Henry James's Reconciliation of Free Will and Fatalism

Abstract

IN RECENT YEARS there have been many excellent studies of the craftsmanship of Henry James. However, few critics have tried to relate this master craftsman to the nineteenth-century climate of opinion; instead, most have isolated him as a rarified test tube culture. This is unfortunate because James was confronted with the same world problems as de Maupassant, Zola, Balzac, Turgenev, Vergas, Crane, Norris, and Hardy. Finding himself attracted to and repelled by both the romantic idealism of the mid-nineteenth century and the psychological realism and naturalism of the new scientific era, he reconciled the two and worked out his own philosophical solutions. James's relationship to the naturalistic movement needs more investigation than has yet been made. In the pages of his fiction, characters are constantly being disillusioned about the world they live in, a social world whose matrons and dowagers are often red of tooth and claw. Like the naturalists, James recognized the importance of heredity and environment in determining character, The Princess Casamassima being the most outstanding illustration of this; but unlike the naturalists he was much more optimistic