Abstract
The disquieting effects of Henry James’s literary supernaturalism in “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) can be suggestively teased out by considering the relation of the psychological and aesthetic concept of the uncanny to John Marcher’s quest to resolve his problematic masculinity. In the eyes of the world, Marcher wishes to pass as “a man like another,”1 yet in his imagination, he is “a man [un]like another,” unique in his terrific destiny. According to James’s preface to the New York edition, John Marcher is “another poor, sensitive gentleman,”2 a man whose “superstitious soul”3 apprehensively prefigures a fate of heroic and/or tragic dimensions, if he can only maintain the vigilant spirit that such an extraordinary encounter demands. Approaching Marcher’s quest for heroic masculinity through Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic investigation of the uncanny, along with Tzevtan Todorov’s concept of the literary uncanny, draws readers into a close encounter with James’s anxious, ambivalent relationship to supernaturalism.
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Notes
Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle,” in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 17 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), 61–127 (92).
Kelly Cannon, Henry James and Masculinity: The Man at the Margins (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 1.
Leland Person, Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 34–35.
Timothy Beneke, Proving Manhood: Reflections on Men and Sexism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 46–7.
David Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
Richard Hocks, Henry James: A Study of the Short Fiction (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990), 91.
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973). See pages 41–57.
See Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 32–33.
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 217–56 (241).
Ernst Jentsch, “Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen,” Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift, 22–23 (1906): 195–98, 203–5.
Kathy Justice Gentile, “Anxious Supernaturalism: An Analytic of the Uncanny,” Gothic Studies 2, no. 1 (2000): 23–38 (24–25).
Sigmund Freud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” in New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis, Standard Edition, vol. 22 (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 1–182 (62).
Henry James, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 199.
Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 269.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Random House, 1989), 267.
Elisabeth Badinter, XY: On Masculine Identity, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 1–2.
Jane Marie Todd, “The Veiled Woman in Freud’s Das Unheimliche,” Signs 1 (1986): 518–30.
Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
Robin Lydenberg, “Freud’s Uncanny Narratives,” PMLA 112, no. 5 (1997): 1072–86.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Beast in the Closet,” in The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 200–12.
Henry James, “The Jolly Corner,” in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 17 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), 435–85 (482).
Peter G. Beidler, Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James: “The Turn of the Screw” at the Turn of the Century (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 38.
Sheldon Novick, Henry James: The Mature Master (New York: Random House, 2007), 458.
Henry James, “Is there a Life after Death?,” in Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American Social Scene, ed. Pierre Walker (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 115–27 (119–20).
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© 2011 Anna Despotopoulou and Kimberly C. Reed
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Gentile, K.J. (2011). John Marcher’s Uncanny Unmanning in “The Beast in the Jungle”. In: Despotopoulou, A., Reed, K.C. (eds) Henry James and the Supernatural. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119840_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119840_6
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