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HENRY JAMES IN CONTEXT

Long misread as a novelist conspicuously lacking in historical con-sciousness, Henry James has often been viewed as detached from, anduninterested in, the social, political and material realities of his time.As this volume demonstrates, however, James was acutely responsivenot only to his era’s changing attitudes toward gender, sexuality, classand ethnicity, but also to changing conditions of literary productionand reception, the rise of consumerism and mass culture, and theemergence of new technologies and media, of new apprehensions oftime and space. These essays portray the author and his works in thecontext of the modernity that determined, formed, interested,appalled and/or provoked his always curious mind. With contribu-tions from an international cast of distinguished scholars,Henry Jamesin Context provides a map of leading-edge work in contemporaryJames studies, an invaluable reference work for students and scholars,and a blueprint for possible future directions.

DAVID MCWHIRTER is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&MUniversity.

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HENRY JAMES IN CONTEXT

edited by

DAVID MCWHIRTER






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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication dataHenry James in context / edited by David McWhirter.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 978-0-521-51461-31. James, Henry, 1843–1916 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. James, Henry, 1843–1916 –

Knowledge and learning. 3. James, Henry, 1843–1916 – Homes and haunts. 4. James, Henry,1843–1916 – Appreciation – History. 5. Literature and society – United States – History – 19thcentury. 6. Literature and society – United States – History – 20th century. 7. Literature andsociety – England – History – 19th century. 8. Literature and society – England – History – 20thcentury. 9. Civilization, Modern – Historiography. 10. Culture in literature. I. McWhirter,

David Bruce. II. Title.PS2124.H454 2010

8130.4–dc222010011236

isbn 978-0-521-51461-3 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence oraccuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred toin this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such

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Contents

List of illustrations page ixNotes on contributors xPreface xixList of abbreviations xxiiChronology

Christopher Carmona xxiv

part one life and career, times and places 1

1 Nineteenth-century America (1843–1870)Andrew Taylor 3

2 Nineteenth-century Europe (1843–1900)Millicent Bell 14

3 Victorian England (1870–1890)Priscilla L. Walton 26

4 Fin-de-siècle London (1890–1900)Michael Levenson 37

5 The twentieth-century world (1901–1916)Martha Banta 47

6 Autobiographies and biographiesSheila Teahan 58

7 Letters and notebooksPhilip Horne 68

8 The James familyPierre A. Walker 80

v






part two historical and cultural contexts 91

9 Aestheticism and DecadenceMichèle Mendelssohn 93

10 AuthorshipRichard Salmon 105

11 ChildrenKevin Ohi 115

12 Consumer cultureMiranda El-Rayess 126

13 CosmopolitanismJessica Berman 138

14 Courtship, marriage, familyLynn Wardley 150

15 EthicsMerle A. Williams 161

16 LanguageElsa Nettels 171

17 LawStuart Culver 180

18 MannersMary Ann O’Farrell 192

19 Media and communication technologiesMark Goble 203

20 ModernismEric Haralson 214

21 Money and classJune Hee Chung 224

22 Museums and exhibitionsTamara L. Follini 234

23 Nationalism and imperialismJohn Carlos Rowe 246

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24 Print cultureJakob Stougaard-Nielsen 258

25 PsychologySarah Blackwood 270

26 RaceKenneth W. Warren 280

27 Realism and naturalismPhillip Barrish 292

28 Sexualities and sexologyHugh Stevens 301

29 Social sciences and the disciplinesWendy Graham 310

30 ThingsVictoria Coulson 321

31 TimeDeidre Lynch 332

32 Travel and tourismRoslyn Jolly 343

33 UrbanityEric Savoy 354

34 Visual cultureKendall Johnson 364

35 Women and menDonatella Izzo 378

36 WorkRory Drummond 389

part three reception 401

37 Publishing history and contemporary receptionLinda Simon 403

38 Critical response, 1916–1947Michael Anesko 412

Contents vii






39 Critical response, 1947–1985Jonathan Freedman 423

40 Recent criticism (since 1985)Gert Buelens 435

41 Translation and international receptionAnnick Duperray and Jeremy Tambling 445

Further reading 459Index 479

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Illustrations

1 ‘The Six-Mark Tea-Pot’ by George du Maurier, Punch,30 October 1880. Courtesy of the Trustees of the NationalLibrary of Scotland. page 94

2 A. L. Coburn, ‘The Cage’, frontispiece to What MaisieKnew, ‘In the Cage’ and ‘The Pupil’, New York Edition,vol. XI (1907–9). Courtesy of the Harry RansomHumanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. 128

3 A. L. Coburn, ‘The Curiosity Shop’, frontispiece to the firstvolume of The Golden Bowl, New York Edition, vol. XXIII(1907–9). Courtesy of the Harry Ransom HumanitiesResearch Center, University of Texas at Austin. 129

4 Young Henry James, Jr with his father Henry James, Sr, adaguerreotype from the studios of Matthew Brady (1854).Frontispiece to A Small Boy and Others (New York: Scribner’sSons, 1913). 368

5 Max Beerbohm, ‘Mr Henry James (in America)’, A Book ofCaricatures (London: Methuen, 1907), plate 48. 373

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Contributors

MICHAEL ANESKO teaches English and American literature at thePennsylvania State University. His principal publications include ‘Frictionwith the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (1986) andLetters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells (1997). Hehas just finished a new study, The French Face of Nathaniel Hawthorne:Monsieur de l’Aubépine and His Second Empire Critics, to be published byOhio State University Press (2011).

MARTHA BANTA, Professor Emeritus, UCLA, is the author of six booksand numerous essays, reviews and editions, many of which treat the worksof Henry James. Among them are Barbaric Intercourse (2002), One TrueTheory and the Quest for an American Aesthetic (2007) and the introduction tothe Complete Letters of Henry James: 1876–1878, forthcoming from theUniversity of Nebraska Press.

PHILL IP BARRISH is Associate Professor of English at the University ofTexas, Austin. He is the author of American Literary Realism, CriticalTheory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995 (2001) and White LiberalIdentity, Literary Pedagogy, and Classic American Realism (2005). HisCambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism is forthcoming.

MILL ICENT BELL, Professor of English, Emeritus, Boston University, haspublished widely on Henry James, from her pioneering Edith Wharton andHenry James (1965) to Meaning in Henry James (1993). Her most recentcontributions to James studies are the introductions to the Penguin Classicsedition of The Wings of the Dove (2008) and to the Complete Letters of HenryJames, 1872–1876 (2009).

JESS ICA BERMAN is Associate Professor of English and of Gender andWomen’s Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Sheis the author of Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics ofCommunity (2001) and co-editor of Virginia Woolf Out of Bounds (2001).

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Her new book on the ethics and politics of transnational modernism isforthcoming from Columbia University Press.

SARAH BLACKWOOD is Assistant Professor of English at Pace University.She has published articles on portraiture, photographic technology andearly psychological discourse in American Literature and the EmilyDickinson Journal and is currently working on a manuscript entitled ‘ThePortrait’s Subject: Inventing Psychology in American Literature and VisualCulture, 1839–1900’.

GERT BUELENS is Professor of English at Ghent University. He is theauthor of some sixty essays in books and journals, including ModernPhilology, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, PMLA, TextualPractice and Diacritics. Henry James and the ‘Aliens’: In Possession of theAmerican Scene won the American Studies Network Book Prize for 2004.

CHRISTOPHER CARMONA is a PhD candidate at Texas A&M Universitystudying Beat literature, with a particular interest in the queer relationshipsof the Beat Generation and other literary groups. He has published anarticle in Beat Scene (2009) and a poem in Beatlick News (2009), and iscurrently working on an edited anthology of Texas Beat writers.

JUNE HEE CHUNG is Assistant Professor of English at DePaul University. Sheis the author of the recently completedHenry James, Popular Cosmopolitanism,and the Arts of Modernity and has published ‘Getting the Picture: AmericanCorporate Advertising and the Rise of a Cosmopolitan Visual Culture in TheAmbassadors’ in American Literature.

VICTORIA COULSON is a lecturer in American Literature at the University ofYork.Her publications includeHenry James,Women and Realism (2007), essayson Elizabeth Bowen and Victorian Gothic architecture, and ‘Sticky Realism:Armchair Hermeneutics in Late James’, which won the 2004 Leon Edel EssayPrize in The Henry James Review. Her next book is about happiness in James.

STUART CULVER teaches at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Hisarticles on American literature and culture have appeared in ELH, AmericanLiterary History and Representations and also in several edited collections onJames and other topics. His essay in this volume is drawn from a largerproject on the relationship between James and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

RORY DRUMMOND works largely on James’s short fiction, with particularemphasis on its portrayal of socially marginal characters. He has contributedpapers to international James conferences in Paris, Venice and Newport,

List of contributors xi






and has recently completed his PhD thesis, ‘“Poor Things”: Henry James onLondon Life, 1888–1903’, with Cambridge University. He is Head ofEnglish at Framlingham College, Suffolk.

ANNICK DUPERRAY is Professor of American Literature at the University ofProvence (Aix-Marseille Université). She is volume editor for two of thefour volumes of the critical edition of Henry James’s Nouvelles complètes(Editions Gallimard/Bibliothèque de la Pléiade). Her publications includean analytical study of Henry James’s tales, Echec et écriture: essai sur lesnouvelles d’Henry James (1993). She also edited The Reception of Henry Jamesin Europe (2006).

MIRANDA EL-RAYESS completed her doctoral thesis, ‘Shops and Shoppingin Henry James’, at University College London. She now teaches at UCLand at New York University in London, and reviews for the Times LiterarySupplement. She is the author of a recent article on James and Tennyson,and is preparing a monograph on James and consumer culture.

TAMARA L. FOLLINI is a fellow and lecturer in English at Clare College,Cambridge. Her articles on Henry James have appeared in such journals asthe Henry James Review, Cambridge Quarterly and the Journal of AmericanStudies. She was president of the Henry James Society in 2007 and isa general editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Edition of the CompleteFiction of Henry James.

JONATHAN FREEDMAN is Professor of English and American Culture atthe University of Michigan. He is the author of Professions of Taste: HenryJames, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture (1991); The Temple ofCulture: Assimilation, Aggression and the Making of Literary Anglo-America(2000); and Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (2008). Hehas held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NationalHumanities Center.

MARK GOBLE is an associate professor in the English Department at theUniversity of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Beautiful Circuits:Modernism and the Mediated Life (2010), and has published essays onHenryJames and various media technologies, as well as on such topics as US poetryand visual culture and cinema and the avant garde.

WENDY GRAHAM is the author of Henry James’s Thwarted Love (1999), andis currently putting the finishing touches to a manuscript on the Pre-Raphaelite movement and celebrity. Her articles on British and Americanliterature have appeared in Boundary 2, Modern Fiction Studies, the Henry

xii List of contributors






James Review, Arizona Quarterly and American Literary History. She teachesBritish and American literature at Vassar College.

ERIC HARALSON is an associate professor of English at SUNY-Stony Brook.He is the author of Henry James and Queer Modernity (2003) and ofnumerous essays on the sexual politics of Anglo-American prose andpoetry. He is also co-editor of The Critical Companion to Henry James(2009) and A Historical Guide to Henry James (forthcoming fromOxford). He serves as Book Review Editor of the Henry James Review.

PHIL IP HORNE is a professor in the English Department at UniversityCollege London. He is the author of Henry James and Revision: The NewYork Edition (1990) and editor ofHenry James: A Life in Letters (1999). He isco-editor (with Tamara Follini) of a special issue of Cambridge Quarterlyentitled ‘Henry James in the Modern World’ (2008). He has also editedJames’s A London Life & The Reverberator (Oxford World’s Classics), TheTragic Muse (Penguin) and The Portrait of a Lady (Penguin).

DONATELLA IZZO is Professor of American Literature at Università‘L’Orientale’, Naples. She is the author of Portraying the Lady: Technologies ofGender in the Short Stories of Henry James (2001), and has edited andcontributed to numerous volumes and journal issues on literary theory, cross-cultural literary rewritings and topics in American studies. RevisionaryInterventions into Henry James, a collection of essays co-edited with CarloMartinez, appeared in 2008.

KENDALL JOHNSON is Associate Professor of Early American Literature atSwarthmore College. He is the author ofHenry James and the Visual (2007)and the contributing co-editor of The Critical Companion to Henry James(2009). His essays have appeared in American Literature, American LiteraryHistory and the Henry James Review.

ROSLYN JOLLY teaches English literature at the University of New SouthWales. She is the author of Henry James: History, Narrative, Fiction (1993)and Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author’sProfession (2009). She is currently writing a book on travel and climate innineteenth-century literature.

MICHAEL LEVENSON is William B. Christian Professor of English at theUniversity of Virginia. He is the author of A Genealogy of Modernism (1984),The Fate of Individuality: Character and Form in the Modern English Novel(1991), The Spectacle of Intimacy (with Karen Chase, 2000) and the

List of contributors xiii






forthcomingModernism (Yale University Press). He is also the editor of TheCambridge Companion to Modernism (1999).

DEIDRE LYNCH is Chancellor Jackman Professor and Director of GraduateStudies in English at the University of Toronto. Her books include TheEconomy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of InnerMeaning (1998) and, as editor, Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees(2000). She is currently completing At Home in English: A CulturalHistory of the Love of Literature.

DAVID MCWHIRTER teaches in the English Department at Texas A&MUniversity. He is the author of Desire and Love in Henry James (1989), andeditor ofHenry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship (1995)and (with Pamela R. Matthews) Aesthetic Subjects (2003). He is 2010 Presidentof the Henry James Society, and is currently completing a book on James’s late1890s fictions.

MICHÈLE MENDELSSOHN is University Lecturer at Oxford University. Sheis the author ofHenry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture (2007) and iscurrently working on a book on race and decadence in late nineteenth- andearly twentieth-century British and American fiction.

ELSA NETTELS is Emeritus Professor of English at the College ofWilliam and Mary in Virginia. She is the author of James and Conrad(1977), Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells’s America (1988) andLanguage and Gender in American Fiction: Howells, James, Wharton andCather (1997).

MARY ANN O ’FARRELL is the author of Telling Complexions: TheNineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush (1997) and co-editor ofVirtual Gender: Fantasies of Subjectivity and Embodiment (1999). She haspublished work on James in the Henry James Review and is currently atwork on an essay on James and Hitchcock and on a longer project aboutappearances of Jane Austen in contemporary popular discourse. She teachesat Texas A&M University.

KEVIN OHI is the author of Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child inPater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov (2005), of Henry James and theQueerness of Style (forthcoming, University of Minnesota Press), and ofnumerous articles on Victorian literature, American literature, queertheory and film. He teaches English at Boston College and is currentlywriting a book about literary transmission.

xiv List of contributors






JOHN CARLOS ROWE is USC Associates’ Professor of the Humanities andChair of the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at theUniversity of Southern California. His books include The New AmericanStudies (2002), Literary Culture and US Imperialism (2000), The OtherHenry James (1998) and The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (1984).

R ICHARD SALMON is a senior lecturer in the School of English, Universityof Leeds, where he specializes in teaching Victorian literature. He is theauthor of Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (1997) and WilliamMakepeace Thackeray: Writers and their Work (2005) and is currentlycompleting a study of literary professionalism in the early Victorianperiod, provisionally entitled The Disenchantment of the Author.

ER IC SAVOY is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Universitéde Montréal. He has published widely on various aspects of Henry Jamesand queer theory. His book, Conjugating the Subject: James’s QueerFormalism, is forthcoming from Ohio State University Press. He waspresident of the Henry James Society in 2009.

L INDA SIMON is Professor of English at Skidmore College and generaleditor of the journal William James Studies. Her most recent book is TheCritical Reception of Henry James: Creating a Master (2008). Previous booksinclude Genuine Reality: A Life of William James (1998) and Dark Light:Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-Ray (2004).

HUGH STEVENS is a senior lecturer in the Department of EnglishLanguage and Literature at University College London. He is author ofHenry James and Sexuality (1998) and co-editor of Modernist Sexualities(2000). He has recently edited The Cambridge Companion to Gay andLesbian Writing.

JAKOB STOUGAARD-NIELSEN is Lecturer in Scandinavian Literature atUniversity College London. He received his PhD with a thesis on the visualand textual culture of Henry James’s New York Edition. He co-editedWorld Literature, World Culture: History, Theory, Analysis (2008) and haspublished articles on James in various books and journals, among them anessay on James’s author portraits in the Henry James Review.

JEREMY TAMBLING is Professor of Literature at Manchester University andHonorary Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of HongKong. He is the author ofHenry James: Critical Issues (2000) and Lost in theAmerican City: Dickens, James, Kafka (2001), and recently published an

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article on James and opera in The Reception of Henry James in Europe (ed.Annick Duperray).

ANDREW TAYLOR is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at theUniversity of Edinburgh. He is the author of Henry James and the FatherQuestion (2002) and Thinking America: New England Intellectuals and theVarieties of American Identity (2010), and co-editor of The Afterlife of JohnBrown (2005) and Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader (2007). He is alsoco-editor of Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures, published byEdinburgh University Press.

SHEILA TEAHAN is Associate Professor of English at Michigan StateUniversity. She is the author of The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James (1996)and of essays in Arizona Quarterly, Henry James Review, and elsewhere. Sheis currently completing a scholarly edition of James’s William WetmoreStory and His Friends, and is writing a book on tropology and causality inJames.

P IERRE A. WALKER is Professor of English at Salem State College. He haswritten numerous articles on Henry James and other literary topics, and isthe author of Reading Henry James in French Cultural Contexts (1995) andthe editor of Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and theAmerican Social Scene (1999). Along with Greg W. Zacharias, he is generaleditor of The Complete Letters of Henry James.

PR ISCILLA L. WALTON is Professor of English at Carleton University inCanada. She is the author of Our Cannibals, Ourselves: The Body Politic(2004) and The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James (1992), and theco-author, along with Jennifer Andrews and Arnold E. Davidson, of BorderCrossings: Thomas King’s Cultural Inversions (2003). She edited theEveryman paperback edition of James’s The Portrait of a Lady and is theeditor of the Canadian Review of American Studies.

LYNN WARDLEY is Assistant Professor of English at San Francisco StateUniversity. Her current projects include a book on Lamarckian plots inAmerican literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and anessay on organicism and American Expressionist drama.

KENNETH W. WARREN is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished ServiceProfessor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. Heis the author of Black and White Strangers: Race and American LiteraryRealism (1993) and So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion ofCriticism (2003).

xvi List of contributors






MERLE A. WILL IAMS is Personal Professor of English and Assistant Deanfor Graduate Studies in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of theWitwatersrand in Johannesburg. She is the author of Henry James and thePhilosophical Novel: Being and Seeing (1993) and is currently completing amonograph entitled ‘The Challenge of Prometheus: A Reassessment ofShelley’s Thought’. Her other publications are in the fields of Romanticpoetry and the modernist novel, looking particularly at the relationsbetween literature and philosophy.

List of contributors xvii






Preface

This volume presents a collection of concise, original scholarly essaysfocused broadly on apprehendingHenry James in the context of the history,sociology and aesthetic and material culture of an emerging and consoli-dating modernity – a modernity James lived, and was uniquely positionedto observe, in various phases of its development; which he represented,analyzed and critiqued throughout a long career straddling two continentsand two centuries; and which has continued to shape the reception of hiswork during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Long misread as anovelist conspicuously lacking in historical consciousness, James has oftenbeen viewed – sometimes attacked – as detached from, and uninterested in,the social, political and material realities of his time. But as recent criticismhas increasingly discerned, and as I hope this volume will help to demon-strate, James is an essential modern novelist precisely insofar as he wasacutely, if anxiously, responsive not only to his era’s changing attitudestoward gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity, but also to changing condi-tions of literary production and reception, to the rise of consumerism andmass culture, and to the emergence of new technologies and media, of newapprehensions of time and space – responsive, that is, in the fullest sense tothe material and historical conditions that in his own time determined new,specifically modern forms of experience, desire and subjectivity.Henry James in Context thus aspires to be both a consolidation and an

extension of key trends in contemporary James studies andmodernist studiesthat have shifted attention from long-standing assumptions about James’sstatus as an inaugurator of aesthetic modernism (a predecessor, for instance,of Eliot and Pound), toward a reading of James as a writer and cultural analystconfronting and representing, in Ross Posnock’s phrase, ‘the challenge ofmodernity’ (more a contemporary, as Posnock has argued, of Weber, Simmeland Benjamin: see The Trial of Curiosity [Oxford University Press, 1991]).James and his characters are modern not only because they live in cities, ridethe subway, send telegrams, read the tabloids or Symonds’s A Problem in

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Greek Ethics, shop in department stores, view art in modern museums, getdivorced, travel in Pullman cars or cross the Atlantic in fast-moving steam-ships, but also because their consciousnesses are produced and shaped by suchhistorical, social andmaterial developments. This volume works to illuminateJames’s modern subjects (in both senses of the word) by locating the authorand his works in the context of the modernity that determined, formed,interested, appalled and/or provoked his always curious mind.

PartOne, ‘Life and career, times and places’, engages the uniquemultiplicitiesof James’s career as an American and English novelist (arguably even a Frenchnovelist); as someone who lived through and responded to both the AmericanCivil War and the European Great War; who knew Emerson and Flaubert aswell as Oscar Wilde; who as a child was exposed to culture both at Barnum’s inNewYork and at the Louvre; and whose greatest direct influences were arguablyHawthorne, George Eliot and Balzac. The volume thus begins with a series ofoverviews of James’s life and writing during various phases of his career that alsoaim to provoke speculative reconsiderations of the multiple social, cultural andliterary contexts (nineteenth-century America; nineteenth-century Europe;Victorian England; fin-de-siècle London; the cosmopolitan twentieth-centuryworld) within which he operated, and to which he so richly responded. Thesebiographically oriented surveys are supplemented by chapters on one additional,peculiarly Jamesian milieu (the James family, once described by his brotherWilliam as a country unto itself), and on the primary textual avenues (James’smemoirs and existing biographical studies; his letters and notebooks) throughwhich we gain access, archivally speaking, to this complex writing life.

Since 1984, when John Rowe announced his intention to question anddestabilize ‘the myth of . . . the high modernist Henry James, whose destinyalways seem[ed] to end in the intricacies of his late style and its retreat fromlife into the palace of art’(The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James, p. 28),James studies have increasingly followed Rowe’s lead in working ‘to modern-ize James’ by reconnecting him not only to ‘our own recent history in thehumanities’, but also to the historical context of the culture of modernity inwhich he lived and wrote. The chapters in Part Two, ‘Historical and culturalcontexts’, are organized around topics and/or keywords that are arrangedalphabetically, and work to place James in a matrix of interrelated contexts –aesthetic, economic, social, political, institutional, epistemological, spatial,temporal, material and technological – that together map the parameters ofsociocultural modernity as it emerged and changed during his lifetime. Thecontexts addressed include specifically literary movements (aestheticism,realism, modernism), conceptual formations (authorship, time, social class),and technologies (language, media), as well as the institutional, economic and

xx Preface






social dimensions of print culture that shaped James’s writing and career.Contributors to Part Two consider how the specific materialities, institutionsand structures of modernity to which they attend function to produce andshape specifically modern forms of experience, desire and subjectivity, even asthey enable James’s rich imagination of alternative trajectories of experienceand embodiment, of new possibilities for being in the world.Part Three, ‘Reception’, focuses on responses to, writing about and cultural

appropriations of James during and after his lifetime. Writing in 1931, WilliamTroy commented that James, ‘like certain other great writers of the past, hascome to mean something different to each of the successive literary generationsthat have taken up his work. What James meant to readers ofHarper’s and theAtlantic in the Eighties and Nineties, what he meant to the generation ofMrH.G.Wells, or to the generation ofMrT. S. Eliot andMr Ezra Pound, wasprobably not any of the things hemeans, ormay come tomean, to the [present]generation’ (‘The Lesson of the Master’, in Selected Essays, ed. StanleyE. Hyman [Rutgers University Press, 1967], p. 45). The chapters in this sectionconsider Henry James in the contexts provided by successive generations ofreaders and critics and their varied historical and cultural milieux. Examiningthe reputation, reception and construction of Henry James and his oeuvre fromhis own time to ours, and exploring the cultural work ‘Henry James’ hasperformed (or been made to perform) in different times and places, PartThree traces the shaping and reshaping of James’s figure and fiction in thehistory of reading practices and literary studies, in relation to the rise and fall ofconflicting theories and methodologies, and in the context of the shiftingaesthetic, social and political agendas of criticism.I am grateful to the Department of English and the Melbern G. Glasscock

Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University for their materialand intellectual support of this volume. Mary Ann O’Farrell, always my bestreader, helped me to shape this project from its conception onwards;Christopher Carmona, my graduate assistant, contributed to Henry James inContext in important ways too numerous tomention here. I also wish to thankRay Ryan, Sarah Roberts and Maartje Scheltens of Cambridge UniversityPress for their professional acumen, advice and support throughout the editingprocess; HilaryHammond for her copyediting expertise; and each of the forty-three contributors for their cooperation, patience and splendid work.

david mcwhirter

Texas A&M University

Preface xxi






Abbreviations

No complete scholarly edition of James’s works has been published to date.The fourteen volumes published thus far by the Library of America – themost comprehensive and easily accessible (if still incomplete) collection ofJames’s fiction and non-fiction writings – are used throughout this book asstandard sources for the texts they contain. Parenthetical references appearas abbreviations followed by page number. All the volumes listed below arepublished by Library Classics of the United States, New York, NY.

CS-1 Complete Stories, 1864–1874. 1999.CS-2 Complete Stories, 1874–1884. 1999.CS-3 Complete Stories, 1884–1891. 1999.CS-4 Complete Stories, 1892–1898. 1996.CS-5 Complete Stories, 1898–1910. 1996.CTW-1 Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America:

English Hours, The American Scene, Other Travels.1993.

CTW-2 Collected Travel Writings: The Continent: A LittleTour in France, Italian Hours, Other Travels. 1993.

LC-1 Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, AmericanWriters, & English Writers. 1984.

LC-2 Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other EuropeanWriters, the Prefaces to the New York Edition. 1984.

N-1 Novels 1871–1880: Watch andWard, Roderick Hudson,The American, The Europeans, Confidence. 1983.

N-2 Novels 1881–1886: Washington Square, The Portrait ofa Lady, The Bostonians. 1985.

N-3 Novels 1886–1890: The Princess Casamassima, TheReverberator, The Tragic Muse. 1989.

N-4 Novels 1896–1899: The Other House, The Spoils ofPoynton, What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age.2003.

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N-5 Novels 1901–1902: The Sacred Fount, The Wings of theDove. 2006.

In addition, the following frequently referenced publications are also citedparenthetically, abbreviated as indicated.

A Henry James Autobiography: A Small Boy and Others,Notes of a Son and Brother, and The Middle Years, ed.F. W. Dupee. New York: Criterion, 1956; reprintedPrinceton University Press, 1983.

CL 1855–1872–1,CL 1855–1872–2

The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855–1872, ed.Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias. 2 vols.Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press,2006.

CL 1872–1876–1,CL 1872–1876–2

The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1872–1876, ed.Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias. 2 vols.Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press,2008–9.

CN The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. LeonEdel and Lyall H. Powers. Oxford University Press,1987.

CP The Complete Plays of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel.Oxford University Press, 1991 [1949].

HJC Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politicsand the American Social Scene, ed. Pierre A. Walker.Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

HJL-1, HJL-2,HJL-3, HJL-4

Henry James Letters, ed. Leon Edel. 4 vols.Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard UniversityPress, 1974–84.

HJR Henry James Review. Louisiana State University,1979–95; University of Louisville, 1995–.

LL Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne.Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.

List of abbreviations xxiii






ChronologyChristopher Carmona

This chronology includes all of James’s major publications as well as hisstories and essays discussed in this volume. Journal and magazine publica-tion venues are provided only for James’s first listed publication therein, inorder to suggest their range and variety.

1842 Older brother William James born.1843 Henry James, Jr born 15 April at 21Washington Place, New York

City, the second child of Henry James, Sr and Mary RobertsonWalsh.In October the family travels to England, meeting literary figuresincluding John Stuart Mill, Alfred Tennyson and ThomasCarlyle.Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol; Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’.

1844 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Experience’.1845 Brother Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) born.1846 Brother Robertson (Bob) born.1847 Greenwich Mean Time adopted across Great Britain by the

Railway Clearing House, synchronizing train schedules.Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre.

1848 Sister Alice born.Seneca Falls Convention occurs, signalling the birth of thewomen’s suffrage movement in America.

1849 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto; AlfredTennyson, ‘In Memoriam, A.H.H.’

1850 Margaret Fuller drowns, and Henry Jr overhears conversationsabout her death between Henry Sr and figures such as WashingtonIrving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Thackeray and HenryDavid Thoreau.Thomas Cook organizes first ‘grand circular tour’ of Europe.Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.

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1851 Frederick Scott Archer, English sculptor, invents the wet platenegative, leading to rapid advances in photography in the secondhalf of the nineteenth century.Western Union Corporation founded.The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nationsopens in Hyde Park, London.Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or The Whale.

1852 Louis Napoleon III proclaimed Emperor of France; HenrySr delays plans to move family to Europe for education until 1855.Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

1853 Becomes an enthusiastic theatregoer and sees P. T. Barnum’sproduction of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.Begins attending Vergnés Institute for Young Gentlemen in NewYork.

1855 James family leaves for Europe with stops in London, Paris andGeneva, and then returns to London, where a private tutor is hiredfor the James boys.Sees Charles Kean’s production of Henry VIII in London.Walt Whitman, first edition of Leaves of Grass.

1856 James family moves to Paris; boys are sent to a Fourierist schoolcalled the Institution Fezandié.Learns French while in Paris and frequently visits the Louvre.

1857 Attends the Collège Imperial and befriends Benoît ConstantConquelin (later a celebrated comic actor).Contracts typhus; bed-ridden for two months and readsvoraciously.The Panic of 1857 hits the US, ending a period of prosperityfollowing the Mexican American War and the California GoldRush.Dred Scott decision by US Supreme Court rules that people bornof African descent or their descendents cannot be citizens of theUnited States.Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act (UK) grants right to seculardivorce, establishing a model of marriage based on contract.Atlantic Monthly founded.

1858 The Jameses move back to the US, settling in Newport, RhodeIsland, where Henry Jr enrolls in the Berkeley Institute, studyingLatin and English literature.Begins friendship with Thomas Sergeant Perry.

Chronology xxv






1859 Disenchanted with the American education system,Henry Srmovesthe family back to Geneva; Henry Jr enrols in the InstitutionRochette.John Brown raids Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.

1860 James family returns to Newport.Abraham Lincoln elected the 16th President of the United States.Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun; Sir Henry Maine,Ancient Law.

1861 James’s cousins, the Temples, come to live in Newport, andHenry Jr begins friendship with Minny Temple.Tags along with his brother William to study art with WilliamMorris Hunt; quickly realizes he does not have the same talent asother students and begins to pursue literature.Hurts his back fighting a stable fire in Newport, leading toreoccurring back problems throughout his life.Civil war begins with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter.Rebecca Harding Davis, ‘Life in the Iron Mills’.

1862 Enters Harvard Law School.Wilky enlists in the Union Army, where he joins the 44thMassachusetts Regiment and later becomes part of the firstAfrican American 54th Regiment under Robert Gould Shaw.

1863 Leaves law school.Robertson enlists in the 55th Massachusetts Regiment; Wilky iswounded at Fort Wagner and returns to Newport to recover.The London Underground Railway System opens.

1864 Family moves to Boston.Begins writing book reviews forNorth American Review and formsfriendship with its editor, Charles Eliot Norton.Anonymously publishes first story, ‘A Tragedy of Error’, inContinental Monthly.

1865 ‘The Story of a Year’ published in Atlantic Monthly.Civil war ends; President Lincoln is assassinated.First transatlantic telegraph cable goes into operation.Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend; Louisa May Alcott,Moods.

1866 Family moves to Cambridge, Massachusetts.MeetsWilliamDeanHowells, assistant editor ofAtlantic Monthly.Hyde Park riots protesting the defeat of the Reform Bill and of theLiberal government (UK).

1867 Begins writing reviews for The Nation.

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Publishes ‘Poor Richard’ in Atlantic Monthly.Charles Dickens gives his first US readings in New York City.First commercially viable typewriter invented by Christopher Scholes.

1868 Publishes ‘A Most Extraordinary Case’.1869 Sails for Europe searching for a back pain cure in Italy and France;

tries a water cure and then tours London.First American transcontinental railroad completed.Suez Canal opens, enabling European imperial expansion.Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy.

1870 Returns to Cambridge and writes travel sketches for The Nation.Death of Minny Temple.Publishes ‘Travelling Companions’.The Franco-Prussian War breaks out; Rome becomes the capitalof Italy.Construction of the Brooklyn Bridge begins.Carl Westphal publishes first medical case report on homosexual-ity in German psychiatric journal.MetropolitanMuseum of Art (New York) and BostonMuseum ofFine Arts founded.

1871 Publishes ‘A Passionate Pilgrim’ and begins publishing first novelWatch and Ward in serialized form in Atlantic Monthly, whereW.D. Howells assumes editorship.Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man.

1872 Becomes occasional art reviewer for Atlantic Monthly.Travels with his Aunt Kate and sister Alice to Europe, where hecontinues to write travel narratives for The Nation.The National Society for Women’s Suffrage (US) is formed.The Army andNavy Stores opens flagship London department store.Howells’s first novel, Their Wedding Journey.James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old BatterseaBridge.

1873 Severe Wall Street crash.Walter Pater, ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance.

1874 Returns to America.Publishes ‘The Last of the Valerii’, ‘Adina’ (Scribner’s Magazine),and ‘Mme de Mauves’ (Galaxy).First Impressionist exhibition held in Paris, featuring Monet,Morisot, Renoir and others.George Eliot, Middlemarch.

Chronology xxvii






1875 Moves to Paris where he meets Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola,Maupassant and other French writers; writing articles onParisian society and culture for the New York Tribune.Begins serializing Roderick Hudson in Atlantic Monthly; publishesA Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales and Transatlantic Sketches(Boston: James R. Osgood).First translation of his work (‘The Last of the Valerii’) appears inRevue des Deux Mondes.

1876 Moves to London and to 3 Bolton St, Piccadilly.Begins publishing The American serially in Atlantic Monthly.Queen Victoria is crowned empress of India.Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone.Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology.

1877 Publishes ‘Occasional Paris’.Thomas Alva Edison invents the phonograph.Émile Zola, L’Assommoir.

1878 Elected to the Reform Club, London.Publishes The Europeans (Boston: Houghton, Osgood), ‘DaisyMiller’ (Cornhill Magazine), ‘Longstaff’s Marriage’ and ‘Rose-Agathe’ (Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine).Articles on ‘The Afghan Difficulty’ and ‘The Early Meeting ofParliament’ appear in The Nation.William James marries Alice Howe Gibbons.The Whistler–Ruskin trial (UK) concludes with the judge’s deci-sion to award the artist Whistler damages for libel for a scathingreview by Ruskin.

1879 Begins friendships with EdmundGosse and Robert Louis Stevenson.Publishes Hawthorne (New York: Macmillan), ‘The PensionBeaurepas’ and ‘An English Winter Watering Place’.Photogravure process perfected by Czech artist Karl Klič, pavingthe way for the development of a new generation of lavishlyillustrated magazines.

1880 Meets American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson in Italyand begins friendship.Washington Square published in Cornhill Magazine and Harper’sNew Monthly Magazine; Confidence (Boston: Osgood); beginsserializing The Portrait of a Lady in Macmillan’s Magazine.

1881 Travels to US due to mother’s illness.

xxviii Chronology






The Portrait of a Lady (Boston: Houghton Mifflin).President James Garfield assassinated.Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Common Law.

1882 Death of mother, Mary Walsh James; returns to Europe.Returns to US following death of father, Henry James, Sr.Meets President Chester A. Arthur and Oscar Wilde inWashington.Publishes ‘The Point of View’.Adapts ‘Daisy Miller’ for theatrical production.Married Women’s Property Act (UK) alters British law regardingwomen’s property and inheritance rights, turning husband andwife into separate legal entities.W.D. Howells, ‘Henry James, Jr’ (Century Magazine).

1883 Returns to London after executing father’s will; brother Wilkydies.Publishes Portraits of Places (London: Macmillan).Reverend Andrew Mearns, ‘The Bitter Cry of Outcast London’.

1884 A Little Tour in France (Boston: Osgood).Publishes ‘The Author of “Beltraffio”’ (English IllustratedMagazine), ‘Pandora’ (New York Sun) and ‘The Art of Fiction’(Longman’s Magazine).Walter Besant helps create the Society of Authors to protectauthors’ rights and promote copyright reform.Home Insurance Building in Chicago, first steel-framedskyscraper.Banking Act (UK) centralizes banking in London, making it theinternational centre for finance.Third Reform Bill (UK) extends franchise to qualified adult malesin the boroughs and countryside, increasing the parliamentaryelectorate by 6 million.Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

1885 The Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law AmendmentAct (UK) criminalizes homosexual acts or ‘gross indecency’.

1886 Moves to 34 De Vere Gardens, London.Publishes The Princess Casamassima and The Bostonians (London:Macmillan).Cosmopolitan Magazine publishes its first issue.The Infant Custody Act (UK) stipulates that the child’swelfare should be taken into account when deciding custody,

Chronology xxix






increasing women’s chances of gaining custody of their childrenafter divorce.‘Black Monday’ (UK) unemployment protest leads to rioting inPall Mall, London.Robert Louis Stevenson,The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll andMrHyde.

1887 Dawes General Allotment Act (US) passes, designed to forceassimilation of Native Americans.

1888 The Reverberator and Partial Portraits (London: Macmillan).‘The Lesson of the Master’ (Universal Review), ‘A London Life’,‘The Aspern Papers’ and ‘London’.First volume of the Oxford English Dictionary (A–B) published.Collier’s Weekly founded.London match-girls employed by Bryant & May factory strike toprotest poor working conditions.In her article ‘Marriage’, Mona Caird asks ‘Is Marriage a Failure?’eliciting 27,000 letters to the Daily Telegraph.Mrs Humphrey Ward, Robert Elsmere.

1889 Aunt Kate dies.Visits the Exposition Universelle in Paris and sees the newlyopened Eiffel Tower.Begins work on a dramatization of The American; publishes ‘AnAnimated Conversation’.First performances of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House on Broadwayand in London.Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will.

1890 The Tragic Muse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin).William James, Principles of Psychology.

1891 The American: A Comedy in Four Acts opens in Lancashire andthen at the Opéra Comique Theatre in the Strand in London.Publishes ‘The Pupil’, ‘Brooksmith’ and ‘The Science ofCriticism’ (New Review).Passage of first International Copyright Law (US).Edison invents the kinetoscope; the Lumière brothers stage firstmovie exhibition (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat).John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Modern Ethics; GeorgeGissing, New Grub Street.

1892 Sister Alice dies of breast cancer.Publishes ‘Collaboration’, ‘Greville Fane’ (Illustrated LondonNews), ‘The Real Thing’ (Black and White) and ‘The Private Life’.

xxx Chronology






Max Nordau, Degeneration; Frances Harper, Iola Leroy, or ShadowsUplifted.

1893 Attends performance of The Second Mrs Tanqueray in London.Publishes Picture and Text and Essays in London and Elsewhere(New York: Harper) and ‘The Middle Years’.The World’s Columbian Exposition opens in Chicago.

1894 Death of Constance Woolson in Venice; James travels to Italy tohelp settle her affairs.Publishes ‘The Death of the Lion’ in first issue of The Yellow Book.

1895 Has De Vere Gardens flat wired for electric lighting.Guy Domville is staged at the St James’s Theatre in London, tomixed opening-night reception; replaced after five-week run byOscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.PublishesTerminations (New York: Harper; includes ‘The Altar ofthe Dead’ and ‘The Next Time’).Oscar Wilde convicted and imprisoned for two years for ‘grossindecency’.Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist.

1896 Publishes The Other House (New York and London: Macmillan),Embarrassments (London: Macmillan), ‘The Figure in the Carpet’(Cosmopolis) and ‘The Way it Came’ (Chapman’s Magazine ofFiction); The Spoils of Poynton serialized as The Old Things inAtlantic Monthly.President Cleveland invokes the Monroe Doctrine in a borderdispute between England and Venezuela, concretizing the UnitedStates’ claim over the Americas.US Supreme Court decision in Plessy vs. Fergusson upholds JimCrow segregation laws.

1897 Buys and begins to use a typewriter.What Maisie Knew (Chicago and New York: Herbert S. Stone).Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? WhereAre We Going?

1898 Moves to Lamb House in Rye, Sussex, which he buys in 1899.Publishes ‘In the Cage’ (London: Duckworth); serializes ‘TheTurn of the Screw’ in Collier’s Magazine and then publishes itwith ‘Covering End’ in The Two Magics (London: Heinemann);series on ‘American Letters’ appears in Literature.Views his first film, The Corbett–Fitzsimmons World ChampionshipPrizefight.

Chronology xxxi






Hires James B. Pinker as his literary agent.TheUSS Maine is sunk outside of Havana Harbor, beginning theSpanish American War.

1899 Meets American sculptor Hendrik Anderson in Rome.Publishes The Awkward Age (London: Heinemann and NewYork: Harper) and ‘The Future of the Novel’.Boer War begins.Theodore Roosevelt gives ‘Strenuous Life’ speech advocating‘American values’ of hard work and patriotism.Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class; Joseph Conrad,Heart of Darkness.

1900 Publishes The Soft Side (London: Methuen and New York:Macmillan) and ‘Broken Wings’.Gold Standard Act fixes gold as the basis for US currency.Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; Theodore Dreiser,Sister Carrie.

1901 Publishes The Sacred Fount (New York: Scribner’s), ‘MatildeSerao’ (North American Review) and ‘The Saint’s Afternoon andOthers’.Death of Queen Victoria.President William McKinley assassinated; Theodore Rooseveltsucceeds him.

1902 Begins friendship with Edith Wharton.Publishes The Wings of the Dove (New York: Scribner’s) and‘Flickerbridge’.

1903 Publishes The Ambassadors (New York: Harper), WilliamWetmore Story and His Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), TheBetter Sort (including ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ and ‘TheBirthplace’) and ‘Émile Zola’.Ford Motor Company founded.Wright Brothers take first flight.Women’s Social and Political Union (UK) founded by Emmelineand Christabel Pankhurst.Edwin S. Porter, The Great Train Robbery.W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk; Georg Simmel, ‘TheMetropolis and Mental Life’.

1904 Travels back to the United States for an extended visit, lecturingon Balzac and other topics, a trip taking him from New Englandsouth to Florida and west to San Diego and Seattle.

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