Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T01:15:55.202Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Henry James

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2012

Timothy Parrish
Affiliation:
Florida State University
Get access

Summary

Shortly after the Civil War, when Henry James (1843–1916) began publishing fiction, the endings of American novels changed. Whereas William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789), Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791), Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797), Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale (1822), James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) all end with tombstones, James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1), William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), and Abraham Cahan’s Yekl (1896) and The Imported Bridegroom (1898) end with troubled marriages. This shift from public memorial to the dynamics of a largely private relation between persons is not absolute, of course, and it is hard to make the immensely varied body of late nineteenth-century fiction fit any pattern at all. Nevertheless, it seems that a formula that once shaped fiction with extraordinary consistency has broken down and the sense of an ending has changed. In turn, a new sense of the novel emerges, one that Henry James, more than any other writer, brought into being.

At the close of Charlotte Temple, Charlotte’s father gestures toward her tomb as he addresses her seducer: “Look on that little heap of earth…. Look at it often, and may thy heart feel such true sorrow as shall merit the mercy of heaven.” The tomb – here only a mound of earth, since Charlotte has just been buried – creates a public monument out of a personal story; as tombstones so often do in early American novels, this grave has the effect of pulling outward and making legible a private story that nevertheless requires interpretation. Novels that graphically reproduce epitaphic inscriptions on the page – The Coquette, The Scarlet Letter – make out of their characters’ lives a text literally open to all; these figures pass on to the reader the task of interpreting, reflecting on, and remembering.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bersani, Leo, “The Jamesian Lie.” A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature, Boston, Little Brown, 1976, pp. 128–55.Google Scholar
Blair, Sara, Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Freedman, Jonathan, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture, Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Holland, Laurence B., The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1964.Google Scholar
McGurl, Mark, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Otten, Thomas J., A Superficial Reading of Henry James: Preoccupations with the Material World, Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Posnock, Ross, The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity, New York, Oxford University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Rivkin, Julie, False Positions: The Representational Logics of Henry James’s Fiction, Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic.” Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990. pp. 182–212.Google Scholar
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1976.Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Scarlet Letter, ed. Brian Harding and Cindy Weinstein (OxfordOxford University Press, 2007), p. 204Google Scholar
Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London, Verso, 1991), pp. 24–34Google Scholar
Susman, Warren, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York, Pantheon, 1984), pp. 271–85Google Scholar
Giddens, Anthony, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar
Gard, Roger (ed.), Henry James: The Critical Heritage (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 31Google Scholar
Levine, Lawrence W., Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 52–73Google Scholar
Harlow, Virginia, Thomas Sergeant Perry: A Biography and Letters to Perry from William, Henry, and Garth Wilkinson James (Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 1950), pp. 309–10Google Scholar
James, Henry, Washington Square, ed. Brian Lee (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986), p. 106Google Scholar
Poirier, Richard, “The Difficulties of Modernism and the Modernism of Difficulty,” Humanities in Society 1 (1978): 273Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Henry James
  • Edited by Timothy Parrish, Florida State University
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists
  • Online publication: 05 December 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139003780.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Henry James
  • Edited by Timothy Parrish, Florida State University
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists
  • Online publication: 05 December 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139003780.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Henry James
  • Edited by Timothy Parrish, Florida State University
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists
  • Online publication: 05 December 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139003780.007
Available formats
×