Abstract
Roderick Hudson makes an example of its eponymous sculptor as a failed artist in order to promote, by contrast, its author as a model of artistic success. By scapegoating Roderick, the novel ingratiates itself with the community of readers of the Boston-based periodical, Atlantic Monthly, in which it first appeared, in serial form during 1875. From being a neophyte, James becomes an established author empowered to dispense death. The writing of sacrificial death exemplified by this early novel is not a one-off event, but continues to be central to James’s construction of his authorial position across his career.
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Notes
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), p. 130.
Roderick Hudson in Novels 1871–1880 (New York: Library of America, 1983), pp. 163–511
Richard Poirier, The Comic Sense of Henry James: A Study of the Early Novels (London: Chatto & Windus, 1960).
Kelly Cannon, Henry James and Masculinity: The Man at the Margins (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), p. 44.
Oscar Cargill, The Novels of Henry James (New York: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 26–7.
Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Richard Ellmann, ‘James Amongst the Aesthetes’ in Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire, ed. John R. Bradley (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 29–30.
My argument here is a response to comments on Roderick Hudson’s role in the development of James’s editorial policy for the New York Edition in Anthony J. Mazzella, ‘James’s Revisions’ in A Companion to Henry James Studies, ed. Daniel Mark Fogel (London: Greenwood, 1993), p. 312.
Henry James, The Other House (London: Hart-Davis, 1948), p. 206.
Geoffrey Moore, Introduction to Roderick Hudson, by Henry James (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 26.
Kieran Dolin, Fiction and the Law: Legal Discourse in Victorian and Modernist Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 27.
D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (London: Heinemann, 1921), p. 465.
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
Kevin Kohan, ‘James and the Originary Scene,’ Henry James Review 22 (2001), 229–38.
Lionel Trilling, ‘The Princess Casamassima’ in The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 69–101.
Julia Ward Howe, ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ Atlantic Monthly Feb. 1862, p. 145.
My discussion of Atlantic Monthly draws on Edward E. Chielens (ed.), American Literary Magazines: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (New York: Greenwood, 1986), pp. 50–7
Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines: 1850–1865 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 493–515
Ellery Sedgwick, The Atlantic Monthly 1857–1909: Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, ‘The Soldier’s Faith’ in The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes: His Speeches, Essays, Letters and Judicial Opinions, ed. Max Lerner (Boston: Little, 1943), pp. 18–25
William James, ‘The Moral Equivalent of War’ in The Moral Equivalent of War and Other Essays and Selections from Some Problems of Philosophy, ed. John K. Roth (London: Harper, 1971), pp. 3–16.
Eric Haralson, ‘Iron Henry, or James Goes to War,’ Arizona Quarterly 53 (1997), 41–2.
W. D. Howells, ‘A Foregone Conclusion,’ Atlantic Monthly July–Dec. 1874
Henry James, Rev. of A Foregone Conclusion,’ by W. D. Howells, The Nation, 7 Jan., 1875, pp. 12–13.
Henry James, ‘The Story of a Year’ in Complete Stories 1874–1884 (New York: Library of America, 1999), pp. 23–4.
Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Towards Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 109–16.
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© 2005 Andrew Cutting
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Cutting, A. (2005). Violence Ashamed: Sacrifice in Roderick Hudson. In: Death in Henry James. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230285996_2
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