The Beast to Come: Henry James and the Writing of Queer Messianism

Abstract

This article argues that John Marcher and May Bartram’s companionship in Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” imaginatively anticipates a relationally richer future in both its ambiguous intimacy and its orientation to a never-named “thing” that, contrary to the story’s dominant interpretations, corresponds neither to unrealized heterosexual love nor to repressed homosexual desire. May and Marcher sketch the contours of “a queer messianism” in which fidelity to the future is uncoupled from normative reproduction and in which melancholic attachments to youth animate oppositional identifications.