James's Fiction Research Articles

"Complicated Music at Short Order" in "Fordham Castle"

"Complicated Music at Short Order" in "Fordham Castle" By Kermlt Vanderbilt, San Diego State University The reflections in these pages have had their source in a happy coming-together of three occurrences: enjoying a recent essay by J. Peter Dyson on the neglected "Fordham Castle," considering further musical aspects of James's fiction after my previous article on "Four Meetings," and completing a semester of weekly discussions on James in a seminar of bright students blessed with the faculty which given an inch takes an ell. It is right to say that these weekly meetings, which usually ran beyond three hours, with one grudging intermission, catalyzed the impressions and ideas which flowed from the two other occasions. To that pair of articles and their attendant stories, along with some further pages in James, I turn for the remarks that fol low.1 I Mr. Dyson regards "Fordham Castle" (1904) as one of the dark tales of the final period. The main figure, Abel Taker, can be viewed as a near-tragic cousin to other late characters like John Marcher, Spencer Brydon, and Herbert Dodd. From his initial assumptions, Dyson embarks on a new reading of the story which I believe is open to question almost every step of the way. Yet his Is one of those suggestive essays that is valuable both in itself and as it prompts further re i ηterprêtât ions. Dyson begins outside the story and cites the several notebook entries James made from 1892 to 1899 ostensibly for this tale. Finally, they crystal ¡zed in his conception of two parallel plots. In "Fordham Castle," an American husband (Abel Taker) is relegated to a Swiss pension by his American wife (Sue) so that she can initiate a social career in England apart from her undistinguished mate; and an American woman (Mrs. Magaw) also happens to be relegated to the same pension by a daughter (Mattie) who also hopes to advance in English society apart from her undistinguished mother. To insure her husband's "death," at least for a time, Sue renames Taker "C. P, Addard." Mattie similarly has renamed her mother "Mrs. Vanderplank." Addard soon discovers Mrs. Vander ϕ I ank* s mutual plight, and they resume their original names in a relationship that, on his part, develops into a dependent affair of the heart. At the end, Mattie writes that she is engaged to Lord Dunderton, thanks to the helpful companionship of a widow, Mrs. Sherrington Reeve (Sue), whom she has met at Fordham Castle, Wilts. Mattie now sends for her mother. Abel Taker, twice abandoned, announces his essential demise in the final line of the story, "'Why certainly I'm dead.'" Though "Fordham Castle" has received its scant critical attention as an acerbic little social comedy, Dyson reminds us that in the notebooks James signalled a "deepened perspective" (42) in the comment "I think I see Death and 'Separation.'" Furthermore, there are two entries in the middle Nineties where James imagined the ordeal of "'defeat. . . failure . . . subjection'" for an artistic genius whose spirit dies in an "advantageous marriage," but whose "Dead Self" revives when he renews the company of a loving and understanding woman he had forsaken as a young man. The editors of the Notebooks, Matthiessen and Murdock, did not connect these passages to "Fordham Castle." But Dyson believes that James "almost certainly" had translated this death and rebirth of the artist into the near-parallels of the "sensitive" Abel Taker with the artist, of Sue with the artist's worldly wife, and of Mrs. Magaw with the loving other woman (42, 43). 1. The two articles are J. Peter Dyson, "Death and Separation in 'Fordham Castle,'" Studies in Short Fiction, 56 (1979), 41-47 and Kermit Vanderbilt, "Notes Largely Musical on Henry James's 'Four Meetings,'" Sewanee Review, 81 (1973), 739-52. Dyson's page numbers appear in parentheses in my text. 61 For Dyson, the heart of the story lies in Abe! Taker's deepening meditations on defeat, failure, subjection, separation, and death. His impressions virtually dominate the third-person narration. We learn, with Mrs. Magaw, that his wife Sue is a social climber with a "capacity for callous, relentless action...

Democracy and the Novel: Popular Resistance to Classic American Writers (review)

only from a careful and comprehensive reading of the fiction itself. The categories and distinctions of German Idealist philosophy may very well have suggested to James ways of dramatizing the problems of freedom and the will, but whether they also provided him with the solutions to these problems is not at all certain. To support his views, DonadÃ-o quotes passages from James's letters and Prefaces, such as "the free spirit, always much tormented, and by no means always triumphant, is heroic, ironic, pathetic, or whatever ... only through having remained free" (p. 129). The problem is that James does not tel I us in this passage just what he means by "remained free," and this crucial definition can only be gathered from the fiction itself. Because DonadÃ-o does not examine specific novels at any length, he is forced to rely on generalizations about the "Jamesian novel," as if it were a fixed quantity about which critical unanimity existed; and although many of his observations, particularly on The Golden Bow I, are helpful and persuasive, too often they seem intended less to describe particular qualities of James's fiction than to satisfy a special thesis. The effect of Donadio's critical approach is that he misses important differences of tone between James and Nietzsche, particularly with regard to the distinction they both made between superior and ordinary types of humanity. For Nietzsche, the distinction is between the Ãœbermenschen and the "herd"; for James, it Is between the finer spirits possessing the capacity to "see" and the "fatal fools" who cannot (p. 110). Nietzsche's slavish herd consists of the spiritually vacuous common men upon whom the supermen have every right, if not the obligation, triumphantly to impose their will. James's "fatal fools," on the other hand—the Henrietta Stackpoles as well as the Charlotte Stants—are never simply written off from life, but exist in the realm of comic or tragic incompleteness. Though Henrietta is certainly btlnd to many things in Portrait, she inspires good-natured laughter; and it is just because Charlotte cannot be dominated simply and unequivocally that Maggie's story possesses its special moral and aesthetic power. To equate James's views with Nietzsche's is helpful in demonstrating that they both responded to similar general pressures of their age, but fatal In assessing the character of their responses, and it leads finally to distorted conceptions of the essential spirit of thefir work, for it neglects the permanent reservoir of Christian humanism in James's sensibility, the exact body of thought and feeling Nietzsche wished to extirpate from the modern world. James's view that in art "we move through a blest world in which we know nothing except by style, but in which also everything is saved by style" must stand as a warning that only by attending to James's own style can one recognize the salvation he extends to the blindest and most foolish as to the most perceptive and intelligent of his men and women. Jonathan Brent Northwestern University Henry Nash Smith. Democracy and the Novel: Popular Resistance to Classic American Writers. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978. 204 pp. 13.95. What can we learn from Democracy and the Novel about the popular contemporary resistance to what are now universally accepted as the classics of nineteenth-century America? Not much, I am afraid, that we did not already know. Yet it is still an occasion when familiar ground is traversed by one who has been among the premier guides to American literary culture. It is as if the author of the pioneering Virgin Land, the scholar who so deftly anatomized the voices of Mark Twain, the co-editor of that monumental presentation of the letters of William Dean Howells and Samuel Langhorne Clemens, has now decided to offer us his considered observations on the classic novelists of the last century. Choosing 71 to limit himself to the novel, Smith can rule out Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman among the writers of the period which F. 0. Matthiessen named ,fthe American Renaissance." Taking his lead from Matt h lessen's sumptuous and seminal studies (Randall Stewart described the experience of reading American...

Hydraulics and Heroics: William James and Stephen Crane

Unquestioning faith in an equilibrium of stasis: it is this flaw of temperament, this European fault of social and moral intelligence that separates European women from their American counterparts in nineteenth-century literature. Particularly in Henry James's fiction women of distinctively New World bearing, young women bred to combine stamina with delicacy of spirit, stubbornness with flexibility, reared to disavow perfectly held balances in favor of riskier angles of poise—James's exemplary women conduct their lives along lines of equilibrium more flowing than European, less stiff by far, lines and angles that parallel the mode and style and history of the society they embody, a society shaped at hazard and given to gamble. It is indeed in his masterwork, The Golden Bowl, a fatidic text anticipating which myth of order would shape American high style during the industrial age, that James devised a program intended to discredit stasis and extol movement without forswearing form. In descent as well as dissent from a Swedenborgian father, both Henry James and his brother William endorsed a creed of “vital equilibrium.” And this American ideology presupposed the existence or cultivation of a self galvanized by “balance/imbalance,” a dynamics of tension which provides a constant feature of motive in our classic literature.

Henry James and the Picturesque Mode

H E N R Y JA M E S AND THE PIC TU R ESQ U E MODE W IL L IA M F . H A L L University of British Columbia Useful as the terms “ romance" and "realism" may have been in nineteenthcentury discussions of the novel, their continued application to the fiction of that period, and particularly to Henry James's fiction, grows less and less so, grows in fact positively misleading. I wish to demonstrate in this essay - in examples from Hawthorne (The Blithedale Romance) and from Henry James (Roderick Hudson and The Portrait of a Lady) - the superior usefulness of another concept: that of the picturesque. One associates the picturesque vision and its techniques in fiction primarily with the first generation - Dickens in England, Hawthorne in America - of great nineteenth-century novelists. By the 1870s the term had become a common literary one1 and (as I shall demonstrate from the practice of Henry James) the vision and its controlling techniques were still positively at work in significant fiction at least through the early 1880s. Considered in the context of this single mode - the picturesque - three major techniques peculiar to it, caricature, melodrama, and mythic reference and allusion, may be correctly appreciated. In the contexts of "romance" and "realism" the first two are invariably considered to be crude, to be simplifications, the one of character, the other of action, instead of the subtle and complex techniques they may in fact be. Only occasionally, in these contexts, is the third understood as a structural patterning device that extends the fiction's total meaning and very rarely as the substitute for what, in the context of "realism," is designated as analysis and especially the analysis of character. The picturesque2 derived from the late eighteenth-century preoccupation with the sublime and like it, in both painting and literature, was marked by a mixture of beauty and ugliness, the symmetrical and the asymmetrical, by the delineation of a series of irregular surface facts rendered without analysis or direct comment. The important difference between the two lay in the reactions the two modes were expected to produce. Thus, common to both was an often repeated pictorial contrast between an ancient, often mythic, context (frequently characterized by the presence of works of sculpture) and modern human figures generally shown as dwarfed by the context. In the sublime mode the contrast was intended to contribute to English Studies in Can ad a, i , 3 (fall 19 75) 327 Henry James and the Picturesque M ode those reactions Burke noted as proper to it: awe and terror. In the picturesque mode the reactions were intended to be those more commonly associated with the grotesque: surprise, shock, even, in extreme cases, disgust. Dr Syntax expressed the essential difference succinctly enough in the fourteenth canto of his Tours: A carrion fowl tied to a stake Will a far better picture make Than a white swan in all its pride Sailing upon the crystal tide. Thomas Sargent Perry's comment on Turgenev's fictional method as "pic­ turesque not analytical ... we see the picturesque and analyse then ourselves" indicates a further distinguishing mark of the literary picturesque. His com­ ment describes what both James and Howells saw in Turgenev's novels - and imitated - as "the dramatic method"; what James was also to call "the architec­ tural method." This method included not merely the avoidance of comment or analysis but the conscious composition of a group of characters in a scene and the arrangement of a linked series of such "compositions" as the total structure of the novel; a method anticipated, one might note, in Mrs Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. Just as Dickens, the most subtle of caricaturists, commonly used the term "caricature" loosely and pejoratively, so did James frequently use the term "picturesque." It is, however, possible to assemble from among James's non-fictional writing his serious and conscious understanding of the word as a literary concept. This amounts to - if one excludes the loose pejorative meaning - a cluster of three or four major related meanings: it may mean the grotesque; it may assume the form of a composed picture or scene associated with the...

Reciprocity and the Market Place in The Wings of the Dove and What Maisie Knew

B EFORE WE CAN HOPE to understand moral sense of Henry James, we must shed a number of misconceptions. One of oldest and most attractive of these misconceptions is that James shared New England conscience which many of his American characters possess. According to Yvor Winters, most persuasive exponent of this view, more immediate source of James's moral sense was Puritan conscience, ultimate source being the Aristotelian ethical tradition. 1 In Puritan conscience this tradition had become intensified even while losing its rational foundations. Because of his Calvinist ancestry, a traditional moral sense survived in James, but without its original philosophical and religious sanctions. Thus, James inherited a moral sense by any clear set of ideas. The instinctual and unsupported nature of his moral sense is Maule's Well, which poisons James's fiction by causing a great deal of obscurity and ambiguity. This interpretation of Jamesian morality presents a number of difficulties. For one thing, Winters rides roughshod over facts

The Early Tales of Henry James James Kraft The Lucid Reflector: The Observer in Henry James's Fiction Ora Segal The Fictional Children of Henry James Muriel G. Shine

Book Review| September 01 1970 Review The Early Tales of Henry JamesJames KraftThe Lucid Reflector: The Observer in Henry James's FictionOra SegalThe Fictional Children of Henry JamesMuriel G. Shine William T. Stafford William T. Stafford Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1970) 25 (2): 237–242. https://doi.org/10.2307/2932995 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation William T. Stafford; Review. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 1 September 1970; 25 (2): 237–242. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2932995 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1971 By The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

A "Shade of a Special Sense": Henry James and the Art of Naming

TN RECENT YEARS students of Henry James's fiction have noticed ll many examples of suggestive naming. Scholarly comments run all the way from Dorothy Hoare's brief generalization, James' names are always odd,' to Quentin Anderson's lengthy theory that Milly Theale is an anagram of a Greek word.2 The attention given to names arises naturally as careful readers become increasingly aware that practically everything in James is deliberate and serves some artistic purpose. What needs examining now is the length to which he carried symbolic naming and how such an unrealisticin some writers even allegorical-device functions in his work. James's most explicit statement on appropriate naming appears in Partial Portraits, where he deplores Trollope's tendency to go too far and strain credulity. A Mr. Quiverful with fourteen children (which is the number attained in Barchester Towers) is too difficult to believe in. We can believe in the name and we can believe in the children; but we cannot manage the combination. However, James added that when Trollope was content not to be too comical, his appellations were fortunate enough, and names such as Mrs. Proudie and Gatherum Castle he felt were rather able to minister to illusion than destroy it. In the same essay James says that Thackeray's names were perfect; they always had a meaning, and (except in his absolutely jocose productions, where they were still admirable) we can imagine, even when most figurative, that they should have been borne by real people.3 For James, then, credibility demanded exercising some slight restraint so as to avoid complete burlesque but did not exclude even the most blatant of connota-

SHORTER NOTICES

SHORTER NOTICES Get access The Search for Form. Studies in the Structure of James's Fiction. By J. A. WARD. Pp. xvi+228. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1967. 57s. net. DOUGLAS HEWITT DOUGLAS HEWITT Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXI, Issue 82, 1970, Pages 252–253, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXI.82.252 Published: 01 April 1970

Review: The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James's Fiction, by J. A. Ward

Book Review| June 01 1968 Review: The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James's Fiction, by J. A. Ward The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James's FictionJ. A. Ward B. R. McElderry,, Jr. B. R. McElderry,, Jr. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1968) 23 (1): 111–113. https://doi.org/10.2307/2932325 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation B. R. McElderry,; Review: The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James's Fiction, by J. A. Ward. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 1 June 1968; 23 (1): 111–113. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2932325 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1968 By The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

: The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James's Fiction . J. A. Ward.

: The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James's Fiction . J. A. Ward.

The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James's Fiction.

The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James's Fiction.

The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James's Fiction

This volume is a study of the structure of certain of James's works, as well as a search for the structural principles that inform James's fiction and lie behind the technical dicta of his essays and prefaces. It also develops the thesis that most of James's structures are determined by logical and spatial, rather than chronological, concepts of relationships.Originally published in 1967.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James's Fiction

The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James's Fiction

Henry James, or, The Beast in the Palace of Art

N A Small Boy and Others, the deeply revealing first of his autobiographical volumes, Henry James describes himself as person so haunted, even from an early age, with visions of life, that aridities, for him, were half a and half an impossibility... figurative language here leads directly into the heart of what I take to be the central theme of James's fiction, that of the loss of It is this terror of James's own which is the source of his great theme; and, prior to that, it is this terror, I feel, which is the dynamic of James's very creative process. Terror is a strong word, but it is appropriate to the emotions generated in stories like The Beast in the Jungle and The Jolly Corner, where those Jamesian surrogates John Marcher and Spencer Brydon are haunted by just this fear of personal failure. It is with such late works as these, and a particular pattern of imagery and event they share, that I will be especially concerned here. But from the same fear issue all those works of every period in which renunciation is at stake, or a lack of initiation into life lamented; in which young men and women discover that they have not the courage to live, and push aside wistfully or with revulsion the cup of life; or older people find that Life has somehow passed them by unawares. 'Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had? .... now I'm old ... it's too late . .. it's as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having had the gumption to know it was there.' Thus-of course-Lambert Strether in Paris (where the young James himself saw those visions, and knew those terrors of life's aridities). It has been said to be a peculiarly American Angst. Certainly James's concern with the life lived-or lost-can be traced back from the latest fiction to the earliest childhood anxieties as described with

The Question of Freedom in James's Fiction

The Question of Freedom in James's Fiction

The Sacred Fount: James's Portrait of the Artist Manqué

'The obsession of other thing is terror.' James was a framer of epigraphs which may or may not stand for his deepest beliefs. But it is possible that in this one we have at least t-he beginning of an approach to that exceedingly difficult and puzzling short fiction, The Sacred Fount, a work which has only recently been emerging from limbo in which it has existed since its publication in 1901. For The Sacred Fount is as near as James ever came to expressing in one place a theory of art and a theory of morality and a theory of love. The summum bonum of Jamesian morality revolves about two words Life and Freedom-often used in special senses in both James's fiction and his criticism-and may best be expressed by phrase: A rich life freely lived. This can be demonstrated by reference to those characters who, obsessed with the other thing, fail in life (such as John Marcher in The Beast in Jungle, or early Strether, or little bookbinder Hyacinth Robinson,

Henry James and the Nature of Evil

Evil in James's fiction is not so much a problem as it is an inexorable, ever present reality that cripples and destroys; it is present at the basis of every human situation, and it is at least latent in the soul of every man. It is unquestioned and undefined, manifest in its effects, not in its causes. Critics frequently describe James as having a of evil, (rather than an idea of or a concept of evil) ; and the term is accurate, for it suggests that to James evil is obscure and indefinite. In his works the reaction to evil often strikes us as vague and unrelated to specific action or character, or we may feel, as Yvor Winters towards some of the novels, that the sense of evil far exceeds what the presented situation merits.' This sense of evil

Art Imagery in Herny James's Fiction

Art Imagery in Herny James's Fiction

The Uses of James's Imagery: Drama Through Metaphor

A study such as Wolfgang Clemen's The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1951) indicates that something other than the content of a metaphor, or even its simple recurrence, will prove important for the investigator of images. The skill of the artist may better be revealed in the functioning of his images or the great variety of uses which they are made to serve in different contexts. This suggestion has especial validity when applied to such a craftsman as Henry James. The changing conditions under which he applies certain figures in part explain why James's later fiction becomes more dramatic, at the same time that it remains realistic and more exclusively concerns itself with subjective events.