Abstract
When Henry James delivered his commencement address, ‘The Question of Our Speech’, at Bryn Mawr College in 1905, he spoke on a subject that had preoccupied him from the beginning of his career. For 40 years, in England and America, he was an inveterate observer of cultural signs, including language. At clubs, hotels, dinner parties and country houses he listened to men and women talk; he noted the habits of speech of different social classes and made studies of American colloquialisms and Cockney dialect that guided him in portraying the characters of his 20 novels and more than a hundred short stories and novellas. The title of his four-part essay, ‘The Speech of American Women’, identifies what he considered the infallible index of a person’s culture. Speech that reveals the presence or absence of the moral and social virtues — restraint, self-control, modesty, powers of perception and imagination — shows in James’s fiction, as in Howells’s, the degree to which language reinforces or reflects the kinds of power men and women exercise in their private relationships and within the social order. Finally, James’s lifelong concern to define what is masculine and what is feminine in speech and writing reflects the preoccupation with the nature of sexual identity that informs his fiction and criticism throughout his career.
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Notes
William Dean Howells, Heroines of Fiction, 2 vols (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1901), II, 168, 164.
Notes and Reviews (Cambridge, Mass.: Dunster House, 1921), p. 116. Hereafter abbreviated NR, with page numbers given in the text. That James himself, in his early novels, frequently resorted to the hyperbole and sentimental clichés and epithets he condemned in women’s fiction is amply demonstrated by William Veeder, Henry James: The Lessons of the Master: Popular Fiction and Personal Style in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 22–35, 56–65 and passim.
Literary Reviews and Essays, ed. Albert Mordell (New York: Grove Press, 1957), p. 289. Hereafter abbreviated LRE, with page references given in the text.
French Poets and Novelists (London: Macmillan & Company, 1893), pp. 161, 181. Hereafter abbreviated FPN, with page references given in the text. For fuller discussion of James’s gender-biased criticism of George Sand, see Sarah B. Daugherty, ‘Henry James, George Sand, and The Bostonians: Another Curious Chapter in the Literary History of Feminism’, Henry James Review 10 (1989), 42–9.
The Future of the Novel, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), p. 40.
Margaret Fuller, ‘Woman in the Nineteenth Century’, The Writings of Margaret Fuller, selected and edited by Mason Wade (New York: Viking Press, 1941), p. 179.
For readings of Roger Lawrence as an exemplary, morally irreproachable guardian, see Robert Emmet Long, Henry James: The Early Novels (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983), pp. 21–2; J. A. Ward, The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James’s Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), pp. 68–70. Roger Lawrence emerges as a morally flawed and self-deluded character in Lee Ann Johnson, ‘A Dog in the Manger: James’s Depiction of Roger Lawrence in Watch and Ward, Arizona Quarterly, 29 (1973), 176; Leo B. Levy, ‘The Comedy of Watch and Ward’, Arlington Quarterly 1 (1968), 87. Alfred Habegger argues that James in making Roger Lawrence a prosaic, unromantic, self-effacing figure consciously rejected the aggressive masculine hero idealized in women’s novels. Henry James and the ‘Woman Business’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 75–80.
For James’s harsh criticism of the London stage and the speech of its leading actors, see The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama, 1872–1901, edited by Allan Wade (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1948), pp. 139–46 and passim.
The Collected Tales of Henry James, 12 vols, ed. Leon Edel (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1961–64), II, 346. Hereafter abbreviated CT, with volume and page references given in the text.
Leon Edel, Henry James: The Conquest of London: 1870–1881 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1962), pp. 106–13.
George Bishop, When the Master Relents: The Neglected Short Fiction of Henry James (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1988), p. 25.
S. Gorley Putt, Henry James: A Reader’s Guide (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 270.
Quoted in Jean Strouse, Alice James: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980), p. 206.
Letter of 25 July 1900, to James B. Pinker, Henry James Letters: 1895–1916, Vol. III, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 154–5.
E. A. Sheppard, Henry James and The Turn of the Screw (London: Auckland University Press, 1974), pp. 54, 57.
Page references in parentheses are to Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: A Study in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Ross C. Murfin (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989).
The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York: George Brazillier, 1955), pp. 93, 310.
Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 228; Roslyn Jolly, Henry James: History, Narrative, Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 99.
Anne Robinson Taylor, Male Novelists and Their Female Voices: Literary Masquerades (Troy, NY: Whitston Publishing Company, 1981), p. 185.
Oscar Cargill, ‘Henry James as Freudian Pioneer’, A Casebook on Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’, ed. Gerald Willen (New York: Crowell, 1960), p. 237.
Tony Tanner, The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 325, 324. Extended analyses of The Sacred Fount as a parable of the creative process include Susanne Kappeler, Writing and Reading in Henry James (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 118–59; Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), pp. 167–94; Donna Przybylowicz, Desire and Repression: The Dialectic of Self and Other in the Late Works of Henry James (University, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1986), pp. 48–87.
Jean Frantz Blackall, ‘The Experimental Period’, A Companion to Henry James Studies, ed. Daniel Mark Fogel (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993), p. 168.
James’s satiric portrayal of Mrs Stringham is analysed by Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 207–9.
The Bostonians (New York: Dial Press, 1945), p. 24. Hereafter abbreviated B, with page references given in the text.
Lillian Faderman argues that Verena has more to gain with Olive than with Basil Ransom, that during her months with Olive she is ‘happy, active, fruitful’. ‘Female Same-Sex Relationships in Novels by Longfellow, Holmes, and James’, New England Quarterly, 51 (September 1978), 309–32.
Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1984), p. 80.
W. R. Martin, ‘The Use of the Fairy Tale’, English Studies in Africa, 2 (1959), 98–109. For similar views of Ransom as the hero who rescues Verena from a morbid relationship, see Charles Anderson, ‘James’s Portrait of the Southerner’, American Literature, 27 (November 1955), 309–31; Robert Emmet Long, ‘The Society and the Masks: The Blithedale Romance and The Bostonians’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 19 (1968), 105–22; Theodore C. Miller, ‘The Muddled Politics of Henry James’s The Bostonians’, Georgia Review, 26 (1972), 336–46.
Graham Burns, ‘The Bostonians’, Critical Review, 12 (1969), 45–60. See also Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 101–53; Michael Kreyling, ‘Nationalizing the Southern Hero: Adams and James’, Mississippi Quarterly, 34 (1981), 383–402. Elizabeth McMahan, ‘Sexual Desire and Illusion in The Bostonians’, Modern Fiction Studies, 25 (1979), 241–51.
The American Scene, edited and with an introduction by W. H. Auden (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946), pp. 67, 25, 127, 167.
Ibid., pp. 65, 64.
Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 69.
The transposition or fusion of gender roles in James’s fiction has been extensively analysed by a number of critics. See, for instance, Lynda S. Boren, Eurydice Reclaimed: Language, Gender, and Voice in Henry James (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989), pp. 21–39 and passim; David McWhirter, Desire and Love in Henry James: A Study of the Late Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), especially pp. 49–53, 59–63; Julie Olin-Ammentorp, ‘ “A Circle of Petticoats”: The Feminization of Merton Densher’, Henry lames Review, 15 (1994), 38–54; Philip Sicker, Love and the Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Henry James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 120 ff.
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© 1997 Elsa Nettels
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Nettels, E. (1997). Masculine and Feminine in James’s Criticism and Fiction. In: Language and Gender in American Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11406-1_4
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