Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity - Leland S. Person

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as a male subject occurs at the beginning of chapter 11 in Notes of a Son and Brother. Although James had written disparagingly of himself, particularly in contrast to his father and brother William, suddenly he writes with some confidence as he rediscovers the governing principle of this “personal history, as it were, of an imagination” (Autobiography 454). He is the “man of imagination, and of an ‘awfully good’ one,” even as he worries that he will not quite be able to “catch” that figure for his use. “He had been with me all the while,” he seems to realize, “and only too obscurely and intimately—I had not found him in the market as an exhibited or offered value.” Although he worried about money throughout his career and certainly recognized the “value”—often a small one—of his writing, he persistently resisted identifying with prevailing models of business manhood. The “man of imagination” James can imagine being, therefore, must find his value and his values elsewhere than in the market, and insofar as business markets comprise the world outside the creative self, the obvious alternative site at which to locate the man of imagination is inside the self. “I had in a word to draw him forth from within rather than meet him in the world before me,” James writes, and “to make him objective, in short, had to turn nothing less than myself inside out” (Autobiography 455). In the context of this study, of course, the image of James turning himself “inside out” resonates in several registers, suggesting romantic inspiration, the contortions involved in identifying against the norm, but also gender and sexual inversion. “What was I thus, within and essentially, what had I ever been and could I ever be,” James concludes, “but a man of imagination at the active pitch?” (Autobiography 455).

      In his preface to volume 15 of the New York Edition, a volume containing “The Figure in the Carpet,” James poses a challenge to critics. “I had long found the charming idea of some artist whose characteristic intention, or cluster of intentions, should have taken all vainly for granted the public, or at the worst the not unthinkable private, exercise of penetration” (Art of the Novel 228). “I came to Hugh Vereker,” he says, by way of a “generalisation”—namely, that criticism is “apt to stand off from the intended sense of things,” so he posited a critic, an “intent worker,” “who should find himself to the very end in presence but of the limp curiosity.” The “drama” that Hugh Vereker’s story describes—a drama of criticism, of the “aspiring young analyst whose report we read”—is that “at a given moment the limpness begins vaguely to throb and heave, to become conscious of a comparative tension.” As an “effect” of this “mild convulsion,” James concludes, “acuteness, at several points, struggles to enter the field, and the question that accordingly comes up, the issue of the affair, can be but whether the very secret of perception hasn’t been lost” (Art of the Novel 229). James had fun writing the long passage from which I have quoted these excerpts. Can there be any doubt that he relished the wordplay, that he experienced what Sedgwick calls “exhibitionistic enjoyment” (“Shame and Performativity” 229), in the idea of “embodied” intentions vainly seeking a public readership able to “penetrate” them, the image of the critic’s “limp curiosity” that begins to “throb and heave” and whose “convulsion” imperils the “very secret of perception”? In his brilliant analysis of this passage and James’s tale as a whole, Eric Savoy archly refers to James’s lesson for readers as a “sort of critical Viagra” and an object lesson in camp, the “ludic self-parody that James increasingly turned to in his prefaces to the New York Edition” (“Embarrassments” 231, 230). As much as anything else Savoy honors the writerly pleasures of James’s text—the laughter that must have bubbled inside him in the act of composition. James poses a serious challenge for his readers, especially his male readers, as he indulges in parody and self-parody and the fun and games of unsettling relationships between words and meanings. Reading James for fun demands no “limp curiosity.” Venturing into the funhouse of James’s fiction we run the risk of getting “lost among the genders and the pronouns” (‘The Death of the Lion” 296). We shall need all our manhood at our sides, where of course we face the danger and the opportunity of losing it altogether. I hope I am man of imagination enough for the job—especially in the plural terms that James’s suspense of masculinity requires.

       Chapter 1

      Configuring Male Desire and Identity in Roderick Hudson

      Before launching into a largely favorable review of Roderick Hudson (1875) for the New York Times, the anonymous critic summarized James’s career—citing first the “Jr.” that connected him to his better-known father and then his esoteric appeal to the “more cultivated and thoughtful part of the reading public.” “He has shown no indications,” the reviewer complained, “of qualities of a robust natural growth” (Hayes 3). James’s lack of writerly virility hampers his ability to distinguish male and female characters from one another, and the critic cites his stylistic inability to differentiate between genders. Complaining that the characters in Roderick Hudson all talk “pretty much in the same way, the way of Mr. Henry James, Jr.,” the reviewer archly observed that Rowland Mallet “might be a male Mary Garland, and Mary Garland a female Rowland Mallet, Esquire” (Hayes 7). In effect, the Times reviewer places James in a position that anticipates Hugh Merrow’s in his later, unfinished story—in the position of having his own gendered identity inferred from the objects, or characters, he creates. Failing to find the right gendered voices for his male and female characters undermines his claim to a “robust” gender identity of his own. Although the reviewer hoped that James would develop more masculine features—that is, more “original traits,” as he “attains conscious strength and wins confidence in his powers by their exercise” (Hayes 3)—the jury, so to speak, seems to remain out. He finally praises Roderick Hudson as “one of the best novels produced in America,” but he also notes the “conscious primness” of James’s style, which he finds “too often apparent” (Hayes 7). James himself, of course, recognized that Roderick Hudson tested his writerly and manly power. Suppressing acknowledgement of Watch and Ward, he considered Roderick Hudson his “first attempt” at a “long fiction with a ‘complicated’ subject” (NY1: vi), and certainly his representation of gender and sexuality, distributed provocatively among male and female characters, figures prominently among those complications. “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere,” he would write in the New York Edition preface to Roderick Hudson, “and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so” (1: vii). If in fact relations “stop nowhere,” the individuals involved in those relations find themselves continually challenged to redefine or re-identify themselves “in relation.”

      Roderick Hudson offers the best early example of James’s “protégé theme” (Martin, ‘“High Felicity’” 101) and his earliest extended effort to plot the narrative trajectory of male homoerotic desire—how men identify themselves in relation to each other. Rowland Mallet recognizes that his “genius is altogether imitative,” even though he has not yet “encountered any very striking models of grandeur” (1: 4), but in Roderick Hudson he obviously finds a “model of grandeur” in whom he can invest considerable energy—playing patron, living vicariously through the other man’s achievement, and testing his own attraction to his protégé.1 In addition to experimenting with paths of desire and identification, the narrative also illustrates James’s early effort to explore a range of masculine behavior and masculine roles, because the male-to-male relationship is doubly complicated by the presence of two women: Christina Light and Mary Garland. In an excellent recent essay on homosocial bonds in the novel, Nomi Sofer argues that James was “acutely aware” that the “homosocial cannot exist outside of the compulsory heterosexuality of patriarchal society and realistic fiction” (192), but I think the relational and identificatory possibilities he explores in Roderick Hudson are more supple and versatile. They certainly include the homoerotic, not just the homosocial, but in exploring the potential of mutually fulfilling homoerotic relationships, James does explore their many complications. Rowland Mallet, for example, finds the male object of his desire—his “model of grandeur”—entangled in a romantic and sexual relationship with a woman

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