Washington Square Research Articles

Utricularia inflata Walt. (Lentibulariaceae), New to New York State

MITCHELL, R. S. (Biological Survey, New York State Museum, 3132 C.E.C., Albany, NY 12230), T. E. MAENzA-GMELcH (Dept. of Biology, New York University, 1009 Main Bldg., Washington Square, New York, NY 10003) ANDr J. G. BARsouR (3000 Fishcreek Rd., Saugerties, NY 12477). Utricularia inflata Walt. (Lentibulariaceae), new to New York State. Bull. Torrey Bot. Club 121: 295-297.-The large floating bladderwort (Utricularia inflata Walt.) is reported for the first time from New York State. Pertinent literature and the distribution, morphology and cytology of the species are discussed, comparing it with closely related U. radiata Small, a taxon with which it has been historically confused. Recent discovery of the large bladderwort in Massachusetts is noted, suggesting the possibility that its distribution range may be expanding northward.

Washington Square: Styles of Money (review)

Book Reviews 221 The focus on private homes (and the traveler's donnée to them) is sharply extended in "Casa Alvisi," James's final essay on Venice, written as a preface to Katherine Bronson's memoirs. Here the emphasis is no longer on "discovering" the city, but on the human connections that the city enables. Bronson's virtue was to enable the traveler and the expatriate to meet on the grounds of a "perfect tenderness for Venice " ( 105 ). This "true principle of fusion " enabled Bronson and her associations to create in her home the sense "of a friendly private-box at the constant operatic show" (103). A similar progression from spectacle to private theater marks the Rome cycle, and James's ethics of vision evolve in these essays from a tourist's view from nowhere to an engaged intersubjectivity in which the traveler's "practiced groping gaze" no longer aims at discovering the city, but at forging relations with his friends in "odd happy passages of communication and response" (95). Fred Kaplan's edition organizes James's Italian essays in a fashion useful to the scholar and pleasant for the general reader. The inclusion of excerpts from James's correspondence makes the volume invaluable: the reader's only complaint of this rich resource is the wish to have yet more. Ian F. A. Bell. Washington Square: Styles of Money. New York: Twayne, 1993. 165 pp. $22.95; pb $7.95. By Janet Gabler-Hover, Georgia State University Ian F. A. Bell's Washington Square: Styles of Money proves the "complex ordinariness" of Washington Square to be far from ordinary (13). I would add that only James could mute his style and subdue his characterization to such an effect of intensity and purposiveness. Such ordinariness, according to Bell, is the appropriate medium for James's inquiry into American nineteenth-century bourgeois politics. Bell contends for the social historicity of James's Washington Square (1880) and, for point of comparison, of its companion-piece The Europeans (1878): "Washington Square is about history, about the ways in which economics and commercial practices structure human relationships, and about the ways in which history may be represented in fictional forms" (23). Bell argues his points gracefully with a masterful use of the traditional Twayne format. Bell argues that the 1840s setting of Washington Square in the nascence of commercial expansion obliquely implicates the fully industrialized American marketplace of the 1870s. This fluidity of boundary reveals the process, glossed by Roland Barthes, Thorstein Veblin, and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, by which bourgeois capitalism seeks to mystify and disguise "its production, the memory of its 222 The Henry James Review own manufacture" (51-52) so as to foreclose "the imagining of alternatives" (31) to its own structure of economic policy and social relation. Bell further argues early in his "Reading" that James found in Balzacian realism and Hawthornian Romance like imprints of stasis and fluidity, respectively, that he recomposed in his own work as a paradoxical interaction between oppositional necessities: Balzacian reification of "fact" and Hawthornian imaginative "latitude." Professor Bell explains that aesthetics and economics share the same ability to disguise the process of their making. In "Time, Place, and Balance" (chapter five), Bell shows how Sloper resists change; the physical solidity of Sloper's house parallels his choice of Washington Square as the last geographical bastion from New York's commercial district. He also employs a "balance" that represses opposition; even his elitist yet practical profession—physician—neutralizes the increasing division between manual and intellectual labor occurring in nineteenth -century corporate practice. Scientific rhetoric complements the "fixed" nature of the marketplace and the alienation of people/things from their usefulness , whether that "thing" is an item in a shop window or Sloper's daughter Catherine. Bell argues additionally that the fallacy of marketplace value is represented by the controversy between soft and hard money during the Jacksonian and Reconstruction eras. Bell's discussion (53-65) inevitably brings to mind Walter Benn Michaels's The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (1987). Both Michaels and Bell expose the fallacy in the argument that one form of money, gold...

Henry James and Masculinity: The Man at the Margins (review)

224 The Henry James Review K. Barnett's Authority and Speech: Language, Society and Self in the American Novel (1993), and Jonathan Freedman's Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (1990). Certainly Bell's Washington Square: Styles of Money is a richly instructive voice in such a dialogue. Kelly Cannon. Henry James and Masculinity: The Man at the Margins. New York: St. Martin's, 1994. 180 pp. $39.95. By Leland S. Person, Southern Illinois University Since I have been working on a study of James and masculinity for some time, readers should be aware that I bring special interests and, undoubtedly, special biases to Kelly Cannon's Henry James and Masculinity. As the first extensive study of the subject, Professor Cannon's book offers a provocative introduction that all subsequent critics will have to engage. His subtitle, however, more accurately describes his focus—on marginal characters who happen to be male rather than on theoretical questions about James's representation or construction of masculine identity. Notable for deviating from normative masculinity, which Cannon equates simply with aggressiveness and heterosexual passion, James's marginal men suggest his "consciousness of alternative masculinity" and his desire to unsettle rather than to appease the "reader's longing for conventional manhood" (1). Cannon posits a straight line of descent (in chapter one) from Rowland Mallet to Ralph Touchett to Hyacinth Robinson to Lambert Strether, and to James himself—each character evidencing his "impaired" manhood by a lack of aggressiveness and desire for women. This gallery of geldings is ingenious, but predicated on a relatively simplistic definition of "conventional manhood" and, in turn, of male characters' deviations from the norm. Given Cannon's subject—and subtitle—Kaja Silverman's Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992) could have provided useful theoretical ballast; her chapter on James, separately published in 1988 (in Novel), could have illuminated Cannon's analyses of many male characters. As it is, Cannon deals only lightly with theoretical questions involving , for example, the social and/or literary construction of gender identity. Is the marginality he cites simply a condition experienced by many male characters, or is it a condition rooted in masculinity as James conceives it in the late 1800s? Provocatively, however, Cannon does argue that male characters' displacement to the social margins signifies both positively and negatively. That is, marginalization signifies the absence of certain conventional masculine attributes , but it also provides a liberated space. "What James's work finally catalogs, " he asserts, " is not an escape from the margins, but a full embrace of that Book Reviews 225 space" (8). I am not always convinced that the embrace is "full," but the case certainly deserves to be argued. The best chapter in this respect is the second—on the "Private Fictions" that James's marginal males compose to compensate for their marginal conditions. Like James, Cannon argues, these marginal males battle society's "conventional image of masculinity (physical aggression, heterosexual activity)" and yearn "for atypicality (androgyny, homosexuality, passivity)" (41). The results: alternative constructs of male selfhood that protect characters from "internalizing" a "sense of worthlessness," which society would inscribe (32). Rowland Mallet's "in-between" status, for instance, produces imaginative and behavioral failure because he cannot write himself into the role of lover, opting instead for the role of "betrayed father" (45). While the narrator of The Aspern Papers more successfully imagines himself a "scholar-conqueror," he ends up being a "monster" because he denies his heterosexuality. More successful, in Cannon's view, is Lambert Strether because he composes several alternative male selves, including little boy and old man, as well as "an alternative masculinity of surrender as opposed to aggression, risking his survival in a heterosexual society" (51). Cannon's terms and what they suggest about his notion of James's imagination will strike many readers as overly rigid, stereotypical , and totalizing, but the idea of alternative male fictions itself cogently explains James's conception of male possibilities. With help from Michel Foucault, Jeffrey Weeks, and other sexologists in chapter three ("Sexual Surprise"), Cannon surveys various strategies James uses to discover and represent marginal sexual satisfactions, to avoid passionate heterosexual experience without representing a full-blown...

Sartre in the States

THE SURREALISTS REACHED US FIRST. And the great poets of nigritude. We' were sixteen. An iconoclastic culture which helped us refine the rebellion to which we had already come and for which Ginsberg and Baraka (The Dead Lecturer: Against what light is false/ what breath . ..) had been the first signposts. In this sense, therefore, what we vaguely heard of existentialism already seemed to us merely so much academicism. Nausea appeared tame. And how could it have been otherwise after the lapidary prose in which we had so recently exulted? And, in any case, we would not have been able, knowing as we did then so very little, to see in it anything other than a requirement for an American culture of adolescence which we already knew very well how to scorn. At seventeen, however, we knew that the philosophical baggage of Breton would not be enough to sustain us. And, if Sartre himself had teachers, why not start with them (knowing as we already did, though not yet well enough, that presupposition and fundament were of no small matter)? At the local college bookstore we sought out Being and Time. But it was not on the shelf. Under Heidegger we found only a slim volume, German Existentialism. Opening it, we discovered a collection of speeches given in 1933-34. We had thought of Heidegger in ways similar to the way we thought of Pirandello, and even more, of Pound. But the volume in hand was something different. We let it fall to the floor and did not bother to reshelve it. What Heidegger had to say we would learn directly from Sartre or not at all. We left with the Washington Square Press paperback edition of Being and Nothingness. But its pages were too technical for us, we who had read Zarathustra without understanding any of it (or, at least, any of its philosophical content) and Sisyphus, which we in our youthful mix of insight and ignorance found merely banal and at which we did not feel the need to direct our derision,

Comedy among the Modernists: P. G. Wodehouse and the Anachronism of Comic Form

The roof of the Sheridan Apartment House, near Washington Square, New York. Let us examine it. There will be stirring happenings on this roof due season, and it is as well to know the ground. The Sheridan stands the heart of New York's Bohemian and artist quarter. If you threw a brick from any of its windows, you would be certain to brain some rising young . . . Vorticist sculptor or a writer of revolutionary vers libre. And a very good thing too. (7) Thus begins P. G. Wodehouse's 1927 novel, The Small Bachelor. is as well to know the ground, indeed, because this particular roof will provide a stage for innumerable farcical events as the plot of the novel unfolds: impostures, concealments behind water towers, hasty retreats down fire escapes, the throwing of pepper into the face of an officious policeman, and more. Such farce, however, requires more than these comic free-for-alls; farce also requires comic belief. Readers must allow Wodehouse's characters to cavort as they do, and it is not accidental that Wodehouse prepares for this by heaving a hypothetical brick at those figures who represent an incapacity to believe comic narratives: modernists. We are told by the comic spirit as it is embodied by the narrator that Vorticist sculptors and writers of revolutionary free verse should be beaned by bricks early and often. For Wodehouse knows that no force poses a greater threat to a welcoming reception of his comedies than the modernist sensibility of the twentieth century. Can anything be more anomalous than the position of Wodehouse twentieth fiction? What beyond quirkiness, after all, can explain Alexander Cockburn's claim that Wodehouse's Bertie and Jeeves saga stands as the achievement the twentieth century (xii)? Equally extreme praise has come from Hilaire Belloc, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, and W. H. Auden, among others.(1) Hugh Kenner, lamenting the betrayal of high modernism by the dons of Oxford (no don, it seems, would really read Joyce, Lawrence, or Pound on his own time), finds particularly galling the fact that in 1939 Oxford conferred on Psmith's creator the honorary doctorate it'd not dream of offering Leopold Bloom's (34). Donnish enthusiasm the long run has meant little, however, for the formation of the canon twentieth literature excluded and continues to exclude Wodehouse.(2) Even one of the most perceptive of Wodehouse's critics, Stephen Medcalf, has held that Wodehouse seems to possess neither the conscious irony nor the undercurrent of Angst which make [sic] Evelyn Waugh a candidate for high seriousness (190). Under such circumstances there is occasion to ponder why the brilliant comic plots that garnered the support of Waugh, Orwell, and Auden should fail to be considered worthy of serious scholarly interest. Wodehouse's exclusion is curious given the ancient lineage of comedy. Comic structures--which characteristically include happy endings and a newly remade society marked by a sense of tolerance and accommodation--have been a central mode of the Western imaginative experience since the classical Greek theater. As Northrop Frye defines them, comedies embody a basic structural pattern which moves from unhappiness to happiness, through the eventual removal of obstacles erected by an intolerant and unjust society. The restrictions to be overcome may take the shape of overbearing parental figures, oppressive social institutions or, more serious comedies, flaws and self-imposed bondages within the protagonist's own character. But eventually a comedy all such bonds are cut, and a liberating and festive resolution follows, often signaled by the erotic consummation of a wedding or the social consummation of a feast, or both (Frye 163-86). It must be conceded that these sorts of traditional comic plots, which Wodehouse unrepentantly fashioned, have become unfashionable the twentieth century. Comic narratives, unfortunately, rarely find acceptance with modern audiences except when they occur popular culture (the Hollywood film, the sitcom, the drugstore bodice-ripper, the mystery or detective novel). …

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...

Reprint from Joslin's ‘Diabetes mellitus’ (12th ed) Chapter 12: Oral Hypoglycaemic Agents (by Leo Krall). Authors: A Marble, LP Krall, RF Bradley, AR Christlieb, JS Soeldner. Publisher: Lea & Febiger, 600 South Washington Square, Philadelphia, PA 19106‐4198. Year of issue: 1993. Size: 185 × 260mm. No pages: 461. Cover: Softback

Practical Diabetes InternationalVolume 10, Issue 6 p. 241-241 Book ReviewFree Access Reprint from Joslin's ‘Diabetes mellitus’ (12th ed) Chapter 12: Oral Hypoglycaemic Agents (by Leo Krall). Authors: A Marble, LP Krall, RF Bradley, AR Christlieb, JS Soeldner. Publisher: Lea & Febiger, 600 South Washington Square, Philadelphia, PA 19106-4198. Year of issue: 1993. Size: 185 × 260mm. No pages: 461. Cover: Softback W Alexander FRCP, W Alexander FRCP Consultant Physician Diabetes Unit, Queen Mary's Hospital, KentSearch for more papers by this author W Alexander FRCP, W Alexander FRCP Consultant Physician Diabetes Unit, Queen Mary's Hospital, KentSearch for more papers by this author First published: November/December 1993 https://doi.org/10.1002/pdi.1960100615AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume10, Issue6November/December 1993Pages 241-241 RelatedInformation

Washington Square: styles of money

Washington Square: styles of money

Vocal Neighborhoods: A Walk through the Post-Sound Poetry Landscape

Washington Square Church, New York City, 14 Ap7z1 1980. A rotund and stately Adriano Spatola strolls out onto the performance space with a large glass of whisky and ice in one hand and a half-smoked cigarette in the other. He steps up to a microphone on a stand, mumbles something in very broken English, takes a puff from his cigarette and a sip from the glass, and then very loudly intones a homage to F.T. Marinetti. The poem contains only two words aviation aviateur and is declaimed in an onomatopoetic fashion reminiscent of the Italian Futurist poetry of 1909. The poem is a World War I dogfight. The two words chase, attack and spit at each other amid long ascending and descending spirals of phonetic flights, intense semi-articulated sputterings and tonguewrenching vocal gymnastics. As Spatola begins another poem, his two brothers come up beside him and whirl long flexible plastic tubes above their heads. The tubes make a strange whistling sound to accompany the More poems and homages are performed. Each are introduced in an English so strange that it is more of a parody of an explanation than any kind of aid. Florence Lambert appears from a side door. She is wearing long robes and has squeaky toys tied to her feet. As she moves it is apparent that she has other squeakers attached to various parts of her body: under her arms, elbows, knees, thighs, etc. Spatola and his two brothers prod at her with microphones. They follow her around the stage like paparazzi chasing a new Hollywood starlet, attempting to catch and amplify every sound she makes as she moves quickly past them. Spatola's brother, F. Tiziano, performs his hommage a Al Capone: he meticulously fills a little metal box of Italian origin with nuts and bolts from a paper bag. The process takes some time, after which Tiziano snaps the metal lid to the box shut. He holds the box against a microphone, then rapidly shakes it to produce a sudden burst of simulated machinegun fire. He then takes a bow for his poem. From the time Spatola first stepped out onto the floor, a man wearing a portable video tape recorder and camera has been flitting around the performers like a fly. The cameraman constantly moves around the whole space, filming Spatola at all angles and distances from far away to extremely close-up with a style that would have made Fellini envious. He is constantly getting in the way of the performers. At one moment Spatola says something to the effect that the guy is a nuisance. The filming continues, however. One wonders if there is any tape in the video recorder. For his finale, Spatola starts tapping a microphone against his chest and well-developed stomach. He seeks out certain resonant spaces within his body the same way a housewife taps a melon to see if it is ripe. The taps increase in intensity. Those in the front rows of the audience, generally with lessendowed bellies, begin to squirm uncomfortably in their chairs. The walls of the hundred-year-old church begin to rattle as Spatola pounds harder. He starts to hit his stomach with the microphone as if it were a big bass drum and maintains the intensity for several minutes. The corporeal sound reverberates in our ears for a long time after the performance has ended.

Eurydice Reclaimed: Language, Gender & Voice in Henry James (review)

330 The Henry James Review those novels. (Woolf used the Literary Classics of America texts for The Europeans, Washington Square and The Bostonians.) Greg W. Zacharias Creighton University Lynda S. Boren. Eurydice Reclaimed: Language, Gender & Voice in Henry James. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989.145 pp. $39.95 In a polyphonic, suggestive prose of her own, Lynda S. Boren sets forth to analyze that rich and poetic discourse which is the literary language of Henry James. It is her thesis that James's prose has musical components that connect with profound psychological and gender issues and express more than mere language, even in the intricate syntax of James, can. Indeed, Boren shows, the "voice" that emerges in the lyricism of his narratives may reflect, in intricate and fascinating ways, the submerged feminine Other, the Eurydice, of Henry James. James's prose is a performance, no question, and, delivered orally as it was by midMaisie , it is a performance on an operatic scale, with James as impresario of a mode of dialogue and subversion that, as Boren shows, replaces the conventional linearity of novelistic structure with a poetic, musical mode. Using the insights of Bakhtin, Lacan, and Julia Kristeva as well as French philosophers, and of Freud, Jung, and music theory, Boren investigates the implications of this peculiar poetic, weaving in the process her own allusive and delicate web of analysis. James's famous "indecipherability" stems in part from the "psychosexual" nature of his performance, Boren says, where meaning is so tightly bound to ' 'internal images of ... thought" "as to remain forever esoteric." Even the cadences of his fiction become meaningful in this view, having a psychological resonance and coalescing into an affective kind of poetic measure. Further, Boren says, citing James Guetti's Word-Music, a visual image repeated over and over again, in the manner of James, can become aural, so that we begin to hear it rather than see it. Thus its tenor is now transformed or denied into something else, music perhaps. As his readers well know, James makes use of sound (and its absence) directly and "strategically for dramatic purposes," as in Charlotte's silent scream at the end of The Golden Bowl or "the scarce audible pathetic wail" of Spencer Brydon's alter ego in "The Jolly Corner." These "preverbal" experiences are profoundly symbolic, iconic like music, and like music, untranslatable unless in the private language of the psyche. "Language must ultimately go back to that underworld of the unconscious," Boren reminds us, quoting Lacan, "where something other demands to be realized,' ' and language is born of lack and desire for what is absent, "the eternal search for the lost Eurydice." The "implications for gender identification" within Lacan's theory are "startling," Boren says, positing James's "eternal search for the lost Eurydice" as a psychic identification with the feminine and his novels as an Orphic search to reclaim her. Within this context, James's own authorial voice orchestrates a Bakhtinian dialogic, embedding voices that often conflict with or subvert his own and which he struggles to unify by "transforming the 'speech' into pure music." This "musical mode of discourse," Boren claims, is complexly entwined in James's late style with his aesthetics, his private sexual anxieties, and the relations of society and gender to language. Indeed, she says, the innovations and "the tensions of James's novelistic form derive from his attempt to make his style bear the burden of music and meaning simultaneously." Book Reviews 331 I am quoting Boren extensively because her argument is extremely subtle and interwoven—"You can't skip a word," as William complained to Henry about his style—and I am trying not to inflict the injustice of paraphrase on it. Moreover, her style of literary criticism offers in its unique weave, it seems to me, a very good example of a new form of literary criticism. This is one that is evolving on a fugal, dialogic structure as opposed—to continue the analogy with music—to the canon form in which a melody is imitated exactly and completely by successive entering voices. I would not hesitate to call Boren's argument a prime example of the way...

Henry James: The Major Novels (review)

Book Reviews Judith Woolf. Henry James: The Major Novels. New York: Cambridge U P, 1991. xii + 163 pp. $39.95 ($11.95 paper) Cambridge University Press includes Judith Woolf s Henry James in its British and Irish Authors branch of the "Introductory Critical Studies" series, which aims to reach "school and university students, as well as the interested general reader" (i). Thus the value of Woolf s book for James scholars is in its usefulness to their students. Students who are aware of the inherent limitations of introductory works, or those whose instructors discuss with them the provisional nature of criticism, especially on the introductory level, should benefit by reading Woolf s Henry James. In nine chapters Woolf introduces the James novel, traces the development of James's "betrayal of innocence" theme (i), discusses style and explains plot in The Europeans, Washington Square, "Daisy Miller," The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove mdThe Golden Bowl. The "Introduction' ' confronts the difficulty of reading James and establishes a place for James's novels in relation to the English novel tradition, especially Richardson's tragic vision, which explores "that dangerous substratum" of everyday life (15), and George Eliot's studies of "how moral choices are made" (13). Woolf gives additional emphasis to James's dramatic technique. Woolf s deployment of provocative statements is at once the strength and the weakness of her introduction. Where such provocative statements will lead thoughtful students to further study, good teachers should remind others that one function of introductions is to open discussion, not to close it. Woolf herself implicitly admits the limitations of her introduction and encourages further study of the novels in passages such as the following on What Maisie Knew: ' 'This last section of the book is at once so complex and so crystalline that ideally I would like to annotate every line as one would do with a great poem, but space does not permit" (79). Thus Woolf s introduction encourages readers to engage James's novels rather than claiming to give critical consensus on his fiction. Just as Woolf argues that attentive readers of James gain rewards for their trouble, so Woolf s readers should receive just compensation for their attention to her stronger statements. In chapter two, for example, Woolf prods readers to consider the relation between the James novel and the romantic tradition when she argues that "Gertrude Wentworth, like Pamela herself, is a tragic heroine in embryo, she belongs not to Richardson's world but to Hawthorne's, or rather to Hawthorne's world as it might have appeared through the eyes of Jane Austen" (22). When Woolf explains that "To be European ... is a matter not of nationality but of culture, and it is from the encounter between mutually non-comprehending cultures that the comedy in the novel springs" (19), she describes an important point in all of James. And by showing close parallels between Catherine Sloper and Austen's Catherine Moreland, Woolf highlights the relation she has described between James and the English novel (29-30). Length limitation, the requirements that Woolf should explain to new readers of James the plot complications in The Portrait and the novels that follow and should discuss expected issues such as point of view and James's integration of plot or ' 'predicament' ' and character, all truncate the explanation of the relation of James's novels to the English tradition and of other issues. The unremarkable section on The Awkward Age, for instance, covers only two pages. Nevertheless, Woolf seeds the plot summary with points that could germinate into larger areas of consideration for the beginning reader of James's fiction, especially for the Henry James Review 13 (1992): 328-31 © 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Book Reviews 329 readers who take the points as starters for their own investigations rather than as last words on James's novels. Among those provocative points are the following. The American is "little more than the anti-catholic fantasy of a naively puritan author" (53). In The Portrait, "James is fascinated by the psychological curiosity of a society founded on puritan...

Individuation under Extreme Conditions J. G. Gaarlandt , ed.Men Zou Een Pleister op Vele Wonden Willen Zyn (We Should Be Willing to Act as a Balm for All Wounds). Amsterdam, Balans, 1990.An Interrupted Life–The Diaries of Etty Hillesum) 1941-1943. Translated from Dutch by Arnold J. Pomerans . New York, Washington Square Press (Pocket Books), 1985.

Individuation under Extreme Conditions J. G. Gaarlandt , ed.<i>Men Zou Een Pleister op Vele Wonden Willen Zyn (We Should Be Willing to Act as a Balm for All Wounds)</i>. Amsterdam, Balans, 1990.<i>An Interrupted Life–The Diaries of Etty Hillesum) 1941-1943</i>. Translated from Dutch by Arnold J. Pomerans . New York, Washington Square Press (Pocket Books), 1985.

『ワシントン・スクウェア』の結婚詐欺(フォーチュン・ハンティング・ゲーム)

『ワシントン・スクウェア』の結婚詐欺(フォーチュン・ハンティング・ゲーム)

Teaching Holocaust Literature

Each year, the most challenging and most rewarding lesson I teach is a unit on Holocaust literature. My approach has changed over the four years I've taught this unit. When I first began teaching Holocaust literature, I was impatient with the insensitivity that persisted even after we'd read Night (Elie Wiesel, 1960, New York: Bantam) and Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank, 1972, New York: Washington Square P). Students drew swastikas on their notebooks and saluted each

Drawing a circle in the square: street performing in New York's Washington Square Park

Drawing a circle in the square: street performing in New York's Washington Square Park

Romance and the Prima Donna Image in the Fiction of Henry James

128 The Henry James Review would be no point in our making any interpretation at aU since we have no access to any other sources of information. On balance, then, it is quite possible that Tina is Juliana's daughter, either by Aspern or some other man, but not, I think, overwhelmingly likely. For my money, the critical liberties one needs to take to make this possible are just a shade too high-handed and illicit. FinaUy the precise information to make such an interpretation cast iron is simply not there. J. Peter Dyson—Romance and the Prima Donna Image in the Fiction of Henry James Very few readers associate Henry James with an interest in opera: with drama, of course, and with the visual and plastic arts, but with music in general, and opera in particular, scarcely at aU. Nevertheless, just as many of James's works have provided the basis for successful plays, an ironic fate for poor James the frustrated playwright, any opera goer interested in the contemporary scene is aware that in the last thirty years several of his works, including Washington Square, The Turn of the Screw, "Owen Wingrave," The Wings of the Dove, and now The Aspern Papers, have been turned into operas. But despite James's lack of interest, there are occasional scenes in his fiction where characters go to the opera and, more interestingly, passages in which operatic metaphors play a central role. Only in his turn-of-the-century fiction does James explore the idea of opera in any depth. Two aspects of the topic seem to interest him: the first is the operatic prima donna, which he uses as a figure for investigating the moraUty of artisticaUy or histrionicaUy shaped behavior, the second is the nature of romance, a subject mat preoccupied him for most of his Ufe and tiiat was to culminate in his analysis of it as a literary mode in the preface to die New York Edition of The American (1907). (I might mention in passing that James's most formal treatment of histrionic behavior faUs outside the scope of tiiis paper, in his presentation of the aspiring actress Miriam Rooth in The Tragic Muse [1890].) There are three operatic instances in which these aspects appear: the first is a passage James revised in The Portrait of a Lady for the New York Edition (1908); the other two occur in late tales, "The Two Faces" (1900) and "The Velvet Glove" (1909). James's interest in using opera at this period stems no doubt from his observation of it as part of the London social scene in the nineties, a scene described by die most brilUant music critic writing in London at the time, Como di Bassetto, alias George Bernard Shaw. Corno di Bassetto was remorseless to many composers and performers, but never more so than to a number of contemporary operatic prime donne. Nothing stimulated his sardonic wit more vigorously than their self-serving egocentricity, or their self-aggrandizing reductions of artistic integrity to a shambles. "The operatic stage is improving," Shaw writes in 1890. "But it is stiU possible for a prima donna to bounce on the stage and throw her voice at die heads of the audience with an insolent insistence on her position as a public favourite, and hardly the ghost of a reference to the character she is supposed to impersonate." He comments that the "offences against artistic propriety" of Adelina Patti, probably the most legendary of contemporary opera singers, "are Selected Papers on Henry James, 1988-1990 129 mighty ones and miUions. She seldom even pretends to play any other part than that of AdeUna, the spoüed child with the adorable voice. . . . [She] will get up and bow to you in die very agony of stage death if you only drop your stick accidentaUy." He concludes by remarking how far the opera house is behind the tiieater in England and how any aspiring young singer may "by die exercise of the simplest good sense and taste, attain a higher normal level of dramatic sincerity" than any of her famous operatic predecessors. Whether James ever read this particular passage of Shaw's...

Henry James' Style in Washington Square

Henry James' Style in Washington Square

Re-producing “James”: Marxism, Phallocentrism and “Washington Square”

Re-producing “James”: Marxism, Phallocentrism and “Washington Square”

A “Machine That Makes the Land Pay”: The West Street Building in New York

A “Machine That Makes the Land Pay”: The West Street Building in New York

Louis Weinstein, Ph.D., M.D.

Thanks to the medical revolutions of the past half century, we have attained a remarkable understanding of health and disease, of diagnosis and therapy. Future generations will undoubtedly be intensely interested in the men and women whose work produced these revolutions. The ability to record their thought processes through the techniques of “oral history” can provide invaluable insights. It is in this belief that HOSPITAL PRACTICE is reproducing a series of interviews conducted by cardiologist Allen B. Weisse, Professor of Medicine at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-New Jersey Medical School. They were originally published in 1984 as Conversations in Medicine: The Story of Twentieth-Century American Medicine in the Words of Those Who Created It (New York University Press, Washington Square, New York). Following is the interview with microbiologist and infectious disease specialist Louis Weinstein, conducted in June 1980.