Henry James progresses (the latest volume covers the years 1883–1884), Duras's Les Papiers d'Aspern and La bête dans la jungle have so far remained untranslated into English. For this reason, Wichelns's extensive quotes from the plays, accompanied by their rendition in English, are a valuable tool for those scholars who cannot read them in the original. [End Page E-11] From a purely methodological standpoint, there appears to be a discrepancy between the chapter devoted to Annie Fields and those that focus on Emily Dickinson and Marguerite Duras. In chapter 2 ("'Those Who Know': Henry James and Annie Adams Fields"), Wichelns looks primarily at the way in which James perceived and addressed Fields in his letters to her, especially after Fields, following the death of her husband (publisher and editor James T. Fields), entered into an intimate, marriage-like relationship with Sarah Orne Jewett. On the other hand, in chapter 3 ("Emily Dickinson's Henry James") and chapters 4 and 5 (dealing, respectively, with Duras's plays La Bête dans la jungle and Les papiers d'Aspern) the focus is on the way in which James was perceived and addressed by Dickinson and Duras. Thus, in chapter 2 we learn a great deal about James's subtly sympathetic acknowledgement of Fields and Jewett's relationship and his bond with both women (but, in particular, with Fields) on the basis of a shared cultural, literary, and social heritage. The emphasis here is on the use, as it were, that James made of his correspondence with Fields, as a private space in which he could explore, and to some extent implicitly sanction, non-normative gender roles and relations. By contrast, the chapters that follow highlight the use James was put to by two women authors who found in his work a vehicle for their critique of conventional femininity and patriarchal power. Regardless of this shift in perspective, throughout the book Wichelns's analysis consistently opens up fresh venues to reassess James's sense of cultural and national identity, as well as his attitude toward women's issues and indeed his own sexuality. For example, in chapter 2 Wichelns offers a stimulating comparison between, on the one hand, both James's sometimes severe pronouncements on transgressive figures, such as Oscar Wilde and George Sand (whose public personas troubled him...