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Re-producing “James”: Marxism, Phallocentrism and “Washington Square”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Barbara Rasmussen
Affiliation:
Department of English Language and Literature, University of Birmingham, P.O. Box 363, Birmingham, B15 2TT, England.

Abstract

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Type
Notes and Comment
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

1 Henceforth cited as WS.

2 Bell, Ian F. A., “Money, History and Writing in Henry James: Assaying Washington Square,” in Bell, Ian F. A. (ed.), Henry James: Fiction as History (London & Totowa, N.J.: Vision and Barnes & Noble, 1984), II.Google Scholar Henceforth cited as Bell, , “Money, History and Writing.”Google Scholar

3 Bell, Ian F. A., “‘This Exchange of Epigrams’: Commodity and style in Washington Square,” journal of American Studies, 19 (1985), 68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Henceforth cited as Bell, , J.A.S.Google Scholar

4 Barthes, Roland, Mythologies (1957; trans. Lavers, A., St. Albans, 1973), cited in Bell, J.A.S., 5456.Google Scholar

5 Barthes, R., S/Z (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974), 9.Google Scholar

6 This in spite of Bell's concern, especially in “Money, History and Writing,” with “styles of writing.” He praises Leo Bersani's emphasis on James's concern with meaning as construction and the power relations implied by such construction (“Money, History and Writing,” 1314Google Scholar), yet Bell at no point questions the status of his own discourse. See 66–67 below for discussion of my own discourse in this respect.

7 Bell, , J.A.S., 58, footnote 31.Google Scholar

8 Bell, , J.A.S., 62, footnote 41.Google Scholar

9 Bennett, Tony, “The ‘Text in Itself’: A Symposium,” Southern Review, 17, 2 (07 1984), 122 (emphasis added).Google Scholar

10 Bennett, , 122–23.Google Scholar

11 Bennett, , 123.Google Scholar

12 Bell, , J.A.S., 67Google Scholar. The problematic relationship between Marxism and feminism has been explored in a number of recent texts, notably: Kuhn, A. & Wolpe, Anne Marie (eds.), Feminism and Materialism (London: RKP 1978)Google Scholar; Barrett, M., Women's Oppression Today (London: Verso, 1980)Google Scholar; Sargent, Lydia (ed.), The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, (London: Pluto Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Delphy, C., Close to Home (London: Hutchinson, 1984)Google Scholar. However, even more problematic and very little explored, as Kaplan, Cora has noted [see her “Pandora's Box: Subjectivity, Class and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism,” in Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Greene, G. & Kahn, C. (London: Methuen, 1985), 151Google Scholar, and her Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986)Google Scholar] is the relationship between Marxism, feminism and psychoanalysis which I broach here.

13 James, Henry: “Washington Square” and “The Portrait of a Lady,” ed. Shelston, A. (London: Macmillan, 1984).Google Scholar

14 For detailed definitions of these terms see Belsey, C.Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), 7084, 7–14Google Scholar. I am well aware of the problem of what Steve Neale has referred to as the “abstract text–subject relationship” associated with early formulations of the concept of the classic realist text (Steve Neale cited by Dave Morley, “Texts, readers, subjects” in Hall, S.Culture, Media, Language [London: Hutchinson, 1980], 163)Google Scholar. In using the concept here I am assuming, as C. Belsey does, that: “To argue that classic realism interpellates subjects in certain ways is not to propose that this process is ineluctable: on the contrary it is a matter of choice. But the choice is ideological: certain ranges of meaning (there is always room for debate) are ‘obvious’ within the currently dominant ideology, and certain subject-positions are equally ‘obviously’ the positions from which these meanings are apparent” (Critical Practice, 69).Google Scholar

15 “… the story moves inevitably towards closure which is also disclosure, the dissolution of enigma through the re-establishment of order … The hierarchy works above all by means of a privileged discourse which places as subordinate all the discourses that are literally or figuratively between inverted commas” (Belsey, , 70).Google Scholar

16 James, Henry, Washington Square (London: Macmillan, 1921), 12Google Scholar. Further references to this work appear in the text.

17 Freud, Sigmund, On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, ed. Richards, A. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), 126.Google Scholar

18 Bell, , J.A.S., 58, footnote 31 (emphasis added).Google Scholar

19 Bell, , J.A.S., 66.Google Scholar

20 Bell, , J.A.S., 68.Google Scholar

21 Rose, Jacqueline, “Introduction II”, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne, ed. Mitchell, J. & Rose, J. (London: Macmillan, 1982), 56.Google Scholar

22 Mitchell, & Rose, , 53 (emphasis added).Google Scholar

23 Freud, , On Metapsychology, 288–89.Google Scholar