Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels

The Art of Concealment

Wibke Schniedermann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030441081
• eBook ISBN: 9783030441098
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This book proposes a new interdisciplinary approach to the gendered power relations in James's novels. Reading James's narrative form through the lens of relational sociology, specifically Pierre Bourdieu's concept of symbolic domination, reconciles some of the most fiercely disputed positions in James studies of the past decades. The close readings focus on three novels, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl, providing a systematic relational analysis into the specifically Jamesian method of narrating the socio-psychological, embodied responses to masculine power and oppression. James persistently narrates his characters as social agents whose perception, affects, and bodily practices are products of the social structures that they in turn continue to shape and reproduce. The chapters trace a development throughout James's career that reflects a growing sensitivity for the concealment and attendant misrecognition of gendered domination.

© The Author(s) 2020

W. SchniedermannMasculine Domination in Henry James's Novelshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44109-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Wibke Schniedermann¹

(1)

University of Giessen, Giessen, Hessen, Germany

Wibke Schniedermann

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In one of the most haunting scenes in The Wings of the Dove, Milly Theale, the novel’s protagonist, gets lost in an area of London unknown to her. She has just left her doctor’s office, where she learned of her terminal illness. As Milly’s mind tries to come to terms with the knowledge of her imminent death, the narration foregrounds contradictory metaphors; images of luxury contrast with those of archaic weaponry. Milly’s concept of herself and her place in the world is threatened to the verge of giving way to a new self-image, one that would acknowledge the full extent of her social privileges as well as her entrapment in a dominated identity. Yet, Milly is not allowed to step out of her limited self-perception. The narrative representation of her mind, besieged by conflicting thoughts and images contradictory to the very foundation of her worldview as she struggles to make sense of her personal crisis, reveals how the protagonist’s cognitive limitations in coping with her situation are directly determined by a social structure that is so irrevocably a part of herself that it reverberates even in her body.

This book investigates how Henry James gives aesthetic expression to his characters’ personal struggles, such as Milly’s, against the seemingly insurmountable force of incorporated social structures. It specifically looks at female protagonists’ attempts to break out of gendered domination and the ways in which James’s narratives reflect both the existing social constraints and his characters’ personal strategies to escape them. The readings are informed by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of symbolic violence and symbolic power. “Symbolic” in this case does not refer to a nonmaterial, imaginary plane. Instead it denotes the need for this kind of power to remain unrecognized and manifest itself by proxy. At the core of Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power is therefore the imperative of a double concealment that is built into any social hierarchy . Symbolic power needs to conceal its true efficacy and the ways in which it works on minds and bodies from both those who exert it and those who are subjected to it. Few writers give expression to this perpetuation of obscurity more effectively than Henry James. My study traces James’s recognition of symbolic domination in the narrative structures, styles, and techniques of three of his major novels.

James was one of the keenest observers of the power relations of his time. Research on James has from its beginnings examined the narrative implementation of his accurate understanding of sociocultural oppression in his character constellations, the representation of consciousness, and the meticulous depiction of, on the one hand, the material world—in architectural design of his fictional realities, in attire, interior decoration, and so on—and, on the other hand, in the verbose, innuendo-filled dialogues and the rich imagery of his novels and tales. James’s fictional worlds, from trimmed lawn to upholstery, from open parasol to oiled mustache, and from silent gaze to eloquent speech, are imbued with the author’s awareness that each knickknack, each gesture, and every spoken or unspoken word can serve as an indicator or even instrument of social power.

Within the extensive criticism written about James’s works, much has been said about his sensitivity when it comes to difficult power imbalances. What remains underexposed at times is not only how James depicts social power and its problematic implications but how his depictions also account for this power’s social conditionality. This blind spot cannot be blamed on a dearth of critical perspectives, and certainly not on the assumption that the author had missed the conditions that enable social power constellations to emerge. And yet, James criticism sometimes hits the proverbial brick wall. Particularly when it comes to his most admired female protagonists, critics get caught up in specific debates that traditional methods of literary analysis cannot seem to resolve. One example are the many questions around the controversial ending of The Portrait of a Lady—a frustrating experience for many readers. The ongoing controversy concerning the character of Maggie Verver and her morally questionable behavior in The Golden Bowl is another case in point. In both cases, this book’s method of merging Bourdieu’s concepts with narratological instruments can overcome the limitations of former approaches.

Henry James criticism has long been rife with questions of power, domination, violence, and sexuality. The author himself is an object of similar interest, and James’s private as well as public image is the product of much shaping on the part of biographers and cultural critics. By the time Leon Edel produced his five-volume biography (between 1953 and 1972), F.O. Matthiessen had already published The James Family (1980 [1947]); in The Art of the Novel, R.P. Blackmur (1934) had laid down the foundation for the iconic figure of “the Master” that other critics would build upon in the following decades. While both structuralism and post-structuralism have made forays into James’s work (cf. McGuirk 1987; Landau 1996), queer theory has claimed James as one of its figureheads (Sedgwick 1986, 1993; Haralson 2003), and feminist criticism has condemned both the author and his works as borderline misogynist (Habegger 2004, 5–7; Person 2003, 4–5).¹ Readings of James have consistently foregrounded sociopsychological issues in the last decades.

If there is one topic upon which most James critics can agree, it is the author’s perceptivity when it comes to the personal repercussions of social power. In The Other Henry James, John Carlos Rowe (1998) helped discover the self-conscious, sometimes awkward and often lonely author whose fiction testifies to a deep and nuanced understanding of the workings of oppression on the human subject. Even those cultural critics who “identified his limitations,” Rowe notes in his foreword to David McWhirter’s Henry James’s New York Edition, give James credit for “the subtlety of his understanding of how social power works” (1995, xxiii). The intricate relations of domination that unfold and grow among his characters disclose myriad shades of complication, the confusion that seems inevitable when trying to determine the source of psychological and symbolic violence, and the immense difficulty of breaking free from such relations. A profound insight into the workings of the dominated mind speaks from the Jamesian consciousnesses.

At the same time, we cannot do away with the overarching notion of “the Master” whose groundbreaking theoretical works are still considered the undisputed origin of novel theory. The self-monumentalizing prefaces to his New York Edition especially bear witness to a writer who confidently claimed an elevated status within the literary world, and who strategically worked to augment it. In “Breaking the Aura of Henry James,” on the other hand, Ross Posnock (1995) draws attention to the “pre-canonical James,” a “provocative figure” and “disquieting curiosity to the reading public” who aroused “unease,” and whose “unpopularity among his contemporaries” was partly caused by “his ungenteel excess of curiosity” (27). This picture does not correspond with Blackmur’s canonical image of a genteel bachelor. Posnock shows how the author, despite participating more than a little in creating his own monolithic position in the history of Western literature, also documents his constant self-questioning. Artistic work is characterized in James’s prefaces, first and foremost, as suffering, doubting, and insecurity.

This ambiguous James is an author whose untiring concern for underrepresented, exploited, and violated groups gains in clarity when the sometimes bloodless, exclusively upper-class scenery of some of the major novels is allowed to fade into the background.² The literary scholar is well advised, for instance by Donatella Izzo (2001), not to turn this newly discovered ambiguity into the next “critically reified” attachment to the image of the Master that is “perhaps as unwilling to question its own premises” as its predecessors (5). As frustrated as James often was with the social problems of his time, and as deep as his sympathy might have been for the individual struggling for a certain degree of freedom, he repeatedly comments condescendingly on women’s suffrage and feminist movements (cf. Habegger 2004, 6–10). His arrogance toward his fellow woman writers, some of which he considered friends despite his scathing criticism, remains as undeniable as the anti-Semitism of certain remarks about Jewish people in his fiction.

The shift in perspective nevertheless sheds new light on James’s perceptiveness with regard to concealed or otherwise overlooked matters of coercion. “Of all nineteenth-century writers,” Winfried Fluck (2009) observes, “James is probably the one who is most aware of the permanent presence of manipulation and the constant re-emergence of social asymmetries in relations” (22–23). In her study Henry James’s Narrative Technique, Kristin Boudreau (2010) emphasizes how Henry James, “shar[ing] his brother’s resistance to ideology,” insisted on prioritizing human experience and, above all, perception over any rationalist logic (4).³ James’s narrative representation of his characters’ experience with and perception of social relations thus figures as one of this study’s focal points.

Discerning the invisible nexus of domination, perception, and obfuscation in James’s narratives requires detailed character studies. In his insightful study Henry James and Sexuality, Hugh Stevens (2008) cautions the reader against “characters’ attempts to put forward watertight narratives [which], when done to perfection, represents an art of concealment so finished that one is not even aware that something is being concealed” (22). In this passage, from which this book takes its subtitle, Stevens highlights how James pays tribute to the conditionality of both perception and its representation through his specific narrative style: “James’s insistence on…a ‘recording consciousness’ entails a recognition of the distance between signification and signified, the difficulty of getting to the ‘signified’ beyond the particular modes of representation used” (22). The present study traces in detail and over time James’s implementation of narrative techniques that acknowledge the social obligation to obfuscate this relation between signification and signified.

The structures of power that rule James’s fictional worlds are often as effectively obscured in his narratives as the examples after which they are modeled in the empirical world. Elsie B. Michie (2011) invites critics in The Vulgar Question of Money to “refuse the critical gesture that establishes our distance” from dismissed or omitted matters in order to bring to the fore how much James’s and other nineteenth-century novels rely on tacitly representing that which they claim to resist (2...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Presence of Absence in The Portrait of a Lady
• 3. The Grip of Inheritance in The Wings of the Dove
• 4. How to Survive One’s Inheritance in The Golden Bowl
• 5. James’s “Culture Vultures”
• 6. Conclusion
• Back Matter