“Massed Ambiguity”: Fatness in Henry James’s The Ivory Tower

Abstract

[T]hat they are each individual of weight being of course of essence of my donnee. They are interesting way--I have no use for them here in any other. --Henry James, notes for The Ivory Tower (221) (1) Henry James's final and incomplete attempt to write new novel, The Ivory Tower, opens with the deliberate step of Rosanna Gaw, a truly massive young person (5) and closes with novel's hero, Graham Gray Fielder, pondering massed ambiguity of his fate and being greeted by florid, solid, smiling person (198) of heavyset Davey Bradham. From its start to its abrupt stop, this fragment of novel foregrounds bodily presence and, indeed, corpulent mass in manner perhaps unexpected from James's infamously abstract late prose. Bodies, bodily features, and conversations about bodies of particular weight, especially creatures so materially weighted (23) as Rosanna and Davey Bradham, figure prominently, at times obsessively. (2) How does considering this help us understand James's abandoned novel, penultimate staging of his long-cherished international theme, which follows Gray's return from Europe to charmingly corrupt and corrupting world of his grotesquely enormous American inheritance? The fat body, I wish to suggest, offers in James's fragment and schema for novel an unstable trope for social processes of marginalization, for economic and stylistic excess, and for his own sense of authorship. The Ivory Tower looks to obesity as physical, psychological, and culturally inscribed state of both imprisonment, encirclement, containment, and of excess, spillage, and abandon. (3) At same time, corpulent mass as figure in James's text helps it explore moral and aesthetic potentialities. These torn visions of obesity reflect novel's ambivalent response to fat's overwhelmingly negative social status--James's writing both reinscribes and resists readings of fatness as disease, as site of shame, as waste. James's pivotal treatment of corpulence may have been, as Susan Griffin and Tim Armstrong have argued, autobiographically informed by author's ambivalent relation to his own fat body, by his ongoing anxieties about femininity of fatness, and by his experiments with dieting (most notably his adoption of Fletcherist mastication in early 1900s). In her insightful reading of Washington Square--the only other text by James to feature fat woman as its central character--Griffin links Catherine Sloper's bulk to James's negotiation of his own weight issues and his parents' desire for both his independence and dependence. For Griffin, weight suggests both an expression of her desire to please her father, and manifestation of female power of sexual independence that her father wishes not to see (133-34). Accordingly, Catherine's story is of woman whom James simultaneously fears to marry and dreads that, unmarried and self-nurturing, he may become after all (136). (4) But if Catherine Sloper's fatness signals newly self-sufficient, even proactive yet highly anxious vision of female sexuality in James's work, The Ivory Tower, through its paired treatment of Rosanna Gaw and Davey Bradham as fat subjects, makes corpulence part of wider critical concern with representation, reading, and management of physical self, of style, and of social circulation of fat discourse. Through paired treatment of masculine and feminine obesity, James's novel both invokes and critiques gendered management of fat body. Weight is slippery, unstable subject in James's late style, and in many ways, bodies swarm in The Ivory Tower mark constructive tensions that, as Thomas J. Otten has recently suggested, attend any act of material representation, any representative claim in world of his final novels. (5) In only other substantial response to fatness in The Ivory Tower, Tim Armstrong argues for an economic reading of obesity as he charts discursive ties between James's Fletcherism and his revisionist aesthetics during and after composing of New York Edition: text of novel as we have it proposes crude embodiment of financial status in its characters. …