LITMIR.BIZ

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self-critical assessments paint a portrait of James as an artist whose gender identification is confused and contradictory. Most of these assessments—including James’s own—work a variation on the nineteenth-century model of inversion and depend upon some form of binarism (male-female, masculine-feminine, normal-inverted, heterosexual-homosexual) with James either assigned one position (from which to be “embattled” with the other), or considered the battleground between the two. They also depend on some notion of normative male identity from which James, even to his own perception, can only deviate. James, in short, fails to measure up. Kaja Silverman concludes that, despite the “ostensible gender of the biographical Henry James, the author ‘inside’ his texts is never unequivocally male; situated at a complex intersection of the negative and positive Oedipus complexes, that author is definitively foreclosed from the scene of passion except through identifications which challenge the binarisms of sexual difference” (180). Silverman helps to open up the question of gender identification in James’s writing, while separating that question from James’s biographical selfhood, but her psychoanalytic approach to the question seems too limiting because it does not account for the playfulness and slipperiness—the verbal performance—of James’s language.⁴ In fact, the multiple characterizations of James’s manliness or lack of manliness suggest that the gender and sexuality to be inferred from his writing are less singular than plural, that his writing is not simply the site of colliding gender monoliths. Indeed, I argue that establishing James’s gender and sexual identity is less important than attending to his own interrogation of gender and sexuality.

      H. G. Dwight’s assertion in 1907 that James was a “woman’s writer; no man was able to read him” (438), while intended to signify James’s effeminacy, may also suggest the way James unsettled male readers by destabilizing conventional nineteenth-century constructs of male subjectivity. David Halperin notes that the “conceptual isolation of sexuality per se from questions of masculinity and femininity made possible a new taxonomy of sexual behaviors and psychologies based entirely on the anatomical sex of the persons engaged in a sexual act (same sex versus different sex).” The result was that “a number of distinctions that had traditionally operated within earlier discourses pertaining to same-sex sexual contacts and that had radically differentiated active from passive sexual partners, normal from abnormal (or conventional from unconventional) sexual roles, masculine from feminine styles, and pederasty from lesbianism: all such behaviors were now to be classed alike and placed under the same heading” (39). Writing during this period of transition, James illustrates the ambiguities and confusions—the multivalence—of gender and sexuality, and his fiction it seems to me conducts a series of experiments in gender/sexual construction and deconstruction. Repeatedly, James demonstrates the instability of gender identities, largely through what I am tempted to call a game of musical subject positions, in which male characters are redefined—re-identified—in relation to “other,” male and female, characters. Triangulating and even quadrangulating male characters such as Rowland Mallet and Prince Amerigo (the bookends, so to speak, in the gallery whose portraits concern me here), James destabilizes male identity by pluralizing male subjectivity.

      Within his own person James may have felt insecure in his gender and sexual identification, but as a writer I find him playful and experimental. Recalling the “flowers of perverse appreciation” that he gathered during his brief sojourn as a law student at Harvard, for example, James remembers his preoccupation, as a budding young writer, with the “degree and exact shade to which the blest figures in the School array, each quite for himself, might settle and fix the weight, the interest, the function, as it were, of his Americanism” (Autobiography 449). As he tries to settle questions of American male typology—what he campily calls “pearls of differentiation”—he remains coyly unaware, “not dreaming of the stiff law by which, on the whole American ground, division of type, in the light of opposition and contrast, was more and more to break down for me and fail” (449–50). This failure of American men to settle themselves neatly into types provides James an opportunity to play with his “pearls” according to the stiff law of his own imagination. The “young appearances” could be “pleasingly, or at least robustly homogeneous,” he notes, “and yet, for livelier appeal to fancy, flower here and there into special cases of elegant deviation—’sports,’ of exotic complexion, one enjoyed denominating these (or would have enjoyed had the happy figure then flourished) thrown off from the thick stem that was rooted under our feet” (450). This remarkable extended metaphor suggests James’s campy playfulness, as well as his awareness of contemporaneous gender and sexual theorizing—and its limitations. He feels some constraints on his imaginative play because some “happy figures” are not yet flourishing, but he seems much more interested than many of his readers in keeping the questions of gender and sexuality open to “elegant deviation”—that is, to improvisation, or performance—especially to deviations that “flower” from the “thick stem” of his own fanciful imagination. He adroitly mixes gendered metaphors in this passage, conflating flower and phallic imagery. The “stiff law” he dimly perceives causes American men to break down—that is, their types to break down, and thus to flower for him. American men, especially those who seem most homogeneously robust, in effect become “pansies.” Masculine homogeneity converts rather easily—almost homophonically—into homosexuality. But the power in this passage is James’s own—the phallic power of his imagination to convert robust young men into flowers. “Everything’s coming up roses,” in the words of the old song. James enjoys the sport of playing with the “sports.”

      Michel Foucault considers the nineteenth and twentieth centuries “the age of multiplication,” featuring a “dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of ‘perversions,’” and he concludes that our “epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities” (37). Although Judith Butler points out some of the contradictions and unresolved tensions in Foucault’s theory of sexuality, her performative theory of gender identity represents the best attempt during the past decade to destabilize gender categories, although applying her theory to men carries certain risks.⁵ Calling gender a “kind of persistent impersonation that passes as the real” (vii), Butler’s feminist project works to destabilize “woman” and “women” as useful categories. “Rather than a stable signifier that commands the assent of those whom it purports to describe and represent, women, even in the plural, has become a troublesome term, a site of contest, a cause for anxiety” (3). Butler destabilizes gender by disassociating it from sexuality, as well as from sexual practice and from desire. “Intelligible genders are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among, sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire” (17). These four quadrants suggest the variables that any identification of sex or gender or sexual practice or desire must take into account. That is, sexual practice is not necessarily a function of sexual or gender identity or even of desire. Gender and sexual identities can be consistent or inconsistent with one another. Gender, Butler asserts, “is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed” (25). I want to try to avoid the sort of psychic determinism that even this transgressive paradigm entails and to keep sex, gender, and desire in play as cross-relational categories. Butler’s feminist project does not translate seamlessly to a study of masculinity, but her suggestive terms seem appropriate to the queer subject, Henry James. Although he does not refer to Butler or apply the idea comprehensively to questions of gender and sexuality, Ross Posnock advances a useful theory of theatricality to describe James’s representation of selfhood. Comparing James to Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, Posnock argues that James “converts the bourgeois self of control into a more supple mode that eludes social categories and is open to the play of the fundamental passions” (5). “As James grew into manhood,” Posnock concludes, “the gaping and the vagueness of his mimetic behavior found its most ‘workable’ public mode in theatricality, self-representation that mitigates the reification of identity by letting the contingencies of social interaction continually shape and reshape it” (185). Posnock’s provocative theory of James’s theatrical, or mimetic, selfhood resembles Buder’s theory of performativity, and the subject positions that James distributes to his male characters certainly represent contested sites at which “sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire,” to use Buder’s terms, come together in a state of dynamic tension.

      I

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