Henry James's Feminist Afterlives

Annie Fields, Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras

Kathryn Wichelns

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319717999
• eBook ISBN: 9783319718002
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores Henry James's negotiations with nineteenth-century ideas about gender, sexuality, class, and literary style through the responses of three women who have never before been substantively examined in light of their relationships to his work. Writing in different times and places, Annie Fields, Emily Dickinson, and Marguerite Duras nevertheless sharecomplex navigations of womanhood and authorship, as well as a history offeminist scholarly responses to their work.Kathryn Wichelns draws upon James' correspondence with Fields, as well as Dickinson's and Duras's revisions of his fiction, to offer a new understanding of gender-transgressive elements of hisproject. By contextualizing his writing within a diverse set of feminist perspectives, each grounded in a specific time and place, as well as nineteenth-century views of queer male sexuality, Wichelns demonstrates the centrality of Henry James's ambivalent identifications with women tohis work.

© The Author(s) 2018

Kathryn WichelnsHenry James's Feminist AfterlivesAmerican Literature Readings in the 21st Centuryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71800-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: On James, Mastery, and Transgression

Kathryn Wichelns¹

(1)

Department of English, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA

Keywords

FeminismQueer theoryWomen’s suffrageEpistolary writingGreat Unrest

End Abstract

This book approaches the thorny, much-debated question of Henry James’s negotiations with his own period’s ideas about gender, sexuality, class, nation, and literary style tangentially—through the responses of three women authors who have never substantively been examined in light of their relationships to James or his work. Writing in very different times and places, Annie Adams Fields, Emily Dickinson, and Marguerite Duras nevertheless share ambivalent responses to notions of womanhood and authorship. Henry James’s correspondence with Annie Fields—a writer and women’s rights activist whose “Boston marriage ” with Sarah Orne Jewett influenced James’s complex sympathy with her—and Dickinson’s and Duras’s revisions of James’s fiction, offer a new avenue for understanding what I argue are gender-transgressive elements of James’s project.

Just to clarify at the outset: my goal is not to present James himself as a feminist of a sort that we would easily recognize. As the title suggests, I regard James throughout this book through a series of feminist frames—each representative of a specific time and place, sometimes incompatibly distinct from the others. Yet I also argue that scholarly views on James’s depictions of women, and his relationship to women’s rights, have suffered from incomplete attention to available documents, including but not limited to his letters to Fields. In part, this oversight reflects the influence of twentieth-century canonizations of James as the “master” who bridges the realist and modernist periods, best understood through his relationship to literary aesthetics, and even then primarily via his late novels. Scholarship since the 1990s has done a great deal to chip away at the foundations of this version of James, as I will discuss briefly below, but surprising gaps remain. In Henry James’s Feminist Afterlives I examine James as seen by three women writers who approach him from outside of our own inherited sense of what matters most in his work. For them, he is a male author who closely explores women’s inner lives, as they negotiate existing ideas about gender and selfhood during the unprecedented transformations brought about by the late nineteenth-century period. Read in this light, James’s critical preoccupation with questions of class, gender, and power becomes the defining aspect of his corpus.¹

James’s relationship to what his contemporaries called “the woman question” both is and is not consistent with his era’s conventions. Most infamously, in two separate letters, written in March 1912 to Edith Wharton and William Dean Howells respectively, James’s lack of sympathy for the “mortally tedious” movement for British women’s suffrage is palpable. At the same time, scholarly readers of the 1912 letters often fail to note the context in which they were written. James condemns Emmeline Pankhurst and the other middle-class “window-smashing women” both because they break gender- and class-specific rules of conduct and because he considers their cause to be insensitively abstract during a period of unprecedented income inequality, known to historians as the Great Unrest. In March 1912, when Pankhurst had resumed a campaign of breaking windows in London and James was writing his letters to Wharton and Howells, a million coal miners had just begun what remains one of the most important strikes in British labor history, in protest over the government’s failure to pass minimum wage laws (Anesko 456–457; Hobsbawm 116–129, 306; Kelly). On March 13, he writes to Wharton of “the coal strike and its mass of attendant misery” just prior to turning to Pankhurst and her fellow activists, who “add a darker shade” to the communal despair (James Letters Vol. II, 227–229). This in part—and only in part—is a critique of the women’s methods and timing, which to him seem tone-deaf; of course, Pankhurst also is violating what James presumably saw as natural and necessary standards of feminine selflessness, during periods of collective hardship. While twenty-first century readers (including me) tend to look more favorably on Pankhurst than on James in this instance, Annie Fields would have shared his views. Another women’s suffrage activist, she also served for James as an exemplar of appropriately private and genteel feminine behavior—one who, for the entire three decades of their correspondence, lived and thrived outside of heterosexual paradigms. Indeed, as British and American feminist speeches and writings of the period consistently indicate, it was through their very privacy, domesticity, modesty, and separateness—and the greater capacity for spirituality, selflessness, and love for which those innately “feminine” attributes served as an outward sign—that (white) women were seen as deserving of the vote.² To James, Fields, and their (white, upper-class, Anglo-American) contemporaries, these two sets of beliefs about women would not have seemed in the least bit contradictory.

Henry James’s Feminist Afterlives represents a close conversation between two recent traditions: feminist and queer theoretical readings of James’s work, life, and/or influence. While these approaches are not, and perhaps should not be, aligned in many contexts, deploying either one separately in the face of James’s writing strikes me as reductive. Early feminist and queer theoretical readings of the author, in the 1980s and 1990s, at times seemed to collaborate on little more than sounding the death knell of the asexual, aesthetic figure that emerged from earlier scholarship. Feminist work on James from this period sometimes doesn’t seem to square with the writer who responded so negatively to Emmeline Pankhurst’s protest campaign in 1912.³ That work gave way, at least in terms of prominence, to the various queer theoretical readings that followed Eve Sedgwick’s 1986 essay “The Beast in the Closet” (republished in 1990’s Epistemology of the Closet). Sedgwick’s ground-breaking opening salvo in this discussion would come to be productively nuanced by others (Haralson, Henry James; Lane; Looby; Moon; Ohi ; Savoy; Stevens ). Leo Bersani’s psychoanalysis-influenced queer theoretical investigations of aesthetic subjectivity have inspired various readers to explore James the male artist as sympathetic towards alternatives to conventional masculine roles (Future 128–155).⁴ The figure that this alternate subjectivity takes for James often is feminine, but this doesn’t necessarily make him a feminist (or, indeed, not feminist)—again, reading him in either way may actually blind us to his negotiations with ideals of masculinity and femininity, as representative of and indistinguishable from ideologies of capitalism, class, individual selfhood, sexuality, nationality, and authorship. Kevin Ohi’s contribution to queer theoretical James studies enables me to argue, quite differently, that what he describes as James’s “queerness of style” just as clearly can be understood as a gender-transgressive approach to writing and authorship. Three decades after the first flowering of feminist and queer theoretical readings of James, an extended examination of the author that critically deploys both theoretical lenses, without either declaring the primacy of one over the other or compromising their differences, arguably still remains to be done.

For nineteenth-century subjects, what today we call gender and sexuality were not divisible: same-sex desire would have been understood as a form of spiritual “hermaphroditism ,” as scholars from Michel Foucault to Elizabeth Reis have extensively demonstrated.⁵ To put this distinction in very basic terms, twenty-first century readers understand that it is both homophobic and misogynistic to conflate gay men with (heterosexual) women; we know that lesbians are not “actually” male, in some way only explainable through recourse to long-dead pseudosciences. Legal apparatuses exist, in some countries, to acknowledge that genitalia and gender are not always necessarily aligned. It seems self-evident to point out that our concepts are just as historically-contingent and -situated as James’s, Fields’s, and Dickinson’s (as well as Duras’s): that does not make them any less real. Yet in reading work from earlier eras we sometimes do not fully consider the fundamental incompatibility between their ideas and our own; equally problematic is our tendency to condemn historical figures for their period-specific notions. The historiographical approach that winds through Henry James’s Feminist Afterlives most resembles Jack Halberstam’s “perverse presentism,” as first presented in 1998. Halberstam describes the quandary faced by scholars of queer and feminist history: seemingly, they must choose between “untheoretical historical surveys” that effectively erase non-normative sexualities and genders from the record, and “ahistorical theoretical models” that impose anachronism through their reliance on essentialized notions of sexual identities. As a resolution to this conflict, Halberstam offers a model that “avoids the trap of simply projecting contemporary understandings back in time, but one that can apply insights from the present to conundrums of the past” (46, 52–53). In short, rigorous attention to the profound alienness of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century notions of what we now call sex, gender, and sexuality provides us with more balanced understandings of the work of James and other authors who lived in the period.

A number of women writers from James’s time and afterwards have, of course, been read extensively in light of their responses to him: Willa Cather, Edith Wharton , Gertrude Stein, and Constance Fenimore Woolson, to name a few. Until most recently, studies of James’s relationships with women and women authors have tended to emphasize his (masculine) stylistic or artistic authority, rather than what I suggest is the specifically gender-transgressive aesthetics that his writing models for others with ambivalent relationships to their own period’s ideas about gender and voice.⁶ Readings of James’s relationships to gender and writing, and the real women he knew or the fictional ones he depicted, often have missed the complex gender ambivalences and identifications inherent to his project. Tessa Hadley and Jonathan Freedman have presented useful correctives to earlier critiques of James’s treatments of women, but each regards James’s examinations of feminine subjectivity as based in a fundamentally more optimistic relationship to the mechanisms of late nineteenth-century capitalism than I think is accurate. Most useful for my purposes are three studies by Lyndall Gordon , Leland Person, and Victoria Coulson. In 2007’s excellent Henry James, Women and Realism, Coulson uses his relationships with Edith Wharton, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and his sister Alice to argue that James is “subject to, and the compelling artist of, a potent ambivalence about the social authority of conservative gender patterns.” For C...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: On James, Mastery, and Transgression
• 2. “Those Who Know”: Henry James and Annie Adams Fields
• 3. Emily Dickinson’s Henry James
• 4. Henry James, French Feminist: Marguerite Duras’s La Bête dans la jungle
• 5. Gender, Colonialism, and Italian Difference: Duras and The Aspern Papers
• 6. Conclusion: Towards a Queer Feminist James
• Back Matter