Reviewed by: Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act Sara Blair Charles Caramello. Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996. 292 pp. $39.95. In Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act, Charles Caramello focuses on the biographical writings of the Master and the Mother of Us All. They are, he argues, freighted vehicles for autobiography—more precisely, for the construction of genealogies that give birth to their own authors as exemplary literary figures. The critical marriage of James and Stein is hardly new. Caramello’s study is the first, however, to treat this relation at full length, and it is the first to recognize that biography itself—the obligatory link via William James, for example—is something of a red herring with respect to their relation and their self-understandings. It is rather, Caramello convincingly shows, biography as a field of representation, a textual practice in and through which the self is created, where James and his successor intimately meet. I follow Caramello’s lead in invoking the idiom of intimacy. Both James and Stein, he argues, exploit the genre of biography, or portrait narration, to explore thematics of marriage, friendship, succession, and precursivity (Caramello’s term). His choice of texts is highly selective: there are chapters devoted respectively to James’s Hawthorne and William Wetmore Story and His Friends and Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Four in America. Despite the intensive focus on specific passages and gestures such economy enables, James is somewhat disserved by it. What of the autoreferentiality, the willing-into-being of James as literary figure, of the canonical fiction, of the late autobiographical writings, of The American Scene? Given the ongoing scrutiny of the James-Hawthorne connection as a site of authorial self-invention by Richard Poirier, Richard Brodhead, John Carlos Rowe, and others, it seems incumbent on Caramello to suggest more fully than he does why James has so consistently invited reading under the sign of literary succession—long before the notion of anxiety of influence and well beyond the advent of poststructuralism. Nevertheless, Caramello manages to reread Hawthorne with a fresh and penetrating eye. Carefully relocating James’s text in its immediate context of production (John Morley’s English Men of Letters series), Caramello gives us a James ever ready to make virtue of necessity, exploiting the terms of his biographical commission in 1878 to do quite specialized work: to map America as a field of cultural production, placing himself at its center as the founder of that new, socially consequential aesthetic, realism. In meticulous detail, Caramello exposes the gaps in James’s double portrait of Hawthorne and the nation that provide the opening for this self-inscription. Caramello rightfully recognizes the importance of Hippolyte Taine’s racialized theory of cultural production to [End Page 98] James’s self-portrayal, and he usefully identifies as a crucial feature of that representation James’s interest in disrupting “Anglo-Saxon social homogeneity and hegemony” (51). But if such disruption is precisely “what made a space for the Scots-Irish James” (and, in another context, for the Jewish-American lesbian Stein), the lineaments of this typology need to be more fully examined (51). As Caramello himself makes clear, we have inherited a James who cites Browning on cultural homogeneity—“I distrust all hybrid and ambiguous natures and nationalities” (NH 313)—but who also strategically characterizes Hawthorne as “the last pure American” (WWS 2: 91), just so as to suggest that ideals of racial purity are themselves outmoded, insufficient to emerging social realities. The tension evidenced by these two assertions, published at a quarter century’s remove from one another, becomes more fraught with respect to Caramello’s reading of Story. This is a text, it must be said, that James’s readers have hastened to shun, and Caramello has done a real service by attending so carefully to its ambitions and eccentricities. He deftly unpacks its dense metonymies, characterizing James as a tour guide to his own complex allegory of expatriation: Story, Caramello argues, figures not only the failures of a romantic aesthetic predicated on willed exile from his New England...