¹ The following table exhibits the basic principle at work in the construction of characters in tales from 1877 to the major-phase period:

Work	The Unattached Soul	The Aggressor Attached to the New or the Modern	The Aggressor Attached to the Old
The American	Claire de Cintré	Christopher Newman	The Bellegardes
“Madame de Mauves”	Madame de Mauves	Longmore	M. de Mauves
The Portrait of a Lady	Isabel Archer	Caspar Goodwood	Warburton; Mme Merle and Osmond
The Europeans	Gertrude Wentworth, Felix Young	The Wentworths	The Baroness
The Reverberator	Francine Dosson and	The Dosson family,	The Probert family
	Gaston Probert	George Flack
The Bostonians	Verena Tarrant	Olive Chancellor	Basil Ransom
The Princess Casamassima	Hyacinth Robinson	Diedrich Hoffendahl, Paul Muniment, et al.	Anastasius Vetch, Amanda Pynsent et al.
“The Aspern Papers”	Tina Bordereau	The “publishing scoundrel”	Julia Bordereau
The Spoils of Poynton	Fleda Vetch	Owen Gereth	Mrs. Gereth
The Awkward Age	Nanda Brookenham	Mrs. Brook	Mr. Longdon
The Ambassadors	Lambert Strether	Mrs. Newsome	Mme de Vionnet
The Golden Bowl	Maggie Verver	Adam Verver	Prince Amerigo

The list might be much extended. There are, it goes without saying, complexities in structure that the paradigm cannot begin to suggest. But the formula of enslaver-aggressor versus free (i.e., divided) spirit persists throughout.

² The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (Baltimore: Penguin, 1965), pp. 137, 46. All subsequent references to Laing are to this edition.

³ The Novels and Tales of Henry James, 26 vols. (New York: Scribners, 1907–17). All subsequent references to James's work are to this edition unless otherwise indicated.

⁴ To Edmund Gosse in 1896 James writes: “But I stay in solitude. I don't see a creature. That, too, dreadful to relate, I like” (The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock, New York: Scribners, 1920,1, 248). To Mrs. John L. Gardner he writes: “I return to England to enter a monastery for the rest of my days”; and again, he says he will get away from London “as quickly as possible into the country—to a cot beside a rill, the address of which no man knoweth” (i, 239).

⁵ F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock, ed., The Notebooks of Henry James (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1947), p. 311.

⁶ James was particularly struck by “the interest [his father] shed for us on the whole side of the human scene usually held least interesting—the element, the appearance, of waste which plays there such a part and into which he could read under provocation so much character and colour and charm, so many implications of the fine and worthy, that … enlarged not a little our field and our categories of appreciation and perception … we breathed somehow an air in which waste, for us at least, couldn't and didn't live.” Notes of a Son and Brother (New York: Scribners, 1914), p. 111.

⁷ The advent of World War I prompted James to denounce “all the active great ones of the earth, active for evil, in our time (to speak only of that) from the monstrous Bismarck down!” (Letters, ii, 390).

⁸ “The Tyranny of the Eye: The Observer as Aggressor in Henry James's Fictions,” Diss. Yale 1969.

⁹ The Tragic Muse, vii, 168; Ch. ix.

¹⁰ F. O. Matthiessen, The James Family (New York: Knopf, 1947), p. 250.

¹¹ Preface, xi, xii.

¹² “The Ironic Imagery and Symbolism of James's The Ambassadors,” Criticism, 9 (Spring, 1967), 174–96.

¹³ “Henry James and the Trapped Spectator,” Explorations: Essays in Criticism (London: Peregrine, 1964), pp. 164–65.

¹⁴ A Small Boy and Others (London: Macmillan, 1913).

¹⁵ A Small Boy and Others, pp. 184–85.