James's Text Research Articles

Codes of Intimacy: Love, Chance, and Masculinity in Henry James's Confidence

Codes of IntimacyLove, Chance, and Masculinity in Henry James's Confidence Karin Hoepker (bio) Setting aside older quarrels over the boundaries of a naturalist canon, this essay argues for a more comprehensive understanding of post-Civil War literary production which traces lines of connection between realism, naturalism, and sentimental fiction. I read Henry James's Confidence (1879), a novel disregarded by critics for more than a century, as a complex text that programmatically investigates codes of intimacy and familiarity against the background of a transatlantic economy of risk, globalization, and uncertainty. As a story of male friendship and romance, jealousy, miscommunication, and a social experiment gone wrong, Confidence explores the late nineteenth-century semantics of love that paradoxically demands both serendipity and inevitable necessity. The novel's often overlooked sharp satirical humor dissects a psychosocial construct of masculine individualism which struggles to maintain a sense of agency within an emerging "age of capital" (Levy 189). Nancy Walker and Donna Campbell have long made convincing arguments for a reevaluation of literary production in the late nineteenth century that revises the lines of distinction drawn between realism, naturalism, and sentimental writing as both heavily gendered and sustaining a prejudice against literature as a marketable commodity. Along similar lines of traditional canonization and bias against the popular and sentimental, Henry James's critics have ignored Confidence as one of his lesser works. Written for profit, tailored to please the tastes of a broader readership, it has, almost by default, been deemed devoid of artistic value. I propose to suspend such categorization and focus on the cultural work of the novel instead. I am interested in what Confidence might tell us about the function of fiction in a late nineteenth-century socioeconomic paradigm of increased social complexity, functional differentiation, and [End Page 1] what kind of impact a pervading logic of market speculation has on contemporaneous codes of familiarity and intimacy. The social system of a capitalist market casts subject relationships in a new light; mutual assessments of value dominate and threaten to overwrite previous narratives of intimacy, familiarity, and ideational values of friendship with a transactional agenda. Speculative capitalism becomes part of the field of invisible forces to which the human subject is exposed and thus also forms one of the "insults" (as Freud had famously called them) to human self-perception and individualist fantasies of control, which naturalism eventually comes to highlight.1 Nineteenth-century literary production centrally engages in an exploration of coping mechanisms, in strategies of complexity reduction, and in efforts of managing the emerging threats of uncertainty and social change. Literary texts address the increasing sense of fragmentation of reality as it is individually and collectively experienced and, more specifically, respond to a crisis of knowledge production and masculinity.2 In this context, Henry James's Confidence engages with issues of masculinity within a broader field of complexity and uncertainty. The novel employs a seemingly conventional sentimental plotline of love and romance to reframe problems of subjectivity, intimacy, and knowledge production. To that end, Niklas Luhmann's discussion of love and trust in modern societies as increasingly differentiating socioeconomic systems provides a conceptual frame for a new reading of Confidence. Luhmann's reflections on the semantics of love help foreground the cultural work of James's text as a forerunner of "naturalist sentimentalism" (Sawaya 56); they highlight how Confidence uses an aesthetics of the sentimental to dismount narratives of individualism and autonomous agency and rejects simplistic ideas of causality and determination. Tapping into the rich resources of sentimental aesthetics and the novel of manners, James employs codes of intimacy at the core of romantic love to question predominant discourses of individualism that are an intricate part of novelistic writing of his time. Confidence targets capitalist fantasies of entrepreneurial individuals as well as realist narratives of individual agency and experience. It humorously exposes the latent sentimental economies of such narratives and the gendered and classist rhetoric that primarily serves the economically privileged figure of the male dilettante. As Confidence pairs romantic narrative and marriage plots with the specters of lost friendship and divorce, it highlights themes of speculation, uncertainty, and confidence as part of a broader engagement with systemic...

George Alexander and the Work of the Actor-Manager by Lucie Sutherland

Reviewed by: George Alexander and the Work of the Actor-Manager by Lucie Sutherland Sarah Chambré Lucie Sutherland. George Alexander and the Work of the Actor-Manager. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. xiii+297 pp., $84.99 (hardback). Examining theater history and cultural practice, Lucie Sutherland provides in this work of forensic scholarship a many-faceted portrayal of George Alexander, one of the last great figures to occupy the role of actor-manager, which dominated and shaped the English stage from Richard Burbage's tenure of Shakespeare's Globe (1599-1613) through David Garrick's creation of the Garrick Theatre (1747-76) and continued with an array of famous names until the early decades of the twentieth century. Like his predecessors and peers, Alexander combined the roles of principal actor, producer, and financial director as actor-manager of the fashionable St. James's Theatre from 1890 until his death in 1918. Sutherland's detailed analysis of the financial and practical aspects of this management arrangement underpins a nuanced portrayal of Alexander's championing of new English drama with a constant assessment of its appeal to his diverse audience, segregated by class and ticket price. This book describes how Alexander's commitment to contemporary texts, nurturing of a new audience, and manipulation of their tastes by the creation of a St. James's brand was tempered by conservatism. This was partly innate, partly due to censorship but mostly the result of a cautious guardianship of his brand, defined with a careful and highly attuned eye to the fashionable occupants of the stalls and dress circle. Sutherland delineates the elements that contributed to this management style and challenges the image of Alexander as a rigid autocrat with particular attention to his collaboration with actors and playwrights. His emerging style and openness to serious new drama was shifted significantly by the events of 1895, of which Henry James's short lived drama Guy Domville (1895) was only one. Sutherland details the financial imperatives and the portfolio approach to Alexander's risk management. Increasingly, the actor-manager interspersed new works with revivals, safe romances, and market-tested offerings such as acknowledged authors or works that had premiered elsewhere. The need for long runs and this conservatively managed collaboration, exemplified by but not exclusive to Alexander, led by the [End Page E-8] time of the opening years of the twentieth century to a bifurcated marketplace—as the critic Dennis Kennedy describes it: "avant-garde suspicion of popular success eventually split [the market place] into two parts: the larger part got the audience but little lasting attention. The smaller part the critical and historical acclaim" (146). In many respects, the representative history so well reconstructed here mirrors the shifts in literary book publishing over the same period. In this history, James arguably placed himself in the wrong market for his work, although the successes of pioneers Oscar Wilde and Arthur Wing Pinero in the early 1890s might have seemed to augur otherwise. Sutherland's book is not primarily about James's play, which was only a brief episode in Alexander's career. He is quoted as reminiscing in 1909 about Guy Domville that "I was, and always shall be, proud, in spite of that particular audience's adverse verdict. It had a fair run, which satisfied me, for it attracted to the St James's that whole of intellectual London's audiences available for any theatre" (45). The author accepts the standard critical viewpoint that the construed failure was due to "the limited dramatic possibilities of James's text." The detailed scholarship contained in this book is nevertheless very useful for Jamesians interested in a re-evaluation of the play and consideration of its limited run in the context of Alexander's practice. The creation of the St. James's brand relied on elaborately realistic and spectacular staging, which entailed high fixed costs for a production, and success was thus reliant on long runs to create profit. The stratified audience composition meant that a play must have broad appeal, something that Guy Domville failed to offer. Sutherland demonstrates that rehearsal time was limited and that Alexander focused on choreography and mise-en-scène rather than dialogue...

Performing in the Margins: Intertextual Memory in Invisible Furies by Michiel Heyns

Within the larger context of intertextuality in contemporary South African works of fiction, the article focuses on Michiel Heyns's novel, Invisible Furies, whose characters, plot trajectories, narrative strategies and thematic concerns are closely inscribed over those of Henry James's The Ambassadors. The article questions whether such blatant appropriation of a classic text might not risk becoming a form of self-marginalisation by the appropriating author, acknowledgement of the primacy of the source text and acceptance of an ancillary role. Approaching Heyns's novel from various theoretical perspectives on intertextuality and memory (Kristeva's intertextuality, Genette's hypertextuality, Riffaterre's obligatory intertextuality, Hutcheon's adaptation), the article examines Heyns's narrative performance in the margins of James's text in terms of Hutcheon's redefinition of intertextual parody as “repetition with critical distance that allows ironic signalling of difference at the very heart of similarity”, and concludes that in Invisible Furies Heyns combines an impressive intertextual feat with an ironic interrogation of intertextuality itself.

The Message to the Merchants in James 4:13–17 and Its Relevance for Today

ABSTRACT This article highlights the contemporary significance of Jas 4:13–17 to business and commercial pursuits. The first part summarizes modern biblical and theological scholarship on the scriptural passage. The discussion highlights areas of convergence within different Christian traditions by examining the work of commentators writing from a variety of Christian backgrounds. The second part offers a treatment of the passage within the wider context of the epistle. Drawing from modern commentary, this part of the essay also elaborates on the relationship between faith and secular pursuits envisioned by the James text. Particular focus is directed toward concerns pertaining to the separation of faith from commercial affairs expressed in two recent Roman Catholic magisterial works, Benedict XVI's Caritas in Veritate and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace document titled Vocation of the Business Leader: A Reflection. The third part extends the discussion in the second part by tracing some further parallels between Jas 4:13–17 and portions of Benedict XVI's Caritas in Veritate.

The Message to the Merchants in James 4:13–17 and Its Relevance for Today

ABSTRACT This article highlights the contemporary significance of Jas 4:13–17 to business and commercial pursuits. The first part summarizes modern biblical and theological scholarship on the scriptural passage. The discussion highlights areas of convergence within different Christian traditions by examining the work of commentators writing from a variety of Christian backgrounds. The second part offers a treatment of the passage within the wider context of the epistle. Drawing from modern commentary, this part of the essay also elaborates on the relationship between faith and secular pursuits envisioned by the James text. Particular focus is directed toward concerns pertaining to the separation of faith from commercial affairs expressed in two recent Roman Catholic magisterial works, Benedict XVI's Caritas in Veritate and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace document titled Vocation of the Business Leader: A Reflection. The third part extends the discussion in the second part by tracing some further parallels between Jas 4:13–17 and portions of Benedict XVI's Caritas in Veritate.

The Strange and Dangerous Voyage of Captaine Thomas James: A Critical Edition ed. by Colleen M. Franklin (review)

Colleen M. Franklin, ed. The Strange and Dangerous Voyage of Captaine Thomas James: A Critical Edition. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's up, 2014. 243 pp. $100. When early modern travel literature was experiencing a kind of critical renaissance in the mid 2000s, Julia Schleck pointed out how many narratives discussing the implications of early modern travel relied too heavily on certain canonical sources. Schleck argued in part that the reliance of contemporary critics to draw primarily from Hakluyt's collection of travel narratives potentially reinscribes a narrative colonialism. From here, she suggests that the recontextualization of these narratives that modernizes them destroys the early modern readers. While Coleen M. Franklin's critical edition of Strange and Dangerous Voyage of Captaine Thomas James is slightly past the historical context of Hakluyt's work (his last work Principall Navigations was published in 1600; James's text is published in 1633), her work sidesteps the problem of narrative colonialism by contextualizing the historical reception of the text and providing access and critical context for an important early modern narrative. Franklin's stated goals are to present a text as faithfully as she could (and to that end she changes little of the source text) and to make the text available and accessible to academic and interested amateur alike. In pointing out the substantial influence James's work had on many artists, and the notes and introduction she provides, Franklin presents a text that achieves both of her stated goals and avoids destroying the context with modernization. In spite of the surge in academic interest in early modern travel literature, few printed critical editions like Franklin's have emerged. Scholars have often relied on texts collected by Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas. These collections can be difficult to navigate, especially Purchas, but in the early twentieth century J. M. Dent and H. G. Rawlinson produced impressive yet problematical reprintings of Hakluyt's and Purchas's collections. The Hakluyt Society has also been active in publishing travel narratives, but few of these offer as sustained a critical study as Franklin's critical edition. The scarcity of print critical editions can in part be explained by the rise of Internet technology and websites like Early English Books Online. Franklin describes the significant difficulties of finding a good, readable copy of Strange and Dangerous Voyage, and her stated goal to produce a text in a state much like what readers in the seventeenth century would have experienced would certainly be destroyed by hypertext. Another significant value of Franklin's text, aside from those who wish to dispense with the fetish of digital for the haptic pleasure of a printed book, is its introduction (the text of the introduction is 126 pages long with 274 endnotes). Here Franklin traces the reception history of James's text, delineating public interest in Strange and Dangerous Voyage to its present reception, and posits the direction of future scholarship. The text is broken into four primary parts: a critical introduction, James's text (including appendices from James on longitude, a note to divinity scholars at Cambridge, and a list of nautical instruments he used), and substantial notes on James's text. Franklin also includes appendices of nautical terms, names of persons and places referred to in James's text, and a bibliography of critical works on James. Strange and Dangerous Voyage is a part of a very large corpus of texts describing the search for a northwest passage. While he, of course, failed in his attempt, the narrative of his voyage was popular during his lifetime, as was interest in the discovery of a northwest passage, and remained popular for many years after his death. Franklin's introduction begins with medieval perspectives of the north and how they potentially influenced James's writing. …

The Imp of the Perverse: Metaphor in The Golden Bowl

This essay argues that The Golden Bowl is marked by the perverse as such, by a constant turning from the direct, the accepted, expected, proper ways of being, acting, speaking and writing to the indirect, improper, incorrect and unexpected. This movement, which drives the narrative of James's fictional world and is the source of its remarkable energy as well as its theory of representation, is most apparent in metaphor with the locational uncertainty that it generates. The essay seeks to describe and uncover the implications of that uncertainty in James's text.

‘The Very Air We Breathe’: The Aesthetics of Experience in Henry James's ‘From Chambéry to Milan’

This study offers a reading of Henry James's 1869 travel essay ‘From Chambéry to Milan’, and argues that James's text uses the occasion of travel to Italy to pose a variety of phenomenological, epistemological and aesthetic questions. Such reflections become especially concentrated when James visits the home of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Chambéry and senses the ghostly' remainder of its former inhabitant's past as somehow embedded in the physical objects of the present. Upon arrival in Milan, the essay then gives an account of James's visions of the monumental nature of the city's Cathedral in terms of Walter Pater's theory of impressionistic perception and Kant's philosophy, as set forth in the Critique of Judgement. Concluding with a visit to the aesthetically rich space of the Milan Opera House, the essay seems to suggest that, in the end, these experiences of Italian travel are an important source for the development of James's theory of fiction.

Unsuspecting Narrative Doubles in Serial Publication: The Illustrated "Turn of the Screw" and Collier's U.S.S. Maine Coverage

Unsuspecting Narrative Doubles in Serial Publication:The Illustrated "Turn of the Screw" and Collier's U.S.S. Maine Coverage Amanda Sigler When in 1898 Robert J. Collier assumed editorship of the journal founded by his father, he faced declining circulation numbers and a legacy of "hard times" (Mott 454). Two ground-breaking events occurred in the year he began editing Collier's Weekly: the journal secured rights to publish Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw," and the U.S.S. Maine exploded in Havana Harbor, providing rich possibilities for news coverage. As Frank Luther Mott records, Collier made two significant statements explaining the decisions he made during his first year at the journal: "I showed my judgment of the public taste by ordering a serial story by Henry James. . . . It was at that time . . . that the Maine blew up and Jimmy Hare [sent to Havana to cover the story] blew in" (455). Although Mott mentions these two events on the same page of his History of American Magazines, he fails to draw any further connection between them, and even scholars analyzing "The Turn of the Screw" as a serialized work have frequently bypassed the surrounding articles in favor of focusing on James's vexed relationship to the marketplace or on his general distrust of periodical illustrators. My project returns to the first publication of "The Turn of the Screw" in Collier's, examining not only how the journal's seldom-reprinted illustrations interact with the tale but also how "The Turn of the Screw" itself both anticipates and complicates its relationship to surrounding articles and visual images. Specifically, I shall discuss how Eric Pape's illustrations are far more complex than traditionally thought and how the coeval emergence of the Maine story at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War uncannily yet appropriately intersects with "The Turn of the Screw," reflecting and reifying anxieties common to the journal's late-nineteenth-century audience. [End Page 80] Whereas modern books strip "The Turn of the Screw" from its original position alongside these stories and images, Collier's uniquely surrounds James's text with striking visual art, other fictional works, and dramatic news coverage, forcing seemingly unrelated narratives to share space between the same journal covers. As Sean Latham and Robert Scholes write, periodicals are "rich, dialogic texts" that "create often surprising and even bewildering points of contact between disparate areas of human activity" (528). These competing and intersecting modes of representation, brought into dialogue by their proximity in periodical pages, give us new ways to approach the literature we typically encounter in different physical formats and in later historical eras. By examining these contexts—the physical positioning of James's story in Collier's and the historical moment in which the serialized tale was published—we can not only begin to more fully appreciate how the story's first readers would have encountered and responded to the tale but also find grounds for rethinking our own twenty-first century approaches to the text. In light of the large body of critical commentary that analyzes James's tale as a frame narrative, it seems important to resituate "The Turn of the Screw" within its original context as a serialized tale—especially since the outermost frame within the story gestures toward an audience of magazine readers. The narrator's comparison of the holiday gatherers' "last story" to "the mere opening of a serial" (TS1 3) gains even greater significance when we consider that this comment first appeared not between the covers of a book but between the covers of a periodical that had a tradition of publishing short stories, including ghost and sensation fiction. Thus when the narrator states that Douglas's story is told in the context of other tales, we may wish to think of it not only as adding "another turn of the screw" (1) to the Christmas Eve stories related within James's narrative but also as adding another turn of the screw to the stories published in Collier's. In 1897, the year leading up to the publication of "The Turn of the Screw," Collier's frequently serialized stories suggestive of horror and intrigue, including...

The Wings of The Dove: An Unproduced Film Script (1949)

This article examines an unpublished film script for The Wings of the Dove, written by Robert Stevenson and commissioned by David O. Selznick in 1949. The article discusses how James's text was deliberately reshaped as a vehicle for one of Selznick's contract actresses–Ingrid Bergman, Jennifer Jones–and subsequently discusses how Stevenson incorporated elements commonly found in women's films of the '40s. It will also show how the novel is rewritten so that the main focus of attention centers on the romantic triangle of Milly, Kate and Densher–a characteristic convention of many women's films of the period.

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

[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. …

Living the Dream: Benjamin's Arcades Project and The Golden Bowl

Both The Golden Bowl and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project examine the conquest of the epistemologies of history and domestic life by monetary consumer culture. By examining The Golden Bowl in terms of the mass cultural alienation that Benjamin called "dream-sleep" and the related phenomenon of the flâneur, this essay demonstrates a Benjaminian anthropological vision present within James's text. Although demonstrating the ultimate victory of a domestic order exemplifying the cultural alienation that Benjamin described, the novel also provides space for a critique of the overarching cultural conditions that permitted this alienation.

Society in Self, Self in Society: Survival in The Wings of the Dove

In the past, criticisms lauding or condemning Milly Theale, Kate Croy, Merton Densher, and Maud Lowder, or any combination of these characters in James's The Wings of the Dove (1902), generally assume that if one or several of these characters is or are the victimized, the others are the victimizers. The most common of interpretations claiming Milly's innocence/' for example, condemn Kate, Densher, and Maud Lowder of duplicity and mercenary intent, describing them, for example, as admirable villains (Syndy McMillen Conger). However, Susan Mizruchi, who sees Milly cultivat[ing] (234) her illness, Julie Olin-Ammentorp, who sees Milly's final bequest to Densher as profoundly manipulative (50), and Sharon Cameron, who contends that Milly performs the novel's ultimate manipulation (124), are among those who detect definite signs of intent on Milly's part and complicate, if not reverse, the view that Milly is merely the unconsciously innocent victim. Adeline R. Tintner's framing of James's text as his very free redoing (125) of Milton's twin epics casts Kate in the role of seductress who contributes to the fall and education of Densher. Milton Kornfeld (346) and Leo Bersani (142-43) essentially agree with this general position when they refer to Densher as redeemed villain. In this way, demonizing Kate resurrects Densher, who, more often than not, is then cast in the role of hero.

Imaging The Europeans: Illustrations to the Polish Translation of James's Text

The article compares the linguistic and the non-linguistic translation of James's The Europeans: Zofia Zinserling's Polish text and Wieslsaw Walkuski's four accompanying pictures in pen and ink. Walkuski's project is discussed in the following contexts: the changing tradition of cover design for James translations into Polish, Jim Dine's artistic commentary on "The Madonna of the Future," Alvin Langdon Coburn's photogravures for the New York Edition, and James's own views on the art of illustration. Working with the hypothesis that the artist and the translator impersonate the two Europeans of the title, the article praises Waÿkuski's reading of James's ambiguity.

Respectability and the Wild Beasts of the Philosophical Desert: The Heart of James's Varieties

This commentary was suggested to me in part by a colleague's remark that it would be nice if we could make William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience "respectable." The implication was that though there was something redeemable about the book, it somehow wasn't philosophically or scientifically proper. The remark awakened me to—or at least reminded me of—the fact that this has been a traditional take on James's text. As Julius Bixler points out, ridicule began soon after the book was published: "The Varieties of Religious Experience, appearing at about the same time as Ernest Thompson Seton's book of animal stories, was soon nicknamed 'Wild Religions I Have Known'" (1926, 1). My awakening to this attitude—a prevalent if not a pervasive one among contemporary intellectuals—led me to consider that it would be better, and crucially important to James himself, to keep James "unrespectable." James may have been a renegade and anti-professional philosopher, but he knew what he was doing.

'It seemed to have to do with something else...': Henry James's What Maisie Knew and Bion's theory of thinking.

This article argues that what Maisie knew, as conveyed to readers of James's novel, can fruitfully be considered and interpreted in terms of Bion's theory of thinking, and especially his concepts of K and -K and the container/contained relationship. It is shown that James describes a containing relationship that Maisie, the child protagonist, has with her nurse, and the gradual growth of such a relationship in Maisie's own psyche, leading to her capacity to learn from experience. James's text is shown to contain striking instances of the creation and the destruction of meaning (K and -K) by the adults close to Maisie. It is argued that Maisie's own choice to make links and to desire knowledge is made through her complex experience of the oedipal situation, which gives her opportunities to see herself in 'the third position' (Britton, 1998). Maisie's eventual decision about her life, made by herself in the absence of any adequate parent, is based on the unconscious knowledge that destruction of meaning poisons the mind, and she must do her best to avoid it.

‘It seemed to have to do with something else &’: Henry James's What Maisie Knew and Bion's theory of thinking

This article argues that what Maisie knew, as conveyed to readers of James's novel, can fruitfully be considered and interpreted in terms of Bion's theory of thinking, and especially his concepts of K and ‐K and the container/contained relationship. It is shown that James describes a containing relationship that Maisie, the child protagonist, has with her nurse, and the gradual growth of such a relationship in Maisie's own psyche, leading to her capacity to learn from experience. James's text is shown to contain striking instances of the creation and the destruction of meaning (K and ‐K) by the adults close to Maisie. It is argued that Maisie's own choice to make links and to desire knowledge is made through her complex experience of the oedipal situation, which gives her opportunities to see herself in ‘the third position’ (Britton, 1998). Maisie's eventual decision about her life, made by herself in the absence of any adequate parent, is based on the unconscious knowledge that destruction of meaning poisons the mind, and she must do her best to avoid it.

Henry James's Legacy: The Afterlife of His Figure and Fiction (review)

The first thing that must be said of this book, the sixth of Adeline Tintner's surveys of everything that went into a James text and everything that has come out of them, is that it is bound somewhere to contain the essential piece of information that a James scholar is looking for, so that, used encyclopedically, it is very useful and full of unexpected details. The title conveys Adeline Tintner's intention, though the word "figure" in it may need glossing: Tintner is as interested in James's influence as a literary figure and as a personality as she is in the influence of his texts. She runs through a range of writers who have used James, some only familiar because of James, and further looks at James in films and in art, including book-illustration. A chapter on Leon Edel's biography of James, which she calls the "Baedeker" for people wishing to visit James (437), reminds us of Tintner's comparable aim to be similarly complete and more than suggests where her own allegiances lie.

Meaning in Henry James (review)

120 The Henry James Review authority that can determine meaning. But Chapman's book tends to cover up the strain of the ensuant writer-reader relationship, to hide James's will to power over readers and the world by evoking a mutuality of purpose. The book too easily highlights an already achieved collaboration, and too readily downplays the painful ambiguities of a world where authority is in question and raw materialism decides the fate of the arts. Chapman's resolution of the central ambiguities of James's stories has the advantage of producing eminently clear prose that would surely be a help to Jamesian neophytes; for better or worse, her prose has none of the densities of much poststructuralist analysis. Chapman's clarity seems to have been purchased, however, at the price of reducing James's work to some unexamined generalizations about the nature of art and power and of reader response, and of reducing James's painful ambiguities to a "convergence through the recognition of shared, mutually reinforcing intellectual and artistic ideals [that] creates the opportunity for human relations that are 'exquisitely personal,' as James describes them in 'The Great Good Place' " (54). Isn't it pretty to think we can have such relations? Donald Wolff Eastern Oregon State College Bell, Millicent. Meaning in Henry James. Harvard U P, 1991.384 pp. $45.00. Millicent Bell's Meaning in Henry James is a welcome addition to James scholarship. A substantial and well-researched book, it provides sensitive and thoughtprovoking interpretations of James's fictions. Meaning in Henry James explores the creation of meaning in James's writings, and employs close textual readings to support its author's attempt "to display how a story or novel of James's arouses expectations in us, stimulates us to hypotheses of its further course, and seems to propose and cancel meanings at successive moments" (10). Bell is a careful reader and her analysis of the varieties of ways in which James's texts achieve meaning is eloquent and persuasive. Bell's focus on the experience of reading James's fiction leads her to examine the ways in which meaning is constructed, re-constructed, and even deconstructed in James's texts. She contends that the process of decoding fiction is "open" (8) and that, ultimately, James's writings "resist summary and closure" (11). Bell's critical approach constitutes a blend of reader-response theory and New Critical technique, which enables her to trace the movement she discerns in James's prose, a movement that is "dictated by the author's language, which—like all language—brings not only immediate meanings to mind but expectations of future, more comprehensive frames of significance' ' (10). This is a laborious project and, in order to support her endeavor, the author examines the ways in which James's writings are "dynamically intertextual," by which she means that "they propose to the reader not one stable antecedent, but a sequence of possible relationships with cultural models of human experience, of character types and paradigmatic life histories, of literary genres and archetypal narratives, and even of specific literary models" (23). Meaning in Henry James supplies historical, biographical, and textual information on its subject. The author frequently draws parallels between James's readers and his characters, for, she contends, the Jamesian reader ' 'is encouraged to constantly renew efforts to integrate and interpret James's narratives, just as the fictional characters themselves B ook Reviews 121 struggle for self-definition" (42). Bell demonstrates how James's characters frequently engage in acts of reading much like the Jamesian reader, and she illustrates how both are engaged in efforts to construct meaning. Meaning in Henry James includes analyses of Daisy Miller, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The Wings of the Dove, and The Ambassadors. While Bell devotes less attention to the early writings, her reading of Daisy Miller is particularly sensitive and allows her to explore the analogies that exist between James's and Winterbourne's attempts to typify Daisy. In so doing, she argues for the tale's topicality, since she believes that James's text manifests a parallel with contemporary readers' tendencies ' 'to place others in...

Henry James and the Evolution of Consciousness: A Study of "The Ambassadors ", and: Searching for the Figure in the Carpet in the Tales of Henry James: Reflections of an Ordinary Reader , and: Henry James: Selected Letters (review)

Reviewed by: Henry James and the Evolution of Consciousness: A Study of "The Ambassadors", and: Searching for the Figure in the Carpet in the Tales of Henry James: Reflections of an Ordinary Reader, and: Henry James: Selected Letters Rosalie Hewitt Courtney Johnson, Jr. Henry James and the Evolution of Consciousness: A Study of "The Ambassadors." East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1987. 187 pp. $15.00. Benjamin Newman . Searching for the Figure in the Carpet in the Tales of Henry James: Reflections of an Ordinary Reader. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. 194 pp. $39.00. Henry James . Henry James: Selected Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge: Belknap, 1987. 475 pp. $29.95. Announced as a "literary breakthrough" in the Preface by Lyall H. Powers, this study of The Ambassadors by Courtney Johnson, Jr. focuses on the scientific basis for the shift from "ordinary" consciousness in Lambert Strether to a higher, "extraordinary" consciousness. To make his case, Johnson tries to demonstrate throughout the book that Strether does indeed move from one type of consciousness, the consciousness of everyday living, to another, more spiritual, "transcendental" consciousness. Johnson's scientific validation rests, first, on Henry James's late essay, "Is There Life After Death?," and on William James's studies of consciousness; second, on a paradigm shift represented by Einstein's critique of Newtonian physics; and third, on transcendental meditation as described in the Bhagavad-Gita and in contemporary studies by David Orme-Johnson. There is no doubt that Courtney Johnson raises some provocative questions in this book about the scientific bases for shifts in consciousness and the relation of this science to the literary representation of consciousness. And certainly Johnson offers some thought-provoking readings of important scenes in The Ambassadors, particularly the Gloriani garden scene and the several "interview" scenes that follow between Strether and Madame de Vionnet. What disturbs me about Johnson's argument, however, is that the scientific aspect of the argument rests primarily on parallels and analogies, seldom on a direct confrontation between James's text and the various texts Johnson uses for scientific support. So, for instance, Henry James's characterization of Strether's consciousness parallels William James's view as presented in certain passages of Varieties of Religious Experience and A Will to Believe, yet there is no accounting made of the seemingly disparate use of terminology. Johnson wants to use the terms "higher," "transcendental," and "extra-ordinary" for Strether's movement to a different state of mind; however, in passages quoted from William James, the term "subliminal" is pervasive. Are we just to accept, as Johnson apparently does, the synonymy of "transcendental" and "subliminal"? Or, what in James's description of Strether's evolving consciousness permits the two terms to be appropriate, synonymous descriptors? Although Johnson goes on in the next chapter to illustrate how the image of "light" is used, particularly in the Gloriani episode, to signal illuminating consciousness, Johnson doesn't really tie that analysis to William James or to any other scientific perspective Henry James might have known. Instead, [End Page 617] in this chapter, Johnson brings in the paradigm shift from Newton to Einstein. And here no direct correspondence is offered, only an analogy: as light is the only constant in Einsteinian physics with time and space constantly changing, so, too, does the "light" of Strether's awareness become a constant in his changing environment. We are also, apparently, to equate developing "awareness" with the "extra-ordinary," "transcendental" consciousness of Johnson's argument. Johnson is most persuasive when he introduces the Bhagavad-Gita and the contemporary twentieth-century studies of transcendental meditation into his argument. Here, too, parallels between the Gita and the novel are drawn without much close textual analysis. It also would have been immensely helpful had Johnson searched out the knowledge Henry James might have possibly had of this ancient text or of literary uses of it. Walt Whitman comes to mind immediately. The most satisfying textual analysis is that of the six meetings Strether has with Madame de Vionnet. Johnson parallels these "sessions" to the stages of the model of transcendence that come out of recent studies of consciousness. In my view, however, whether Strether's evolution is "transcendental...