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American Literature at the University of York.

H E N RY JA M E S Women and Realism

2 the actress and the orphan: henry james's art of loss, 1882–1895 3 teacups and love let ters: constance fenimore wo olson and henry james 4 realism and interior design: edith wharton and henry james epilo gue: 1892 biblio graphy

H E N RY JA M E S , Women and Realism

1 alice james and the p ortrait heroine

both in his vividly drawn female characters and in his relationships with female relatives and friends. Combining biography with literary criticism and theoretical inquiry, Victoria

CONTENTS introduction: ambivalent realism

Women were hugely important to Henry James,

coulson

V I C TO R I A C O U L S O N is a lecturer in

HENRY JAMES

Women and Realism

Coulson explores James’s relationships with three of the most important women in his life: his friends the novelists Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton, and his sister Alice James, who composed a significant diary in the last years of her life. These writers shared not only their attitudes to gender and sexuality, but also their affinity for a certain form of literary representation, which Coulson defines as ‘ambivalent realism’. The book draws on a diverse range of sources from fiction, autobiography, theatre reviews, travel writing, private journals and correspondence. Coulson argues, compellingly, that the personal lives and literary works of these four writers manifest a

v i c to r ia co ulso n

widespread cultural ambivalence about gender identity at the end of the nineteenth century.

Jacket illustration: Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau) by John Singer Sargent, 1883-4, oil on canvas, 82 ⅛in. x 43 ¼in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, 1916 (16.53). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

printed in the united kingdom

v i c t o r i a c o u l s o n is a lecturer in American Literature at the University of York

Introduction: ambivalent realism

I am grieved to hear that Mrs Stoddard is ill; why do literary women break down so, and . . . act so? It almost seems as though only the unhappy women took to writing. The happiest women I have known belonged to two classes; the devoted wives and mothers, and the successful flirts, whether married or single; such women never write. (Constance Fenimore Woolson to E. C. Stedman [1876?])1

The novel is the only developing genre and therefore it reflects more deeply, more essentially, more sensitively and rapidly, reality itself in the process of its unfolding. (Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel’)2

restive conservatives This book explores the structural interdependence of writing, gender and cultural authority within a small, yet suggestively representative, group of late nineteenth-century expatriate American writers. It focuses on the textually mediated relationships between Henry James (1843–1916) and three of his most important female friends: his sister Alice (1850–92), career hysteric and author of a significant diary, and the novelists Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–94) and Edith Wharton(1862–1937). At the heart of this book is the claim that the distinctively ambivalent private, professional and literary lives of Henry James, Alice James, Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton adumbrate the contours of inarticulate discontent within a conservative but increasingly restive, and beleaguered, cultural establishment. From the middle of the nineteenth century, both in Britain and the United States, the ‘Woman Question’ was a central focus of debate. In Britain topics such as marriage laws, property rights and 1 Downloaded from Cambridge Books Online by IP 91.240.2.62 on Fri Feb 19 10:42:41 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511485053.001 Cambridge Books Online ©©Cambridge University Press, 2009 Cambridge Books Online Cambridge University Press, 2016

Henry James, Women and Realism

suffrage, higher education and job opportunities, and female emigration, were increasingly debated from the 1860s,3 while in the United States rapid political and socio-economic change formed the background for significant upheavals in the family and in relations between women and men.4 ‘Even the most contented [women]’, Martha Vicinus argues, ‘could not help but be affected by the intense debate on the position of women that swirled around them’.5 By the 1880s, the legal structures of patriarchal tradition were being dismantled by feminist reforms through legislative acts which materially improved women’s status: the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 and the Guardianship of Infants Act in 1886.6 There was a major setback to the cause of female suffrage when the women’s amendment to the Reform Bill was defeated in 1884, but this served only to redouble the commitment and energy of women activists. ‘Though the term was not introduced until 1890 or so, the movement that came to be called ‘‘feminism’’ became large and outspoken during the second half of the 19th century’ and Elaine Showalter has described the period of 1880–1910 as ‘intensely feminist’.7 From the 1880s, discussion of the nature and social role of women became more radical with the emergence of that icon of cultural change, the New Woman. ‘[S]ingle, highly educated, economically autonomous’, the New Woman was both ‘a specific sociological and educational’ phenomenon and a provocative cultural symbol of female independence:8 a development reflected by the fact that between 1883 and 1900 more than a hundred novels were written about the New Woman.9 With her ‘simultaneous challenges to the gender-based division of labor, the ideal of the bourgeois home, and the hierarchy of class’, the New Woman embodied a serious threat to the Victorian social order;10 and she was joined in the cultural imaginary by such decadent figures as the homosexual and the aesthete, whose challenges to traditional constructions of masculinity were equally radical. At the fin de siècle, the conceptual foundations of separate spheres ideology were under attack; now the cultural avant-garde began to call into question the social construction of gender itself. Recent historians have borrowed George Gissing’s characterisation of the 1880s and 1890s as a period of ‘sexual anarchy’ to show that by the last decade of the century ‘the system of patriarchy was under attack not only by women, but also by an avant-garde of male artists, sexual

Downloaded from Cambridge Books Online by IP 91.240.2.62 on Fri Feb 19 10:42:41 GMT 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511485053.001 Cambridge Books Online ©©Cambridge University Press, 2009 Cambridge Books Online Cambridge University Press, 2016

Introduction: ambivalent realism

radicals, and intellectuals, who challenged its class structures and roles, its system of inheritance and primogeniture, its compulsory heterosexuality and marriage, and its cultural authority’.11 As Rita Felski remarks, the result of this new historiographic focus is that a period ‘once deemed . . . conservative . . . and still in the throes of Victorian ideology . . . now looks much more exciting, innovative, and quintessentially modern’.12 Other historians have stressed that these radical elements represented a tiny social minority. Yet, vociferous, eloquent, provocative, they nevertheless constituted a radical elite, a cultural avant-garde leagued against what Kate Millett calls ‘enormous odds of cultural resistance’.13 Discussing the situation in the United States, Diane Price Herndl stresses that the vast majority of women were not New Women: ‘Even at the height of the first women’s movement, only a very small percentage of women (around 4–5 percent) actually went to college’, and only half of those who graduated went on to pursue professional careers.14 Rather than bringing about direct, radical and widespread alterations in the patterns of everyday life, the avant-garde was applying significant pressure to the cultural establishment, making it not only self-conscious, but also self-consciously threatened by the prospect of change; and the result was a reactive hardening of prescriptive gender roles and an increased surveillance and policing of hegemonic norms. Whereas the mid-Victorian preoccupation with stereotypes of women may be seen as indicating a concern with the ‘imperfect enforcement’ of gender roles,15 the radical minority challenge to hegemonic social values at the fin de siècle produced a correspondingly more severe reaction from dominant elements of the culture. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s argument about the agonistic interdependence of socio-sexual deviance and medico-juridical surveillance, Showalter describes how ‘[a]t the same time that new opportunities for self-cultivation and self-fulfilment in education and work were offered to women, doctors warned them that pursuit of such opportunities would lead to sickness, sterility, and race suicide . . . From the 1870s onward, [a] generation of doctors . . . presented a constellation of rigid views on gender roles.’16 The second half of the nineteenth century thus presents a changing complex of contradictory and ambivalent attitudes in relation to the politics of gender. A widespread mid-Victorian debate about stereotypes of femininity

Henry James, Women and Realism

develops into a radical interrogation of the social construction of sexual difference; and as this social critique becomes more radical it becomes less acceptable to majority opinion, while retaining cultural centrality as a topic of political and artistic debate. There is thus a paradoxical tightening-up of hegemonic norms around the fin de siècle, as the ‘Woman Question’ becomes radicalised. It is in this context that the ‘ambivalent realists’ of this book claim their place as peculiarly symptomatic of their culture. With the exception of Alice’s passionate interest in Irish politics, Woolson, Wharton, and Alice James were social conservatives and never identified themselves with any form of avowed feminist thought; yet for each of these women there was a disjunction between a conscious commitment to conservative values, and the lived experience of the social and psychological disentitlements that nevertheless ensued. All three women found that compliance with the traditional imperatives of respectable femininity led not to social success and personal happiness, but rather to various forms of dissatisfaction and marginality. Alice James’s lifetime career of hysterical illness can be understood as an obedient response to the expectation that femininity be a kind of sexualised passivity; yet the paradoxical self-assertiveness with which Alice embraced this identity took her beyond social centrality and towards the marginality of chronic invalidism. Constance Fenimore Woolson achieved both popular and critical acclaim for her literary work, but she could never fully reconcile her intellectual ambition with her loyalty to conservative gender roles, and thus her authorial success inevitably figured to her as a sign of her failure to marry. Alice and Constance came to think of themselves as spinsters: a painful but perversely reassuring gender identity that clings to social legitimacy by asserting some relationship with sexually validated femininity – a failed relationship. In contrast, Edith Wharton made an outwardly successful Society marriage; but it was rumoured to be a mariage blanc, and it ended in divorce when her husband became mentally ill. Marriage failed to protect Edith from social shame; and, as did her affair with William Morton Fullerton, it ended by confirming her sense of the disappointments of sexual intimacy. Through their different experiences of the coercions and failed promises of femininity, these women came to develop a restless and never fully articulable ambivalence towards the social authority of gender expectations.

Introduction: ambivalent realism

Thus, seeking the traditional entitlements and rewards of femininity, each discovers herself in a kind of internal exile. Without ever consciously rebelling, each woman resists or complicates gender conventions enough to provoke the criticism of other, more compliant women, who came to stand as punitive embodiments of her own conservative loyalties. Both Alice and Edith – at different times – were objects of disapproval for Alice’s brother William’s wife, Alice Howe James (known in the James family, with rather pointed distinction, as Mrs Alice). Mrs Alice was deeply uncomfortable about Alice’s Boston marriage with Katharine Loring; and after Henry’s death, Mrs Alice refused to accept Edith Wharton as editor of a collection of Henry’s letters, on the grounds that she had heard that Mrs Wharton had been unfaithful to her husband. Constance’s younger sister Clara – a rather conventional woman, widowed, with a daughter – functioned as a similar figure of feminine reproof to her older sister. Constance also found herself besieged by a legion of phantasmatic female critics and rivals: the wives of the literary men with whom Constance corresponded throughout her writing life, whether these women actually existed or not (for the unmarried Henry James, Constance repeatedly evoked ‘a sweet young American wife’17). For his part, Henry James’s attitude towards heterosexual masculinity was vexed and complex: his compliance with the social imperatives of masculinity is problematised at every point by a profound imaginative kinship with women, an affiliative communion with feminine structures of subjectivity that is unparalleled elsewhere in the work of nineteenth-century male writers; and recent scholarship has charted his emotional – and possibly physical – resistance to male heterosexuality. Henry James’s queer selves have been emerging into critical daylight since Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s pioneering work on male homosocial desire in fiction and ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ (Between Men, 1985; Epistemology of the Closet, 1991). Today there is a fruitful absence of consensus as to what, exactly, it means to read James ‘as’ a ‘homosexual’, with claims ranging from positivist biographical assertions of physically enacted same-sex desire (such as Sheldon M. Novick’s The Young Master (1996), or, in more literary-critical mode, the collection edited by John R. Bradley, Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire (1999)) to the most subtle arguments about cultural modality and imaginative alliances

Henry James, Women and Realism

(a suggestive recent example being Eric Haralson’s Henry James and Queer Modernity (2003)). These various works represent a salutary turn in Jamesian studies from an unexamined orthodoxy of presumptive heterosexuality (which coexisted oddly with the equally prevalent feeling that James’s masculinity was somehow not quite right) to the current climate of critical debate in which the only point of agreement is that when we think of James and sexuality we can, often, profitably chercher l’homme. This book does not aim to articulate a queer James: my focus is on the structures of social identity which, though invariably bound up with the construction and experience of sexuality, can most usefully be thought of in terms of gender. Clearly this is nothing more than a pragmatic distinction; to quote Haralson, whose own work explores in depth the political function of the ‘sex/gender regime’, ‘James’s consistent and ever more subtly emphatic writing against what seems to be primarily norms of gender identification and enactment cannot help but assail norms of sexuality as well.’18 My decision to leave open the question of the relations between feminine subject-positions and male homosexual desire may – I hope – enable a productive ambivalence in the reader at the same time as it honours James’s own fertile equivocations. This book is, among other things, an intervention in the increasingly sophisticated discussion of the gender politics of James’s writing and the work of gender in the construction of Jamesian subjectivity (there is a useful ambiguity here – to which I turn later – which puts into question the boundaries between James ‘himself’, and his characters, and his texts). James has encountered some famously hostile readings in the past two decades by critics who have condemned various aspects of his on- and offpage dealings with women; the most influential of the inaugural attacks was Alfred Habegger’s vilification in Henry James and the ‘Woman Business’ (1989). Habegger describes ‘Henry James’s appropriation, masterly and distorting, of American women’s fiction’, and while he may suggest that the focus of his attention will be ‘the interaction between [James] and a whole insurgent culture of female writers’, this quickly degrades to ‘chronicl[ing] the long war that was fought . . . between him and the women’, and builds to the assertion that ‘James’s fiction embodies a covert act of force directed against women’.19 Habegger’s sustained anger about the simultaneous exploitation and marginalisation of

Introduction: ambivalent realism

women’s art and cultural experience stands as an honourable refutation of the proposition that men cannot be feminists. But the target of Habegger’s critique is profoundly misjudged, and can be justified only through a critical deformation that leads to such tone-deaf claims as that The Portrait of a Lady (1881; 1908) engineers Goodwood’s kiss to compel Isabel’s return to Osmond, or that The Bostonians (1886) devotes itself to the recapture of Verena and her rendition to the heroic Ransom. Such readings repudiate the complexity and ambivalence of James’s fictions, erasing the anguish and the solidarity that are persistently tangible at these scenes of feminine struggle and which make it possible to apprehend Verena’s marital extinction as an implicit tragedy and Isabel’s ostensible capitulation as almost her first act of strategic resistance after a lifetime of unconscious collaboration with the agents of her defeat.20 In marked contrast, some of the most attractive recent work on James has sought to emphasise the emotional and political possibilities of his writing. In her Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure (2002), Tessa Hadley argues that it is James’s ‘erotically polymorphic’ imagination that makes possible his ‘deep and sympathetic treatment of women’, while ‘[his] freedom from ‘‘definitional frames’’ of hetero- and homosexuality gives him [a] special purchase on the whole urgent business of gender definition and gender identity in his society’.21 In a similarly optimistic vein, Jonathan Freedman suggests that James’s fiction perceives the ‘tragic . . . entanglements of human intimacy’ as open to transformation by virtue of their frailty: ‘And that remaking, for James, is the utopian point of the exercise – one that projects the making of social value through and well beyond the nineteenthcentury nuclear family . . . and hence foreshadows new possibilities of relation whose lineaments we are only now beginning to discover.’22 Yet as they honour the pleasures of the Jamesian text, construing a vision of James ‘liberat[ing] himself to step over the boundaries . . . into the open space outside’ and of the ‘utopian potential’ of his fictional project,23 these critics occlude the anxiety and violence in James’s fictional world; they look away from the ‘gleam of [the] bare blade’ that ‘passe[s] across [Maggie’s] vision ten times a day’ (GB 305), and close their ears to Charlotte’s silent scream as she is led into exile by Adam, a cord looped around her beautiful neck. For James, and for his closest

Henry James, Women and Realism

female friends, ‘the elation of liberty and the pain of exclusion [are] indistinguishably mingled’ (PL 24): inner marginality offers pleasure at a high price, and the political potential of their experience is both generated and constrained by their intimacy with the punitive effects of power. This book proposes that James can best be understood as both subject to, and the compelling artist of, a potent ambivalence about the social authority of conservative gender patterns. Neither condemnation of James’s ‘elusive male authoritarianism’,24 which fails to engage with the resistant potential of cross-sex affiliations and imaginative community, nor overly utopian readings that wishfully underestimate the overbearing authority of culture, offer a sufficiently nuanced perspective on James from which to apprehend the psychological and aesthetic complexity of his work. ‘[I]t wouldn’t be thinkable except as free and wouldn’t be amusing except as controlled’:25 this is the bind in which ambivalent realism finds its generative force, its constrained and unquenchable energy. This book explores the imbrication of cultural boundaries and resistant subjectivity, reading the lives of Henry and Alice James, Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton, as the subtle and restless testing of limits – as the creative process of negotiating with the cage. For these late nineteenth-century figures drew together not only in their shared uneasiness towards dominant patterns of gender identity – and, on James’s part, a long imaginative affiliation with women – but also in their affinity for a certain form of textual representation, which I term ‘ambivalent realism’. ‘Ambivalent realism’ is a mode of representation characterised by the productive equivocation of its semiotic structures; it is, therefore, especially hospitable to the expression and negotiation of ambivalence towards authority. The book examines these writers’ idiosyncratic textual practices in relation to their social modes of being, to map out the structural kinship between contemporaneous forms of femininity and of realist representation. All four writers found in ambivalent realism a way of negotiating their muffled restiveness and self-division; their uncertain sense of failure and reprieve; their conflicting impulses towards complying with, and resisting, authority. Ambivalent realism is generated by, and covertly explores, the failures of ideology: the flaws and gaps in the texture of social consensus, the disjunctions between conscious conservatism and the lived experience of marginality.26

Introduction: ambivalent realism

The ambivalent realists thus constitute a social, emotional and aesthetic community of interest, whose kinship stems from much more than mere geographic or social proximity. As academic perspectives change, it has become at once more thinkable to align James’s work with that of others, and very much less acceptable to explore the work of Woolson or Wharton in relation to James’s. Chapter 3 discusses in detail the traditional construction – within James studies – of Constance Fenimore Woolson as thwarted spinster admirer of the cavalier Henry: in reaction, Woolson specialists are understandably reluctant to cede James any more of the limelight, particularly if this means implying significant relationships between Woolson’s literary work and his.27 The notable exception is Lyndall Gordon’s A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (1998), with which my work shares a foundational perception of the importance of women’s experience to James’s writing. Gordon reads James’s life and work in the light of his relationships with Minny Temple and Constance Fenimore Woolson, to argue that James exploited his special capacity for intimacy with brilliant, marginal women in order to recreate real people as fictional characters. Having transmuted these vulnerable pioneers into icons of the Jamesian imaginaire, James turned his back on their real-life avatars, eluding their expectations of continuing emotional involvement. Gordon’s book forms a major contribution to the biographical study of James, Temple and Woolson (indeed, it is the first extended account of Woolson’s life); it is a tour de force of empathetic lifewriting – imaginative, scrupulous and compelling. But Gordon’s conviction of James’s culpability leads her to a misreading of his relationship with Woolson, whom she perceives far too simply as a victim. While apprehending the creative importance of the Woolson-James relationship to each of its participants, A Private Life of Henry James does not recognise the psychological complexity of their intersubjective collaboration. From a periodising perspective, the more unexpected inclusion here may be Edith Wharton, who is considered by much recent criticism to belong to the post-James generation of the early modernists – a perspective often aligned with the rescuing of Wharton from her traditional role as a semi-amateur sub-Jamesian whose work at its best offers an unsubtle reprise of the Master’s. Millicent Bell deprecates the tradition of criticism in which Wharton’s ‘literary

Henry James, Women and Realism

sophistication was often confused with a supposed resemblance of her art to that of the most sophisticated of American writers, Henry James’, and argues instead that ‘resemblances [are] less significant than the differences’.28 There is a valuably corrective force in the view of Wharton as a writer working in the era of modernism whose later fictions engage thoughtfully with some of the characteristic preoccupations of the radical experimentalists of the 1920s and 1930s; but we lose an important sense of Wharton’s distinctive cultural ambivalence if we elide either the traditionalism of her overt political commitments or the resilient circumspection of her textual dissent. Further, my decision to include Wharton with writers born twenty years before her is grounded in my sense of the powerful transitionality of the late nineteenth century, a period in which Victorian textual practices – as much as social forms – were uneasily breeding their own critiques. This book shares with Haralson’s Henry James and Queer Modernity an animating perception of the significant links and connections between the most complex, questioning writers of the 1870s and 1880s, and the literature of the subsequent halfcentury; as Haralson writes of his chosen group (Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, James, and Gertrude Stein), ‘[w]hat differentiates the work of these American authors from most of their predecessors is their alert receptivity to [the] queerness . . . that modern life casts up: a receptivity – sometimes despite powerful internal resistance – . . . to modernity itself’.29 With Haralson and with other recent revisionists,30 I want to resist what Ann Ardis calls ‘classic modernist ‘‘narratives of rupture’’’31 which imagine a violent birth for modernism from the repudiated body of nineteenth-century literary forms. This book implies rather that modernism has its roots, its auguries, its restless beginnings in the expatriate lives of the ambivalent realists and in their work, with its disavowable estrangement from the status quo; its anxious, alert apprehension of change; and its discovery of feminine experience as a synonym for the resisting self which would eventually issue in the liberation of the unconscious by modernism. But while Haralson views James as an ambivalent prophet whose work could best begin to speak to a later generation of selfconsciously ‘modern’ writers and subjects, I want to show that the textually mediated relationships between Alice and Henry James,

Introduction: ambivalent realism

Woolson and Wharton suggest the tangible contours of conservative resistance active within their own culture. ‘Ambivalent realism’ is a usefully double term which articulates both the distinctiveness of this textual practice – not all nineteenth-century realisms are ambivalent; or at least, not all are as fundamentally equivocal as is this mode – and, at the same time, its aesthetic and cultural centrality: this is a very significant ‘dialect’ within the broader linguistic range of nineteenth-century narrative representation, and it adumbrates an uneasy apprehension of the semiotic revolutions to come. And there is a corresponding value in naming these writers as ‘ambivalent realists’: the Jameses, Woolson and Wharton constitute a substantial, coherent and richly creative community, yet this small group combines distinctiveness with a wider typicality, their full significance coming into focus only in relation to the broader cultural context in which they occupied a paradoxical position of marginality and expertise.32 Mikhail Bakhtin called the novel ‘the genre of becoming’.33 When we engage with this small group of inner marginals whose work draws its strength and originality from its authors’ unresting ambivalence, we are encountering lives played out on the internal edges of a culture, where subjectivity and representation alike participate in the difficult, alluring process of change. the realist sign He got up as he spoke and walked to the chimney, where he stood a moment bending his eye, as if he had seen them for the first time, on the delicate specimens of rare porcelain with which it was covered. He took up a small cup and held it in his hand; then, still holding it and leaning his arm on the mantel, he pursued: ‘You always see too much in everything.’ . . . Madame Merle kept her eye on her cup . . . ‘I’ve seen better what you have been to your wife than I ever saw what you were for me. Please be very careful of that precious object.’ ‘It already has a wee bit of a tiny crack,’ said Osmond dryly as he put it down . . . After he had left her she went, the first thing, and lifted from the mantelshelf the attenuated coffee-cup in which he had mentioned the existence of a crack; but she looked at it rather abstractedly. ‘Have I been so vile all for nothing?’ she vaguely wailed. (Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881; 1908), 524–5)

When we read realism, we become used to encountering objects which have a physical, commonsense reality within the world of the text, and which at the same time bear a great weight of semiotic

Henry James, Women and Realism

importance. Madame Merle’s cracked coffee cup is one of many ‘real’ objects which adorn her Roman apartment, yet we have no difficulty in accepting it as a sign, not merely of Serena Merle’s fashionable collection of bibelots, but of a whole sphere of flawed happiness and disappointment and betrayal. To read realism, we learn to negotiate a world in which objects glow or loom with the promise, or the threat, of a meaning beyond their mere material substance. This dual structure of significance is one of the most characteristic features of realist narrative, which plays on the signifying relation between the (fictional) object-world (which we may think of as the world of the signifier) and the sphere of novelistic meanings (the realm of the signified). At the theoretical heart of this book is the structuralist conception of the linguistic sign as a functional union of a signifier and a signified. For Ferdinand de Saussure, who first used these terms, the signifier is a sound pattern and it is linked by the linguistic sign to the signified, which is a concept.34 Central to Saussure’s scheme is the idea that the relation between the signifier and the signified has no inherent or essential value: ‘The link between [signifier] and [signified] is arbitrary. Since we are treating a sign as the combination in which a [signifier] is associated with a [signified], we can express this more simply as: the linguistic sign is arbitrary.’35 ‘Arbitrary’ here means ‘conventional’ – ‘the [signifier] is unmotivated: that is to say arbitrary in relation to its [signified], with which it has no natural connexion’.36 The sign thus functions purely because it participates in a system of culturally understood signs, all of which are composed of arbitrary unions of signifiers and signifieds. There is, in Saussure’s analysis, no functional significance in the signifier/signified relation except that of agreed equivalence.37 I use the terms ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’ throughout this book, but I have modified them in order to shape a new understanding of ambivalent realist representation. Whereas Saussure is analysing the most fundamental structures of language to theorise the signifying relations between sound patterns and abstract concepts, these terms are used here to address a different level of meaning: that at which the signifier/ signified contrast can distinguish between the literal and the metaphorical valences of the linguistic sign – between Madame Merle’s chipped coffee cup and the life that has ‘dried up [her] tears’ (PL 522).

Introduction: ambivalent realism

This book problematises the hostile diagnosis of the political function of realism as elaborated by later structuralists, perhaps most influentially in Roland Barthes’s discussion of ‘the reality effect’: Semiotically, the ‘concrete detail’ is constituted by the direct collusion of a referent and a signifier; the signified is expelled from the sign, and along with it, of course, there is eliminated the possibility of developing a form of the signified, that is, the narrative structure itself . . . This is what might be called the referential illusion. The truth behind this illusion is this: eliminated from the realist utterance as a signified of denotation, the ‘real’ slips back in as a signified of connotation; for at the very moment when these details are supposed to denote reality directly, all that they do, tacitly, is signify it . . . It is the category of the ‘real’, and not its various contents, which is being signified; in other words, the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent, standing alone, becomes the true signifier of realism. An ‘effet de réel ’, (a reality effect) is produced, which is the basis of that unavowed ‘vraisemblance’ which forms the aesthetic of all the standard works of modernity. This new ‘vraisemblance’ . . . arises . . . from an intention to alter the tripartite nature of the sign so as to make the descriptive notation a pure encounter between the object and its expression. The disintegration of the sign – which seems in fact to be the major concern of modernism – is indeed present in the realist enterprise, but in a somewhat regressive manner, since it is accomplished in the name of referential plenitude[.]38

In Saussure’s analysis there is no relation between the signifier and signified except one of arbitrary linguistic union – the sign – which makes sense because a culture agrees to understand it. In Barthes’s analysis of the realist sign, on the other hand, there is something much more complicated going on in the potent relation between the form and the content of the text’s representational structures. ‘Would you mind shutting the window, my dear?’ said Lady Macleod, seating herself stiffly on one of the small ugly green chairs. She had been educated at a time when easy-chairs were considered vicious, and among people who regarded all easy postures as being so; and she could still boast, at seventy-six, that she never leaned back.39

Barthes’s charge against the ‘reality effect’ is that realist discourse claims to eliminate the signified in favour of the referent (that is, extratextual reality), while in fact it exploits the illusion of referentiality to smuggle in a covert signified. That is, realism offers the illusion of a clear window on to the (fictional) world at the very moment that its representational structures are most powerfully

Henry James, Women and Realism

constructing that ‘reality’. The ugly green chairs in Alice Vavasor’s drawing room do not seem to be standing for anything except themselves: their ugliness does not indicate Alice’s temperament, their colour does not represent the emotional ambience of the scene, and Lady Macleod’s straight-backed posture claims only the most modest symbolic function, testifying to nothing more than her cultural vintage and her conventional ‘uprightness’. Yet Barthes would argue that it is precisely this apparent literalism, this seeming solidity and absence of the signifying function, that makes such moments in realist texts so ideologically potent: as we picture the little chairs and settle, to our own satisfaction, the exact shade of green velvet which Alice and her aunt might find displeasing, we are succumbing to the text’s masterful selfeffacement, forgetting the work of culture in the pleasure of the reality effect. For Barthes, realism is a strategy for disguising the extent to which bourgeois ‘reality’ is ideologically produced: realism is the way in which ideology both reproduces and conceals itself, reproduces itself by concealing itself. As we linger on the velvet (which, in the mind’s eye of this reader, is yellowish-green and slightly ridged in texture), we pay tribute through our oblivion to the technical mastery of the text, to the semiotic authority that Anthony Trollope creates by rendering invisible the representational work of the narrative. Because Alice’s chairs do not denote a signified of character or ambience, they can connote a powerfully absorbing image of ‘reality’ whose ideological effect depends on the disavowed relation between signifier and signified, producing the subliminal impression that Alice and her aunt (and Trollope’s mid-Victorian bourgeois readers) inhabit a world which is somehow naturally there. There is thus in realism a perfect coincidence of form and content, message and mode; it could be called ‘performative’ insofar as it enacts itself, reproducing itself in mirrored form between the planes of act and statement, being and saying. Realism, in this view, is in some sense a neurotic mode, condemned to reproduce infinitely its own conditions of production. (We do not know who made the green chairs, nor in what conditions; and the text that supplies them to us is correspondingly invisible in its representational mode of production.) For Barthes, the ‘arbitrariness’ of the sign has become a myth whose ideological power resides in the denial of the insidious semiotic collaboration between signifiers and signifieds, the form

Introduction: ambivalent realism

and content of realism. It is when Alice’s green chairs seem to be most innocent of symbolic function that their signifying effect is most powerful, smuggling into the Trollopian drawing room the signifieds of a whole uncontested culture.40 We encounter more and less sustained versions of the reality effect throughout nineteenth-century narrative. (Indeed, it is difficult to think of a single nineteenth-century fiction that does not make use of this effect to some extent; the most radical prose experiments of modernism may be understood as attempts to imagine a literary form which does not draw on the illusion of reality as a deep source of pleasure and value. Yet even Ulysses (1922) is merely split between estrangement and the pleasures of the illusory real, the fine urine tang of those kidneys lingering despite the bravura demystifications of James Joyce’s novel.) What I want to draw attention to here is the way in which some forms of realism embrace the potential for ideological assertiveness in the disavowed relation between signifier and signified, while other writers – the ambivalent realists of this book – find in the structure of the realist sign a contestable space for the expression of resistance to dominant meanings. The cabin of Uncle Tom was a small log building, close adjoining to ‘the house,’ as the negro par excellence designates his master’s dwelling. In front it had a neat garden-patch, where, every summer, strawberries, raspberries, and a variety of fruits and vegetables, flourished under careful tending. The whole front of it was covered by a large scarlet bignonia and a native multiflora rose, which, entwisting and interlacing, left scarce a vestige of the rough logs to be seen. Here, also, in summer, various brilliant annuals, such as marigolds, petunias, four-o’clocks, found an indulgent corner in which to unfold their splendors, and were the delight and pride of Aunt Chloe’s heart.41

Entering Harriet Beecher Stowe’s flower garden, we encounter a masterly deployment of the reality effect to promote the most explicit political message of this crusading text. Beginning with the simplest gestures of description – Tom’s cabin is fictional, but we are to understand that this is how slaves’ cabins are liable to be when the master is humane; Uncle Tom (‘as the negro par excellence’) and his cabin are modestly representative of an extratextual reality – the passage modulates into a generalised homily on the flourishing of productive life ‘under careful tending’; and then it moves one step further into a much more focused and symbolically charged image

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of the interlaced flowers covering over the ‘rough logs’ of the slaves’ dwelling. These three sentences embody a stealthy progression from a relatively straightforward claim of realistic representativeness – ‘at best, this is how slaves’ cabins are’; via a demonstrative picture of good husbandry – ‘see the fruits and vegetables which result from careful tending’; towards a powerfully covert version of the reality effect, in which we are shown the harmonious entwisting of the ‘scarlet bignonia and [the] native multiflora rose’ without any avowed editorial gloss. Whereas the small log building was placed and determined by the authority of how things are, and the flourishing fruits and vegetables by the benevolent authority of human mastery, the bignonia and the rose seem to exist independently: they appear to have left behind the status of objects, occupying the position of subjects within the description, twining together as if spontaneously and seeming to obscure the unlovely edifice of slavery by inner volition alone. Finally, the passage eases back into a more cautious register, with another rather modest and generalised image of the ‘brilliant annuals’ which suggest the lively aesthetic sense of the excellent Aunt Chloe (and reaffirm the possibility of purely decorative ornamentation). Stowe’s novel wants us to believe and, more importantly, to feel, that slavery is wrong, and that it is wrong by virtue of the natural human capacity for interethnic community and mutual responsibility. Stowe uses the reality effect in order to create the subliminal impression that such community and interdependence are part of the natural order of the world. The passage works by seeming to move from the avowed persuasion of rhetoric to the unadorned persuasiveness of those entwined flowers, reality itself; from a representational technique which encourages the reader to recognise that she is listening to a sermon, to a technique which hopes to be overlooked in the flourishing harmony of the real. At the very moment, then, that the text is working hardest to construct an image of natural community, it is underwriting the power of that image with the implicit claim that such a meaning is essentially natural, a given of the world, beyond argument and beyond interpretation. The bignonia and the rose are to represent the natural order by not appearing to be doing any representing at all. Stowe’s text harnesses the ideological effect of the covert relationship between signifiers and signifieds to support the most overt message of the whole novel in a way that comes close to

Introduction: ambivalent realism

Barthes’s reality effect – even though the political content of Stowe’s novel might seem incompatible with the alleged conservatism of realist form. Barthes, after all, is describing a mode of representation which aims to naturalise the authority of the status quo, while Stowe’s novel is militantly opposed to a central feature of contemporary social organisation. However, the most fundamental attitude here is to do with power itself: the reality effect aims at naturalising both social and semiotic authority, and this is exactly what Stowe’s text is doing at the point at which the flowers of interethnic community entwine as if spontaneously before our eyes. Stowe’s political project opposes one feature of social organisation, but does so by suggesting – covertly – that slavery itself is opposed to the natural order of things. Stowe’s signifiers are loyal footsoldiers striving discreetly to produce a subliminal message of support for Stowe’s abolitionist signifieds. Vanderbank . . . gave a vague but expressive sigh. ‘She’s rather lovely, little Aggie . . . ; there’s the young lady.’ He pointed to an object on one of the tables, a small photograph with a very wide border of something that looked like crimson fur . . . ‘At Naples they develop early. She’s only seventeen or eighteen, I suppose; but I never know how old – or at least how young – girls are, and I’m not sure . . . She gave me the portrait – frame and all. The frame is Neapolitan enough, and little Aggie is charming.’ Then Vanderbank subjoined: ‘But not so charming as little Nanda.’ ‘Little Nanda? – have you got her?’ The old man was all eagerness. ‘She’s over there beside the lamp – also a present from the original.’ [chapter break] Mr Longdon had gone to the place – little Nanda was in glazed white wood. He took her up and held her out [.] (AA 36–7)

It would be a preternaturally acute reader who on first eavesdropping on the vague, coyly oppressive dialogues that constitute most of The Awkward Age found herself able to notice and wonder at this pair of photograph frames – or who managed to remember them in the hysterical denouement of the story’s climactic chapters (when her attention is likely to be consumed by the lurid symbolic implications of that ‘French novel in blue paper’ as it burrows obscenely beneath Aggie’s skirts (275)). James’s photograph frames – like Stowe’s flower garden – exploit the difference between signifiers and signifieds to disguise the presence in the text of symbolic meaning. But whereas Stowe’s signs use the covert signified to promote the explicit message of the text, and thus create a harmonious semiotic assemblage which communicates a

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confident embrace of rhetorical authority, the photograph frames covertly produce and express disharmony, both in the world of the text and in the reader’s relationship with that textual world. There is a demonstrative disjunction between the unexceptionable initial appearance, and the later significance, of James’s ambivalent signs: in readerly retrospect, the metaphorical potency of the photograph frames is shamingly frank. How could we miss them: Aggie’s luxuriant border of crimson fur and the protective frozen virginity of Nanda’s ‘white wood’? At first sight, the red frame is unobjectionable. Aggie is from Naples, so we are given to understand that the crimson fur signifies nothing except the most banal and enjoyably recognisable token of southern European cultural difference; the frame seems to be making only a light pretence of strangeness that is actually well domesticated within accepted social and epistemological boundaries. But as the text nears conclusion with the revelation that Aggie is utterly ‘corrupt’ – that she is sexually unbounded and uncontrollable – the red fur begins to be comprehensible as an urgently sexual symbol whose significance was repressed but present from the reader’s earliest engagement with the world of the text. Whereas Stowe’s signs build subliminal affirmation into the signifying structures of her fiction, James uses the difference between overt and covert meaning to encode conflict within representation, structuring the text as a site of resistance to semiotic authority. Stowe’s signs enact a naturalised relationship between signifiers and signifieds to mirror the notion of a natural harmony between blacks and whites; James, on the other hand, builds temporal difference into the reader’s experience of signs in order to problematise the relations between symptoms and meanings, demystifying the ideological fiction of society as benevolent custodian and femininity as virginal innocence. The example of the photograph frames is a tiny embedded parable, a miniaturised allegorical figure troping the text’s concern with the social and psychological frames that produce and delimit interpretation, in particular the formation and analysis of young women who come to stand in this novel as exemplary victims of hermeneutic attention. It is a parable layered with equivocations: framing is a suggestively ambiguous project, open to interpretation as protection or confinement, as a sealing-off or a boxing-in. Moreover, there is some uncertainty as to the agent of

Introduction: ambivalent realism

the framing: Mitchy and Mr Longdon are able to possess, display and compare the young women as objects within their frames, but these photographs, and these young women, are signs which resist simple subordination to the semiotic projects of those seeking to frame them for consumption. Both pictures and people, signifiers and signifieds, the photographs’ objectness is tempered with subjectivity: Aggie, at least, is supposed to have given Mitchy her frame as well as her photograph, which implies some collaboration between a young woman who has chosen to display herself in crimson fur, and the text which proffers it to the reader, versus the explicit, commonsense level of the plot in which the only people with power to judge are complacent men in a late-night conclave. Thus the text elaborates a troubling but productive conflict between first and second readings; between conscious and unconscious meanings; between the reader’s naturalised respect for the masculine interpreters in the text and her nascent alliance with Aggie’s (admittedly compromised) resistance to their hermeneutic authority: and these dynamic, interdependent struggles find their most fundamental form in the ambivalent relation between signifiers and signifieds. In ambivalent realism meaning comes into being in the contestable space between the literal and the metaphorical valences of signs. This generative distinction surfaces under many names in the course of the book: outer appearance and inner meaning; public and private; ideology and resistance; past and future; parents and children; facts and fiction; obligations and possibilities; experience and desire; origins and exile; home and abroad. public writers, private selves? This book is neither pure literary criticism nor pure biography, which reflects its central interest in the constitutive relationship between subjectivity and representation in ambivalent realism. ‘Henry James’ is not a biographical secret hidden behind his public persona: we cannot find the ‘real’ Henry in his private texts, nor are his public texts mere façades. The realist subject comes into being through his or her negotiation of these contrasting textual zones; what creates realist meaning is the controlled proliferation of relationships between differentiated yet reactive semantic levels.

Henry James, Women and Realism

Of course, to assert that there is a productive, mutually determining relationship between the private self and the public writer is to meet with vociferous opposition from the ambivalent realists themselves: it is to articulate a paradoxical truth on which realism thrives, but which it cannot acknowledge. Henry, Alice, Constance and Edith are driven by an intense desire to write for a public readership, while at the same time experiencing an unrelenting anxiety about what they feel to be the risk of this public presence – psychological vulnerability. What each fears is that, through their relationship with their published texts, their private being may become public meaning. Yet somehow this anxiety strengthens the writer’s sense of the private self. Realist signs, realist texts and realist subjects are produced through the creative incompatibility of wanting to protect the self from the violation of being known, and at the same time sensing that it is through this risk that the self – the signified of textual or subjective meaning – comes into being. Edith Wharton writes as if the worst possible thing that could happen to her would be the reader’s breaching of her psychological privacy; so she designs her writing to be invulnerable (see Chapter 4). Yet during the early years of her adulthood and marriage she suffered psychosomatic illnesses which ceased once she established her literary career; in her autobiography she claims that she ‘had [ . . . ] no real personality of [her] own’ until the publication of her first book of stories (BG 868).42 Publishing one’s writing voluntarily sets up the possibility, or the idea of the possibility, that private being may become public meaning: for Edith, there is no sense of self in the absence of this risk. An earlier version of this paradox is evident in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s uncharacteristically outspoken disapproval of the public status of women writers. Believing in principle that women should be private, domestic and reticent, she is horrified by the idea of women writers as celebrities. She finds Ouida’s self-publicising behaviour painfully undignified, and she insists that her own private life has nothing to do with her published work. As she says, referring to W. D. Howells’s insistent requests that she should sit for a ‘medallion portrait’, ‘I do not at all think that because a woman happens to write a little, her face, or her personality in any way, becomes the property of the public.’43 But Constance’s whole life, with its difficulties and pleasures, as a woman independent of husband or family, is guaranteed by her

Introduction: ambivalent realism

writing; and moreover, despite her chronic loneliness, she chooses to arrange her life to suit her writing. She could return to her family home in Cleveland, to which she received regular invitations from her nephew; she could collaborate in her travel arrangements with her widowed sister and niece; she could even live alone in a permanent home in Europe. Any of these options would be considerably cheaper – and, for a woman who claimed to yearn for domestic stability, considerably less disconcerting – than the mobile, independent life that she actually chose. It is misleading to imagine, as she often claims, that Woolson has to write and publish in order to support herself; while her writing might have begun as a financial necessity, it became a passion and an uneasily congenial way of life (see Chapter 3). Far from tolerating the discomforts of publishing in order to support her private life, she arranges her private life to enable her to write fiction for a public readership. For her part, Alice James was so acutely ambivalent about the idea of a public textual presence that she wrote nothing more substantial than personal letters, despite her eager interest in intellectual debate, until she began her diary in 1889. Alice’s writing – discussed in Chapter 1 – was crippled by her nearinability to negotiate with the demands of social and semantic authority. Her diary is fuelled by a frustrating and frustrated combination of defeatism and pride; she communicates an implicit faith in her intellectual potential and possibilities, at the same moment as she insists that they are irrevocably wasted and lost. Her father and her two oldest brothers, always her favourites in the family, were figures of overpowering intellectual authority: writing as a public act of self-assertion was almost impossible for Alice, and yet her diary, as it develops, develops ambitions for a public audience. From 31st December 1890, the diary ceased to be private, in that Alice was now dictating her entries to Katharine;44 as she did so, her literary awareness of a wider audience increased. Paradoxically, as she embraces the prospect of her impending death, Alice seeks to live through her diary; she dictated a correction to the final entry on the day before she died. Thus Alice’s diary – that most ostentatiously private literary genre – forms the most pointed example of the conflictual, generative interplay between the ideas of publicity and privacy in the creation of ambivalent realism.

Henry James, Women and Realism

Ambivalent realism is a structure of meaning that is social, psychological and representational; it is neither possible nor useful to achieve a pristine separation of Woolson the regional story-writer from Constance the traveller, or James the playwright from Henry the son, or Wharton the novelist from Edith the hostess. Yet scholars have tended to do either criticism or biography, while using the other as a subordinate background or supplement without taking seriously the mutually constitutive and imbricated activities of each. An interesting example here is Richard Salmon’s Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (1997), which analyses precisely this ideological function of the public/private distinction in the mystified relationship between (realist) literature and late nineteenth-century capitalist modes of production. Salmon’s work offers a rigorous and sophisticated analysis of James’s ‘acute concern with the cultural space of authorship, and its movement across a shifting boundary between private and public spheres’, highlighting James’s ‘tension or ambivalence’ in relation to ‘the culture of publicity’; ‘it is clear’, Salmon argues, ‘that [James’s] seemingly hostile apprehension of this phenomenon in many ways contradicts the ‘‘fluidity’’ of his own fictional practices’.45 Yet Salmon’s treatment of James exclusively as a professional writer, with no attention to Henry in any ‘private’ relationship, could be seen as reproducing the pristine division that the book itself has analysed as an ideological formation. When we engage with late nineteenth-century subjects, we are negotiating with the citizens of a world in which the relationship between private experience and public performance was increasingly potent, volatile and contested. Rather than accept uncritically the emphatic protestations of the ambivalent realists that what they do in private has nothing to do with their public writings – James’s story ‘The Private Life’ (1892) is a particularly urbane expression of this idea – this book seeks to analyse the rhetorical and emotional power of the idea as deriving as much from fantasy as from ethics: from a fantasy whose ambivalence is a source of more, not less, imaginative force. Only relational, interdependently literary and biographical exploration can begin to engage with the realist mode in which representation and subjectivity are best understood as directly continuous semiotic phenomena. Consequently the book finds both its narrative structure and its hermeneutic focus in the complex interplay of

Introduction: ambivalent realism

writing and living; of meaning and being; of representations and subjectivities. Throughout the book, I refer to the four principals sometimes by their first, and sometimes by their second names. This departure from the literary-critical convention of impersonal formality is both a responsive gesture and a strategic decision, elicited by the public-private problematic at the heart of realist representation, and further challenging the counterproductive policing of the borders between the territories of biography and literary criticism. This is not a defence of programmatic inconsistency, nor of estrangement per se: I use first and second names with some care to evoke more and less ‘private’, more and less ‘public’ versions of the writerly self, within a conceptual framework which understands subjectivity and representation as interdependent. It is when the choice of first or second name is hardest to justify, or when there needs to be the most restless shuttling between private and public identities, that the decision to embrace ambivalence in addressing the book’s principals seems most productive, and – I hope – sympathetic to the equivocal lives of these writers. The book is structured chronologically by James’s life, from his childhood relationship with his sister Alice, through his middleaged ambivalence towards heterosexuality (played out in his relationship with Constance Fenimore Woolson), to his elderly embrace of his imagined readership (an attitude which underlay his vexed friendship with Edith Wharton). James is a figure who provides biographical continuity, but it should be clear that this narrative trajectory comes into being only through the elective affinities which form the central subject of the book. Henry James led me to these women, his social and literary selves both eagerly receptive of, and alertly reaching out towards, the patterns of meaning and being negotiated by his most intimate female friends. Henry met Edith first in Paris around 1887, but they did not begin to develop a friendship until Wharton’s literary career was beginning with her short story collection The Greater Inclination (1899) and her novel The Touchstone (1900). Henry and Constance met in Florence in 1880. Constance and Alice never met Edith – but the preoccupations which drew Edith and Henry into a long and superficially incomprehensible friendship are directly continuous with those that allied Henry with his rebarbative sister and his never-quite-lover. Chapter 2 is alone in its lack of a female

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companion, and it explores the instabilities of Henry’s self and the failures of James’s work in the absence of significant others (whether erotic, companionate or familial). For the ambivalent realists, art is a shared object of communion within a culture whose inner boundaries are shifting. In parallel fashion, by serving as the central figure of this book Henry James comes into focus as a transformative object for the women writers who sensed in his work a profound kinship with their own.