Reproducing Women in The Awkward Age

Abstract

AT THE CLOSE OF HenryJames's 1899 novel TheAwkwardAge, Nanda Brookenham departs for a country estate, the ward of a man three times her age; her jaded brother Harold appears committed to a life of bachelorhood; the marriages of the Grendons, the Cashmores, and the Donners totter precariously; and the newly debauched Aggie revels in adulterous union with Petherton, the barbaric aristocrat. The novel's final word, tomorrow, echoes tensely in a society that offers little hope for generational continuity. James's portrait of an upper class in decline, stripped of its reproductive powers, is consistent with the perceptions of other social observers of his day. Anxieties about the distance between a revered ancestry and a decadent modern society that had lost the ability to transmit inherited traits and values were voiced throughout turn-of-the-century England by authors, politicians, and intellectuals alike. These concerns were at the forefront of debates on the developing social sciences.' In a letter to the English Sociological Society, one lady contended that the new discipline's most urgent task was the training of girls for the resumption of a lost power of race motherhood, which shall make for their own happiness and well-being in using these for the benefit of humanity.2 Lady Wellby's plea comes down to us as a confused cry in the wilderness of early sociology. But it should remind us that English social science (as well as its American counterpart) arose in a society actively engaged in redefining women's roles.3 The Awkward Age foregrounds what is only implicit in these social-scientific debates: that an elite's ability to control women's sexuality and reproduction is the test of its ability to control cultural transmission in general. The novel portrays an emergent female sexuality that requires society's most elaborate forms of vigilance. Female adolescents possess contradictory attributes as members of a group whose social purpose is both essential and unstable. In James's preface they are innocents whose entry into society requires the purification of cultural habits. But in the novel proper a curious inversion takes place, and the female adolescent becomes a threat to social mores. All attempts by society to preserve feminine innocence fail, and each failure is attributed to feminine nature rather than to social experience. As examples of difference, the novel's female adolescents, and ultimately all of its women, embody nature's most threatening yet potentially exploitable aspects.4