Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels: The Art of Concealment by Wibke Schniedermann

Abstract

Reviewed by: Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels: The Art of Concealment by Wibke Schniedermann Shuqin Fu Wibke Schniedermann. Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels: The Art of Concealment. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 177 pp., $18.61 (electronic), $18.02 (hardback). Gender issues in James's oeuvre have been subjected to extensive academic scrutiny. Among the scholarly works that probe into James's stance and speculation on gender, Wibke Schniedermann's Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels: The Art of Concealment contributes impressively to work on gendered power relations and the narrative representation of these structures in James. Building on Pierre Bourdieu's relational sociology theory as well as his assumptions on masculine domination, the book specifically examines the female protagonists' personal struggles against and strategies to break from gender-based symbolic violence and symbolic power in three major James novels––The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Although much has been written about James's sensitivity to power disequilibrium, Schniedermann sheds new light on James's depiction of social power and its problematic implications that "account for this power's social conditionality" (2). This book is composed of six chapters. Chapter 1, which serves as an introduction, presents the subject and structure of the study. In particular, Schniedermann introduces the book's critical practice in "Daisy Miller: A Study" (1879) via Bourdieu's terms habitus, field, capital, symbolic violence, and symbolic domination. The author contends that a micro field is created in the novella, in which clashing habitus leads to the conflicts among the characters, whose capital distribution can be analyzed to disclose the represented social hierarchies. In this sense, symbolic capital works as the premise for the exercise of symbolic power, which can only exert its influence by means of actual misrecognition. Thus, Daisy's failure to recognize the established symbolic power literally plunges her into a closely knit and inescapable web of gender-specific domination as "the form par excellence of symbolic domination" (24). As a result, her absence and death at the end of the story constitute a doom foretold in the androcentric society. As Schniedermann explains, James's treatment of a female protagonist's absence in "Daisy Miller" is an experiment in the androcentric basis of feminine absence, which James develops in Isabel Archer. Thus, chapter 2 ("The Presence of Absence in The Portrait of a Lady") focuses on feminized vacancy and (absence of) visibility as well as the female character's inner struggle against gendered domination. The author contends that Isabel's fighting back is fully manifested through her feminized absence in the beginning of the novel, the constantly changing perspective toward her view, and her self-chosen absence at the end of the story. Unlike Daisy Miller, who is short on wisdom and lacks the disposition to empower her own subversiveness, Isabel's penetrating cognition and critical temperament make her subversion truly potent. Just as absence is a common topic of the textual analysis of "Daisy Miller" and The Portrait of a Lady, inheritance as a species of symbolic capital turns out to be [End Page E-11] a shared theme of the textual interpretation in chapter 3 ("The Grip of Inheritance in The Wings of the Dove") and chapter 4 ("How to Survive One's Inheritance in The Golden Bowl"). Revolving around "the unequal distribution of capital and the gender-dependent sphere of influence provided by and through a character's resources" (26), the third chapter concludes that Milly's controversial triumph comes less from a misjudgment of her class privilege than from the latter's intricate interconnection with her wealth and fatal illness. Compared with Milly's moderate success, Maggie's victory is a full one in that "she achieves exactly what she aims at" (27): Maggie's astute cognition, firm decision, and consequent actions enable the novel to uncover the powerful effect of the well-disguised system of masculine domination. Firmly believing that her father deserves honor and authority, Maggie spares no effort in maintaining his power by hiding Amerigo and Charlotte Stant's adultery. In essence, what Maggie tries to cover is just what the text tries...