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Henry James's World of Images

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2021

R. W. Short
R. W. Short*
Affiliation:
Hoestra College, Hempstead, N. Y.
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Extract

Mindful of Josephine Miles's question: “If the problem [of imagery] is subjective, how can it result in tables and charts?” I shall offer here only the simplest classifications, for the sake of imposing a surface neatness upon the presentation of protean material. After some introductory generalizations about James's imagery, I shall appear to be discussing the whole subject in terms of the areas of existence or experience most used by James as sources for his imagery. The problem is that one cannot draw close to James's vital imagery of any single sort without knowing something about the other sorts, so cooperatively do the major images-areas complement each other; but we must star somewhere. In my second division I shall discuss images-areas used throughout the later works, but not independently thematic in any given work. In the last division I shall treat image-areas found unusually concentrated within given works; and here the given work itself will help to hold the materials together.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 68 , Issue 5 , December 1953 , pp. 943 - 960
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953

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References

page 943 note 1 Sewance Rev., lviii (Summer 1950), 523.

page 944 note 2 Citations from James are keyed as follows: Amb, GB, IT, PC, SP, and WD represent respectively The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, The Tower, The Princess Casamas-sima, The Sense of the Past, and The Wings of the Dove, in the New York Edition; SF—The Sacrred Fount (Scribner's: New York, 1901); Notebooks—The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (Oxford Univ. Press, 1947); Prefaces—The Art of the Novel, ed. Richard P. Blackmur (Scribner's, 1934).

page 944 note 3 The Princess Casamassima (Macmillan & Co., 1886). Every image in this first edition has been collated with the revised version of it in the New York Edition of 1908. The revisions affecting imagery far otua number all others put together. It would seem that James was critically aware of the uses of imagery, though the Prefaces do not show this. To indicate this is my reason for citing PC so often in a paper devoted mainly to the later style.

page 944 note 4 Images in which part, usually the most obviously sensuous part, is suppressed. From Henry Wells, Poetic Imagery (Columbia Univ. Press, 1924), pp. 76 et seq.

page 947 note 5 Rage for Order (Chicago Univ Press, 1948), p. 149.

page 950 note 6 Another meaningful setting. “Brighton... where the twinkling sea and the breezy air, the great friendly, fluttered, animated, may-coloured ‘front,‘ would emphasise the note I wanted; that of the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy.” Said of “Sir Edmund Orme,” Prefaces, p. 216, but applicable here as well.

page 954 note 7 Roderick Hudson (1876) and Dairy Miller (1879).