Henry James: To Love is to Double

SSRG International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 2024

This research paper examines the complexities of marriage and romantic relationships portrayed in Henry James's novel, "The Portrait of a Lady," focusing on the 19th-century societal norms and constraints that impact the characters' choices. The review utilizes a Realist and Psychoanalytic theoretical framework to understand better the characters' motivations and actions within the context of their profound psychological struggles. This research adopts a qualitative approach, using textual analysis and thematic coding of specific entries and interactions from the novel. By applying Realist theory, the review explores the portrayal of 19th-century society, its traditions, and social expectations regarding marriage and relationships. Furthermore, applying Psychoanalytic theory enables a deeper assessment of the characters' subconscious desires and psychological conflicts. Analyzing "The Portrait of a Lady" through a Realist lens reveals a faithful representation of 19th-century societal norms and their effects on characters' choices regarding love and marriage. The characters' interactions and concerns about wealth and social status epitomize the pragmatic considerations prevalent during this period. Additionally, the use of Psychoanalytic theory provides profound insights into the character's inner motivations and emotional complexities, shedding light on their struggles to reconcile personal desires with societal expectations. The research emphasizes how societal constraints frequently lead to marriages driven by financial interests rather than genuine love, resulting in the characters' conflicts and unfulfilled relationships. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the review offers a comprehensive exploration of the complex themes of love, marriage, and societal norms in "The Portrait of a Lady," contributing to a deeper understanding of human relationships in 19th-century literature.

Journal of International Social Research, 2016

The early twentieth century is usually dubbed the starting-point of modern literature, but prior to the 1900s a string of novels was written by Henry James in which a slight break with the previous narrative tradition can be starkly observed. The most significant elements which separate modern tradition from the conventional one include: "point of view, interior monologue, stream-ofconsciousness, fragmented narratives, extreme subjectivity and broken chronology" (Professor Grant Voth). In this study, I want to deal with these elements as developed by Henry James in the late 1880s to the last stages of his career. The first part of this essay will take into account why Henry James is usually seen as the major discoverer of modern novel (or at least the one whose roots can be traced back to him) and his main contribution to the genre and the second part would survey the characteristics described above at play within the two eponymous novels of this essay. At the end I would sum up the framework of my essay in a unified conspectus.

Henry James in context, 2010

In 1996, I published a book-length bibliographical survey of Henry James studies. 1 It was organized around three key-terms that seemed to cover a lot of work, especially of the 1980s and 1990s: style, ethics, history-and especially the intersection of the three in a new understanding of what the historical means. When asked some ten years later to discuss recent James criticism for the present volume in the context of the evolving changes within literary and American studies, I find that the trend I saw as emergent back then very quickly became dominant. That is what John Carlos Rowe has aptly summarized in the title of one of his books as our scrutiny of The Other Henry James (1998)-the Henry James who ‗is valued because his hopes and worries still speak to us', because ‗the changes we have passed through are readable historically from James and his contemporaries to us'; not the Henry James who left us a ‗testament to some dubious universal truth '. 2 James studies up to the late 1970s were by and large what we used to call ‗liberal humanist' in orientation. What we meant by that was the proclivity for deriving from James's work general lessons for ‗Man'. A good example is the common reading of ‗The Beast in the Jungle', which held that John Marcher realizes too late in life that the big life-changing event he kept on waiting for had been under his nose all along: his true love was his dear friend, May Bartram. There was always a strong moralizing thrust to such readings: James's work was indeed a ‗testament to some dubious universal truth,' as Rowe puts it; and it was an object-lesson in how characters, and by natural, self-evident extension, readers, ought to conduct their lives, then as now. James himself, for liberal humanist study, fulfilled the idealized author function: he never married, because he was too dedicated to his muse. This so-called fact was documented biographically, at length, by Leon Edel, while Adeline 2 Tintner, in a similar spirit, shed encyclopedic light on the creative process, in particular its sources in what James could have been acquainted with. 3 James studies, from around the early 1980s, heavily participated in the theoretical turn away from such universalizing and, often, in the case of literary interpretation, flattening tendencies. And it seems to me that the manipulation of the theoretical screw has, in that quarter century or so, received, not one but at least two turns, bringing us to quite uncanny heights (or depths?) of Jamesian delight.

Journal of Modern Literature, 2007

This essay links the recent wave of interest in Henry James's private life as material for fiction—specifically, in Colm Tóibín's The Master, David Lodge's Author, Author and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty—to James's conflicted, often queer responses to the private and the public. Tóibín and Lodge, in divergent ways, trace through James, the failed dramatist, their own ambivalences about biographical fiction's private-public play. For Tóibín, James's life and writing offer figures for the queer author's efforts to probe, complicate, and even conceal homoerotic desire. Lodge's novel remains haunted by a queer specter of James even as it places disembodied devotion at the centre of James's and the fictional biographer's art. While Hollinghurst's novel invokes James as a background presence, James's vexed attitudes toward publicity and privacy and his stylistic excess illuminate the novel's attention to the "guest" status of gay aesthetics in the heteronormative public sphere of Thatcherite Britain.

Literature Compass, 2005

The Portrait of a Lady is a masterly portrait of its female protagonist, Isabel Archer. The pathos and spiritual richness make it a very moving account and illumination of the situation and character of Henry James's vivid individual, described by one of his characters as a rare apparition. Isabel, the young independent American girl is intelligent, generous hearted, innocent and yet dogmatic in her beliefs. She is duped by the sophisticated façade of European aestheticism in the persona of the manipulative villainous duo of Gilbert Osmond and his mistress Madame Merle. Isabel's idealistic illusions of the world as a place of free expansion and as a place of brightness are cruelly shattered when she realizes their duplicity and becomes a prisoner in Osmo nd's house of darkness and humiliation. Denied her mental space and freedom, Isabel yet rejects the free life offered by her American suitor, Caspar Goodwood. She goes back to the poisonous atmosphere of Osmond's world to save his teenage daughter Pansy from a disastrous marriage of convenience, brokered by him, to a much older but titled man. Henry James examines important social issues of human exploitation in the face of vulgar materialism, the role of the individual and the aspiration for freedom and selffulfilment. The Portrait of a Lady is an 'architectural' marvel of the consummate artist, the poet-novelist, Henry James, who carefully piled brick on brick to give us a literary masterpiece suffused with ethical and aesthetic power.

The Henry James Review, 2003

2013

This dissertation examines the modern, worldly dimensions of Henry James's literary practice evident across his criticism, nonfiction, and novelistic fiction, which James described to be his "various," comparative response to U.S. culture and society. Drawing upon contemporary critical turns to ethical and affective-oriented aesthetic modes of interpretation, I show that James's "various" literary practice expresses worldly and comparative thinking that opposes the private, Protestant-informed "business enterprise" society developing in the United States around the turn of the twentieth-century. In describing James to be an oppositional critic to American business enterprise, my dissertation contributes to ongoing interventions in Henry James studies that have reconstructed James to be a more historically-minded and politically-engaged thinker than asserted in canonical, twentieth-century formalist and New Critical approaches to James's literary work. My dissertation proceeds through readings of his late criticism in the Prefaces to the New York Edition, his three-volume autobiography, his mid-career essay "The Art of Fiction" (1884), and finally, to his first novelistic masterpiece at the outset of his career, The Portrait of a Lady (1881/1908). My dissertation's formal construction forefronts James's contributions as a literary critic, and I describe an oppositional, critical reading practice in his thought based upon ethical, aesthetic, and political modes of reading. James's practice as a critic, I argue, not only enables critics today to confront and challenge the ongoing contentious politics of interpretation in Henry James studies, but it allows readers to discern the critical and oppositional dimensions of his novelistic literary fiction, which I show to be particularly evident in The Portrait of a Lady. v In my reading of James's work, I suggest that a theoretical, critical orientation will help readers to understand better James's novelistic literary practice to be an articulation of a modern critical consciousness: to this end, I examine J. Hillis Miller's deconstructive "interpretive" approach to the Prefaces; I argue James's concept of literary art functions as a kind of "worldly" secular criticism in the sense that Edward Said articulated worldliness; I consider Raymond Williams's concept of "structures of feeling" as "emergent" ways of thinking in relation to James's claim for the novel as a generator of "interest" premised upon its representation of a "feeling" sensibility; I examine James's claims for the freedom of literary art as an anticipation of Jacques Derrida's characterization of writing as the purposeful occasioning of différance; and, I suggest an affinity between James's claims for the "exercise" of freedom in artistic creation and Michel Foucault's conception of an Enlightenment ethos of modernity premised upon aesthetic self-making. In my readings of James's critical, autobiographical, and fictional works in light of these selected works of criticism and theory, I aim to demonstrate that Henry James critics may comprehend a discernible Jamesian "text" that in toto expresses a new, modern way of thinking in American novelistic literary art that occasions difference from a business-dominated, theocratically-inclined, Protestant American culture. Despite the particular, historically-distinct discrepancies between these somewhat disparate theoretical orientations, I aim to demonstrate their value for revealing Henry James's commitment to the democratic conditions of a still-emergent form of modernity that he practices in novelistic literary art. As a result of formalist-oriented New Criticism and polemical Left criticism, James has typically been taken to be anything but a

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