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possibilities for gender and sexual identification.

      Rowland Mallet serves James not only as a center of consciousness, but also as a “center of manliness”—a subject position, if you will, through which various constructs of manhood can circulate. Although Kelly Cannon rightly claims that Rowland “fails to meet the masculine norm because he cannot muster sufficient heterosexual passion for Mary Garland” (9), such a view of Rowland’s limitations and of the norms and alternatives with which James works is itself much too limited. Not content to represent Rowland’s masculine sensibility within any simple binary, James attempts to educate it, first through relationship with Roderick, and then through the challenges posed by Christina and Mary. Roderick in effect mediates Rowland’s relationship with each of the women, placing himself “between women,” while the women mediate Rowland’s relationship with Roderick, placing themselves “between men.”

      As James initially characterizes him, Mallet appears waiting for some outside force to change his life. Identified as he is with his money and with conventionally masculine systems of business exchange, he feels ready to invest self and money in some alternative speculation. He is “waiting till something takes [his] fancy irresistibly.” “I’m holding myself ready for inspiration,” he tells his cousin Cecilia in reporting his intention to visit Europe, but he worries that if “inspiration comes at forty it will be a hundred pities to have tied up my money-bag at thirty” (1: 4). Claims such as Poirier’s that Rowland is simply an “observer who, like Ralph Touchett, must subsidize the kind of life he cannot lead” seem short-sighted, given the open field for investment that James initially posits for his central character (20). For in Mallet (and in the “drama” of his consciousness) James depicts a male character whose intellectual and emotional energy, while narcissistically invested in an enclosed self, nonetheless awaits something to stimulate an opening and presumably an outpouring of the “moneybag” of hoarded emotion. Jonathan Freedman considers the “neurasthenic” Mallet to represent the “conflict between a Calvinist insistence on a life of vigorous activity and the aestheticist privileging of a life of pure contemplation” (138). Mallet himself seems to recognize that conflict and to seek a means of reconciling those two impulses.⁴ He certainly recognizes the vacuity of his present life and feels the need to channel suppressed energy into self-expression. He pointedly tells Cecilia that he is tired of narcissistic self-enclosure: “tired of myself, my own thoughts, my own affairs, my own eternal company.” “True happiness,” he recognizes, “consists in getting out of one’s self’ and, moreover, being able to “stay out” (1: 7). Although he could simply be rationalizing his inactivity and covertly expressing a desire to uncloset himself (anticipating a character such as John Marcher in “The Beast in the Jungle”), he explains that his problem has simply been the lack of an “absorbing errand”: “I want to care for something or for somebody. And I want to care, don’t you see? with a certain intensity; even, if you can believe it, with a certain passion.” Although Cecilia interprets this to mean that he simply wants to “fall in love” (1: 7), the issue is more complicated, because love is only one of several bases for relationship in Roderick Hudson. The terms of desire that Mallet uses, furthermore, clearly suggest an alternative to a strict “moneybag” economy of investment and profit at the expense of others. Whether oriented heterosocially or homosocially, caring for something or somebody suggests selflessness more than selfishness and a basis for human relationship that James pointedly distinguishes from the economic basis of American business society.

      As he looks in the mirror, Mallet characterizes himself half-facetiously as a “man of genius half-finished. The genius has been left out, the faculty of expression is wanting; but the need for expression remains, and I spend my days groping for the latch of a closed door” (1: 8). He does in fact spend the rest of the novel seeking ways to invest and to “open” himself to experience by getting and staying outside the closed door, or closet, behind which he has secreted himself. In this regard, he registers a typical male scenario in post-Civil War America. Feeling cultural pressure to achieve business success and to fall in love and marry, he wants some other definition of maleness, some other male self that can serve as a “model of grandeur.” He accepts the idea that “true happiness” requires investment of energy in “something or someone,” but he seeks an alternative to the two choices most readily available and encouraged by his culture: a woman or a business career. “Roderick will repay me,” he tells Mary. “It’s a speculation” (1: 77). Indeed, Rowland is in some sense as much a sculptor as Roderick—a “fairy godmother,” in one reviewer’s arch terms (Hayes 9), with the power to transform Roderick’s Cinderella into a princely sculptor. Mallet feels bored to have his “hands always so empty,” so he “embraced the idea that something considerable might be made of Roderick” (1: 48), even though his cousin Cecilia warns him that he will have his “hands rather full” with the younger man. The challenge for Mallet inheres in the terms—the discourse of aesthetic capitalism—he uses to express his desire. Can he keep his “speculation” in Roderick as free as possible from the dominant-subordinate, potentially exploitative temptations of profiteering capitalism? To speculate in another man is risky in all sorts of ways—even before the criminalization of homosexuality—and James seems specially interested in the ethical and psychological challenge of such male-male investment.⁵ What effects can such male-to-male desire have on both relationships and individual identities? Can male desire be compatible with self-achievement? In effect, can Rowland care enough about Roderick to keep his hands off and allow his protégé to develop freely—to own his own labor? Roderick will later declaim to the Italian sculptor Gloriani that he wants to “produce the sacred terror; a Hera that will make you turn blue, an Aphrodite that will make you turn—well, faint” (1:117), so freeing him from patronizing control could quickly turn the tables on Rowland’s project—placing him in a masochistic position, as Wendy Graham notes, in relation to a sculptural male sadist. In her view Roderick “intends for his ‘divine forms’ to replicate the experience of being shattered into sexuality; his bravura manner belies a hidden identification with the viewer’s frisson, the sublime thrill of aesthetically induced pain and fright” (129–30).

      Although Mallet and Hudson are very different from one another, each represents an alternative to conventional masculinity. Having never been “accused of anything more material than a manly stoutness” and with hair the “fairest shade of yellow” and a “complexion absurdly rosy” (1:13), Mallet is a kind of Fair Gentleman. Although he served, like the later Christopher Newman and Basil Ransom, as an officer during the Civil War, “if not with glory, at least with a noted propriety,” he feels none of those later characters’ hunger for “driving a lucrative trade” (1: 15). In fact, he considered his post-college stint in his father’s counting-house to be “small drudgery” (1: 14). Hudson, of course, seems very different. Active and energetic, he does “everything too fast,” according to Cecilia, and he himself feels “something inside” that “drives” him—some “demon of unrest!” (1: 20). Neil Schmitz considers Roderick a typical Jacksonian male; his “aesthetic tall talk” is the “dangerous hyperbole of the male hysteric” (155).⁶ At the same time, Hudson is no conventional Masculine Achiever in the manner of Newman or Goodwood. Indeed, this “remarkably pretty boy” (1:17), with his “soft and not altogether masculine” voice (1: 21) and “extraordinary beauty” (1: 23), reminds Rowland of “some beautiful, supple, restless, bright-eyed animal, whose motions should have no deeper warrant than the tremulous delicacy of its structure” (1: 31). In these physical terms, he is as much an alternative to conventional masculinity as Mallet, and like his patron he rejects the “repulsive routine” of the business world (1: 24). He experiences exasperation at having to fill a “double place” for his mother ever since his brother Stephen, a model of the “useful man,” was killed in the war. “It’s a good deal to ask of a man,” he complains, “especially when he has so little talent as I for being what he’s not.” From his mother’s point of view and from his culture’s, he recognizes, his brother was “much more the right thing” (1: 41). His mother demands that he “must be to her everything that [his brother] would have been”—in short, someone who “would have made fifty thousand dollars and had the parlour done up” (1: 42). In putting the matter so bluntly, James obviously represents the conflict he himself felt between business and an artistic career, but he has also

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