Henry James and the (Un) Canny American Scene

The Eagle Feather, 2012

In the prefaces to his novels and short stories, Nathaniel Hawthorne explores the conflicts that surface when political leader utilized tyranny to force consensus in antebellum American state. His prefaces introduce these conflicts and act as guides on how to read what follows. Under threat of termination by his coworkers and representatives in government, he transforms his writing style so that its implicit message can only be understood by a select audience. Hawthorne, I will argue, is determined to enlighten his readers to the hypocrisies and civil violations that occur in spite of the protections the constitution guarantees. He also takes issue with the growing power of political factions in the decade leading up to the America Civil War by taking a classical republican stance for civic virtue over private interests. In his stories, Hawthorne heightens the significance of these issues through characters who meet tragic circumstances. Through the settings of his stories-often in the years of America's infancy-Hawthorne uses allegorical connections to comment on the dilemmas of his present. In this way he is, perhaps, advocating a revision of the sociopolitical state of antebellum New England and indirectly promoting an agenda that will be capable of bringing the faults of his country to light.

With his literary work, and notably with The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne always endorsed a clear idea pertaining to the achievement of the New English national unity. A vivid Biblical imagery, or sometimes even the ingrained Puritan prejudices that were still held by most of the New Englanders of Hawthorne’s period, were used to accomplish this purpose. Hawthorne believed that only togetherness could save the Union in crucial political moments, and thus he was ready to forgive his compatriots many costly mistakes that were made during their common history. In what was often referred to as America’s “promised land, ” exactly this hereditary trait of Hawthorne’s generosity was paternally demonstrated in many cases. It also empowered Hawthorne to be the prime torchbearer of Joseph Conrad’s grandiose but slightly diabolical scheme of one’s “heart of darkness” existent in still not gingerly explored and densely populated New England of his times. To Hawthorne, a new “chosen people” has started to wage a bitter struggle for the assurance of its survival therein while permeating it with its all-pervading gloom.

The Henry James Review

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

Journal of American Studies, 1999

Nathaniel Hawthorne's view of his first American ancestors as belonging to a grim and gloomy race, impatient with human weaknesses and merciless towards transgressors, reflects a wide-spread popular attitude towards the Massachusetts Bay colonists. Indeed, Hawthorne's contribution to the construction and perpetuation of this view is not inconsiderable. Hawthorne frankly confesses to his own family descent from one of the “hanging judges” of the Salem witchcraft trials, and he does not spare any instance of persecution, obsession, or cruelty regarding the community led by his paternal ancestors. But Hawthorne does not stop at indicting his own family history; in a famous exchange with the president of Hartford College, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, shortly after the publication of The House of the Seven Gables (1851) Hawthorne is accused of blackening the reputation of another of New England's great colonial families. Hawthorne denied any knowledge of a “real” Pynchon family, l...

The Henry James Review, 1992

Studies in the Novel, 2014

2012

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s works, especially his late romances, display an innovative form of poetic economy which engages the philosophical thought resulting from some major advances of science in his time, incorporating, not so much the discoveries themselves, as the new paths they open in interpretation. Hawthorne’s case is particularly interesting not only because of this incorporation, but also due to the author’s conscious use of them coupled with his moral resistance to them. His critical view goes indeed against the general enthusiasm with which the majority of his contemporaries welcomed the advances in fields of science deemed dubious by him, and the moral and metaphysical issues they seemed to tackle. Hawthorne liked experimenting with the structure of his narratives. His works are often structured in clusters of passages or scenes overloaded with minute, even seemingly redundant, information, bordering on the superfluous, which are connected with each other in an elliptic and...