Moral Relationships in the Fiction of Henry James

Abstract

At the present time, any inquiry into the relationship between literature and morality is likely to go forward, as do so many other matters in our intellectual and public life, under the auspices of some conception of values. Whether the universal currency of this notion means that its import is well understood and can therefore be presupposed without any prior scrutiny is, of course, another matter. I suspect that this may not in fact be the case and that inquiries in which an unexamined notion of values plays a significant role will typically yield results that are at best problematic. At least one thing about values does seem reasonably plain, though, and that is that, as they are now generally understood, they always belong to someone. In literary contexts, the person to whom they belong may be the author or the narrator or the characters of a fiction or even the reader. Whoever it is, that person's values are thought of as something that he brings along with him and projects upon the various situations with which he has to deal. These situations are thereby construed in terms of an order of preferability and importance that is supposed to express what that person would be disposed to do and not do in them. In the more sociological variants of this conception, such values are typically assumed to be shared with the members of at least some social grouping, and a measure of compatibility in the responses of different people to a given situation is thus assured. When the concept of values takes on a more Nietzschean cast, however, there is no presumption of such compatibility, and the fact that a value is shared may even suggest that its espousal by a given individual is something less than an authentic exercise of a capacity for generating values that are uniquely one's own. What both these conceptions have in common is the notion that the situations on which these values-shared as well as idiosyncratic-are brought to bear are initially indeterminate with respect to any distinction between those features that are to count more and those that count less or not at all. It is, therefore, only as a result of applying some set of values to these situations that anything in them becomes good or bad,