James's Treatment Research Articles

Will to the Original: Platonism in Henry James’ Roderick Hudson

Will to the Original: Platonism in Henry James’ <i>Roderick Hudson</i>

Toward a Pragmatist Account of Human Practices

This paper focuses on a curious lacuna in the pragmatist tradition. In the writings of the classical American pragmatists (Peirce, James, Dewey, Mead, and Lewis) very little attention is given to articulating a conception of practices and, more broadly, of pragmata. The author offers a sketch of what he takes to be a pragmatist account of human practices. He stresses how for the pragmatists themselves theory is a practice or, more precisely, an extended family of evolving practices complexly related to other practices. Moreover, he takes such an account of practices to be fundamentally at odds with various attempts to provide a transcendental justification for any human practice. He draws upon a brief yet suggestive discussion in William James's Pragmatism of language, law, and truth and develops the implications of James's treatment of these topics. In the course of doing so, he proposes how a classic work (such as a philosophical text or musical composition) can be understood from a strictly historicist perspective. He concludes with a reflection on the extent to which creative intelligence has been conscripted by the bellicose agenda of national or imperialistic regimes, yet holds out the hope of creative intelligence freeing itself to some extent from the war machine of nation states.

Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels: The Art of Concealment by Wibke Schniedermann

Reviewed by: Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels: The Art of Concealment by Wibke Schniedermann Shuqin Fu Wibke Schniedermann. Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels: The Art of Concealment. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 177 pp., $18.61 (electronic), $18.02 (hardback). Gender issues in James's oeuvre have been subjected to extensive academic scrutiny. Among the scholarly works that probe into James's stance and speculation on gender, Wibke Schniedermann's Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels: The Art of Concealment contributes impressively to work on gendered power relations and the narrative representation of these structures in James. Building on Pierre Bourdieu's relational sociology theory as well as his assumptions on masculine domination, the book specifically examines the female protagonists' personal struggles against and strategies to break from gender-based symbolic violence and symbolic power in three major James novels––The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Although much has been written about James's sensitivity to power disequilibrium, Schniedermann sheds new light on James's depiction of social power and its problematic implications that "account for this power's social conditionality" (2). This book is composed of six chapters. Chapter 1, which serves as an introduction, presents the subject and structure of the study. In particular, Schniedermann introduces the book's critical practice in "Daisy Miller: A Study" (1879) via Bourdieu's terms habitus, field, capital, symbolic violence, and symbolic domination. The author contends that a micro field is created in the novella, in which clashing habitus leads to the conflicts among the characters, whose capital distribution can be analyzed to disclose the represented social hierarchies. In this sense, symbolic capital works as the premise for the exercise of symbolic power, which can only exert its influence by means of actual misrecognition. Thus, Daisy's failure to recognize the established symbolic power literally plunges her into a closely knit and inescapable web of gender-specific domination as "the form par excellence of symbolic domination" (24). As a result, her absence and death at the end of the story constitute a doom foretold in the androcentric society. As Schniedermann explains, James's treatment of a female protagonist's absence in "Daisy Miller" is an experiment in the androcentric basis of feminine absence, which James develops in Isabel Archer. Thus, chapter 2 ("The Presence of Absence in The Portrait of a Lady") focuses on feminized vacancy and (absence of) visibility as well as the female character's inner struggle against gendered domination. The author contends that Isabel's fighting back is fully manifested through her feminized absence in the beginning of the novel, the constantly changing perspective toward her view, and her self-chosen absence at the end of the story. Unlike Daisy Miller, who is short on wisdom and lacks the disposition to empower her own subversiveness, Isabel's penetrating cognition and critical temperament make her subversion truly potent. Just as absence is a common topic of the textual analysis of "Daisy Miller" and The Portrait of a Lady, inheritance as a species of symbolic capital turns out to be [End Page E-11] a shared theme of the textual interpretation in chapter 3 ("The Grip of Inheritance in The Wings of the Dove") and chapter 4 ("How to Survive One's Inheritance in The Golden Bowl"). Revolving around "the unequal distribution of capital and the gender-dependent sphere of influence provided by and through a character's resources" (26), the third chapter concludes that Milly's controversial triumph comes less from a misjudgment of her class privilege than from the latter's intricate interconnection with her wealth and fatal illness. Compared with Milly's moderate success, Maggie's victory is a full one in that "she achieves exactly what she aims at" (27): Maggie's astute cognition, firm decision, and consequent actions enable the novel to uncover the powerful effect of the well-disguised system of masculine domination. Firmly believing that her father deserves honor and authority, Maggie spares no effort in maintaining his power by hiding Amerigo and Charlotte Stant's adultery. In essence, what Maggie tries to cover is just what the text tries...

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context

"Poor Isabel, who had never been able to understand Unitarianism!": Denominational Identity and Moral Character in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady

The Portrait of a Lady 's chapter 42 vigil scene features Isabel Archer remembering Gilbert Osmond objecting to her moral sensibility by comparing her to a Unitarian minister. This article examines James's treatment of pre- and post-Civil War Unitarianism in book reviews and novels such as The American, The Bostonians , and The Europeans to evaluate James's reference and discovers that, far from being a minor part of James's characterization technique, his references to Unitarianism shed light onto the fundamental qualities that define Isabel Archer and thus shape the novel that centers so fully on her status as a moral being.

Did the Historical Jesus Prohibit All Oaths?: Part 1

AbstractThe total prohibition of oaths (Mt. 5.34-37) come from the historical Jesus. The criterion of discontinuity argues that there is no parallel to Jesus' total prohibition of oaths in the Jewish Scriptures, the intertestamental literature prior to 70 CE, or the New Testament. The Jewish Scriptures take oaths for granted and impose them in a few cases. Apart from Jas 5.12, the New Tetsament knows of no prohibition; Paul uses oaths with abandon. The criterion of multiple attestation argues that Jas 5.12 represents an independent tradition of the prohibition; Jas 5.12 is parallel to Mt. 5.34-37 in both content and structure; James has other examples of Jesus' sayings woven into his epistle without attribution; and Jas 5.12 is at odds with James's treatment of the Law in the rest of his epistle. Hence Jas 5.12 qualifies as an independent witness to an isolated stream of oral tradition preserving Jesus' prohibition. This is Part 1 of a two-part essay.

Stasis &amp; Verve: Henry James and the Fictions of Patience

What are the implications of patience's prominence in the final paragraphs of both Roderick Hudson and Portrait of a Lady? How do these patiences differ from each other, and from patience as more ordinarily considered? Such questions provide the frame for a more sustained engagement with patience, as deployed in The Golden Bowl. Patience, in the hands of Maggie Verver and the Prince, becomes luridly preferable to what it otherwise seems to defer; James's treatment of patience, I argue, posits this mode of temporality as inextricable from understandings of knowledge, authority, and (most plangent in The Golden Bowl) from love.

Henry James's Permanent Adolescence, and: A Form Foredoomed to Looseness: Henry James's Preoccupation with the Gender of Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Henry James's Permanent Adolescence, and: A Form Foredoomed to Looseness: Henry James's Preoccupation with the Gender of Fiction Gale Temple John R. Bradley . Henry James's Permanent Adolescence. New York: Palgrave, 2000. 172 pp. $90.00 (hardcover). Cecilia Mazzucco-Than . A Form Foredoomed to Looseness: Henry James's Preoccupation with the Gender of Fiction. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. 264 pp. $57.95 (hardcover). In his 1938 work, Enemies of Promise, British writer Cyril Connolly described his adult sexual desire as a form of "permanent adolescence," a melancholic yearning for his days at Eton when sexually undifferentiated forms of intragender camaraderie and togetherness imbued life with seemingly infinite promise (325). In Henry James's Permanent Adolescence, John R. Bradley argues that James's engagement with sexuality in his life and writings should be understood according to this paradigm, for James both longed for the homoerotic intimacies he experienced as a youth and, in a way that Freud would have viewed as characteristic of homosexual narcissism, longed for himself as a sexually inexperienced young man, when opportunities for acceptable same-sex intimacies had yet to be foreclosed. Bradley eschews those studies which he says either ignore James's sexual orientation or overtly defend James against charges of homosexuality, as well as those which read altogether too much homosexual significance into James's work, and instead focuses on creating "valuable gay readings of some of James's most important novels and tales" by "focusing on character, plot, structure, style, historical context and sensible biographical speculation" (10). Bradley does indeed create an intelligent, historically attuned, and academically responsible genealogy of James's response to and representation of homosexuality [End Page 188] in his life and fiction. He looks specifically at four stages in James's life—an initial focus on a confused, improbable, yet defiantly heterosexual masculinity in James's early career; an ensuing desire to portray same-sex intimacy as informed by a classical model; an increasingly open treatment of homosexuality influenced by James's association with an emergent countercultural aestheticism; and, finally, an encrypted portrayal of homosexuality in response to turn-of-the-century homophobia, epitomized in the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1894 and the scandalous trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895. One of Bradley's strongest readings is of James's 1890 novel, The Tragic Muse, which Bradley interprets in light of shifts in thinking about the nature of homosexuality in the final decades of the nineteenth century (homosexuality as a "form of behaviour . . . to a condition" [93]), as well as in light of early modernist formal concerns. The Tragic Muse, in Bradley's view, illustrates the pattern of "permanent adolescence" more clearly, perhaps, than any other of James's novels or tales. In Bradley's reading, the protagonist Nick's sexual confusion—his propensity to view his adolescent friendships as more emotionally resonant than those he forms in later life, his preference for an ineffably alternative aesthetic lifeway over a staid career in law, the "emotional and psychological security" (96) that results from his bond with the eccentric aesthete, "Nash"—indexes the novel's debt to "the radical changes in thinking about sexuality and gender in the years surrounding its composition" (101). While Bradley's treatment of James's sexuality is indeed careful and judicious, at times his readings can seem too cautious, adhering with unnecessary fidelity to a model of interpretation based on biographical evidence and authorial intent, a tendency that limits his ability to develop more fully the political and ethical ramifications of James's treatment of homosexuality in his fiction. Bradley's desire for restraint might also have something to do with his unnecessarily disparaging allusions to "queer theory," which he sets up as a kind of straw man against which his own ostensibly more responsible readings achieve focus and definition. Still, Bradley's book does an admirable job tracing the effects of changing social mores and conventions (and, indeed, laws) on the ways James and other writers and intellectuals of his day conceptualized their own sexual desires and their portrayals of intimacy between men. The James that emerges from Bradley's study is a fastidiously cautious gay man who was...

Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited

A hundred years after William James delivered the celebrated lectures that became The Varieties of Religious Experience, one of the foremost thinkers in the English-speaking world returns to the questions posed in James's masterplece to clarify the circumstances and conditions of in our day. An elegant mix of the philosophy and sociology of religion, Charles Taylor's powerful book maintains a clear perspective on James's work in its historical and cultural contexts, while casting a new and revealing light upon the present. Lucid, readable, and dense with ideas that promise to transform current debates about and secularism, Varieties of Religion Today is much more than a revisiting of James's classic. Rather, it places James's analysis of religious experience and the dilemmas of doubt and belief in an unfamiliar but illuminating context, namely the social horizon in which questions of come to be presented to individuals in the first place. Taylor begins with questions about the way in which James conceives his subject, and shows how these questions arise out of different ways of understanding that confronted one another in James's time and continue to do so today. Evaluating James's treatment of the ethics of belief, he goes on to develop an innovative and provocative reading of the public and cultural conditions in which questions of belief or unbelief are perceived to be individual questions. What emerges is a remarkable and penetrating view of the relation between and social order and, ultimately, of what religion means.

Varieties of religion today: William James revisited

A hundred years after William James delivered the celebrated lectures that became The Varieties of Religious Experience, one of the foremost thinkers in the English-speaking world returns to the questions posed in James's masterplece to clarify the circumstances and conditions of in our day. An elegant mix of the philosophy and sociology of religion, Charles Taylor's powerful book maintains a clear perspective on James's work in its historical and cultural contexts, while casting a new and revealing light upon the present. Lucid, readable, and dense with ideas that promise to transform current debates about and secularism, Varieties of Religion Today is much more than a revisiting of James's classic. Rather, it places James's analysis of religious experience and the dilemmas of doubt and belief in an unfamiliar but illuminating context, namely the social horizon in which questions of come to be presented to individuals in the first place. Taylor begins with questions about the way in which James conceives his subject, and shows how these questions arise out of different ways of understanding that confronted one another in James's time and continue to do so today. Evaluating James's treatment of the ethics of belief, he goes on to develop an innovative and provocative reading of the public and cultural conditions in which questions of belief or unbelief are perceived to be individual questions. What emerges is a remarkable and penetrating view of the relation between and social order and, ultimately, of what religion means.

Stories of Sublimely Good Character

Donald Callen STORIES OF SUBLIMELY GOOD CHARACTER In aesthetic experience the limits of the imagination frequently appear to be found in that region of feeling or quality known as the sublime. In this article, I want to approach our sense of the sublime by taking up a puzzle about what makes for a good story. The puzzle arises in Aristotle's requirement that the protagonist of a tragic drama not be too good (Poetics, 1452b). On the face of it there are at least a couple of reasons suggested in the Poetics for this condition. Aristotle writes first that the tragic fall of such a character would be hateful. To be sure—but this is an odd reason in a way, since while it may seem unfair that a virtuous person should suffer, the gods may be like that and the sobering tale may be worth telling, speaking to our hope and despair of justice. Second, for Aristotle, the "tragic" fall of a good person is neither fear-inspiring nor piteous. Perhaps because such unhappiness is hateful, it is not readily countenanced. Or perhaps, inasmuch as (for Aristotle) art is imitation and we enjoy the likeness it presents to us, the virtuous person may not be enough like us to capture our imagination. Not being especially good ourselves, we cannot readily have sympathy for or understand such a person. However we interpret his reasoning here, while Aristotle is concerned principally with tragedy—and that construed with action rather than character as primary—his remarks raise a problem thatcan be generalized. Can literature give us convincing characters who are sublimely good? And if so, how can it give us a good story if such persons exceed our imagination's capacity to follow or feel their motives and fates? Rather than with the Poetics, I should like to take as my point of departure Henry James's treatment of this issue in his tale "The Story In It"1 and his Critical Prefaces.2 Granting that there may be many miles 40 Donald Callen41 separating Aristotle's and James's ideas of a truly good person, James addresses our problem explicitly, and, having in view the capacities of the novel, in the end parts company with Aristotle. The tale tells of a triangle, Mrs. Dyott, a widow; Colonel Voyt, who leaves his wife and children in London on weekends to pursue his "relation" to Mrs. Dyott; and Maud Blessingbourne. Maud, also a widow, loves Colonel Voyt as well, but secretly, she mistakenly believes. In a quiet way, Maud is a truly good person, James would have us believe. Thus the reason for her secret love. Voyt and Dyott find this "goodness" hard to take and snicker behind Maud's back at her passionless, private love. One afternoon the issue comes into the open by way of a debate between Maud and the Colonel over the merits of the French romances she has been reading lately. The Colonel evinces surprise that Maud should take to works of such passion. Actually, Maud finds them to be quite tame. Not that she believes they lack feeling altogether. Indeed, by contrast with English fiction, she thinks that with them one can get hold of more "life," more of "the real thing." (James tells us elsewhere that by "the real thing" he means the dangers, perhaps "common and covert" that "can be but inwardly . . . dealt with, which involve the sharpest hazards to life and honour and the highest instant decisions and intrepidities of action."3 Also, "the real thing" connotes life rather than art.4) Glossing "life" in terms of the dynamics of passion rather than sensibility, Voyt agrees: the French do what they feel, "and they feel more things than we . . . when it comes to any account of a relation between a man and a woman."5 Nevertheless, Maud finds the French romances repetitious and, particularly, has yet to find in them the representation of a truly good woman. They are tame then in not being very imaginative when it comes to representing virtuous sensibility. Voyt finds this disingenuous , and accuses her of trying to find life, specifically her life, in novels. It isn't the...

Concerning the Unity of Consciousness: Part II William James on Personal Conscious Unity

Everyone agrees on one thing about consciousness. It possesses some sort of unity. Theorists of consciousness do not always give the same account of what this property amounts to, or of that from which they believe unity derives. In the present article, the unity of consciousness is discussed with reference to authors who have given to it some, larger or smaller, quantity of theoretical attention. Four main kinds of conscious unity emerge from the discussion, though these are not all uncontroversial. William James's treatment of one of these—called here “personal conscious unity”–is addressed in the greatest detail; but there remains a great deal more that needs to be said about all four kinds of conscious unity. The article is published in two parts.

Concerning the Unity of Consciousness: Part I. Varieties of Conscious Unity

Everyone agrees on one thing about consciousness—it possesses some sort of unity. Theorists of consciousness do not always give the same account of what this property amounts to, or of that from which they believe unity derives. In the present article, the unity of consciousness is discussed with reference to authors who have given to it some, larger or smaller, quantity of theoretical attention. Four main kinds of conscious unity emerge from the discussion, though these are not all uncontroversial. William James's treatment of one of these—called here “personal conscious unity”–is addressed in the greatest detail; but there remains a great deal more that needs to be said about all four kinds of conscious unity. The article is published in two parts.