"Lost Among the Genders": Male Narrators and Female Writers in James's Literary Tales, 1892-1896

Publisher’s Note

At least twenty of James’s more than one hundred tales deal with literary life. The seven that center upon female writers evoke the author’s desire to win a popular market but immure himself from feminine influence. James wrote four of these seven tales (“Greville Fane” in 1892, “The Death of the Lion” in 1894, “The Next Time” in 1895, and “The Figure in the Carpet” in 1896) during his relatively brief but tumultuous theater years, when he abandoned novel-writing for a more popular and, he hoped, lucrative market. His failure to garner a popular market that he frequently characterized as feminine and infantile lends particular bitterness to his descriptions of unappreciated male artistry and overblown female authority in these tales. ¹ Whether James displaces his dread of female sexuality onto literary battles with women, or his fear of literary competition onto sexual dread of women, is hard to say. In these stories about women writers, female sexuality and literary character, like female roles and debased language in the Bryn Mawr Address (1905), seem intentionally embroiled. The powerful women who orchestrate literary and social scenes are reduced to sexual slang: two Lady Janes and a Fanny Hurter in these stories, with Mrs. Beever to follow in The Other House. James plays on the fear of loose(d) professional women, common since the seventeenth century but reinvigorated by the rise of the New Woman at the end of the nineteenth century. In all four tales, male narrators’ supervision of women’s influence over male authors attempts to discount the threat of feminine literary authority. ²

In “Greville Fane,” the narrator portrays a popular female novelist as a frustrated mother, thereby displacing a literary reputation that could overshadow his own with details of her domestic failure. But his attempt to dismiss her influence as literary precursor is belied by his identification with her parasitic son; the desire to kill her off becomes itself a recognition of her authority. In “The Death of the Lion,” the narrator mediates between Neil Paraday and his female public. Although purporting to protect the great author from the insidious influence of commodifying women, he only exacerbates the problem. In “The Next Time,” the narrator refuses to lend Jane Highmore’s work the aesthetic aura of a market failure by reviewing it and, similarly, refuses to assist Ray Limbert to popular success by not writing about him. His mediation between the writers, and between them and their publics, underscores his desire for both popular circulation and artistic isolation, a position between genders and between markets that is pursued and feared by the narrators of all four stories. Finally, in “The Figure in the Carpet,” the narrator brandishes his rivalry with male authors and critics to cover a more central and threatening rivalry with the female writer, whom he insistently reads as sexual complement to men rather than literary figure in her own right. In each of these stories the narrator’s ambivalence about feminine literary authority gets the better of him. Because he can neither safely distance nor comfortably entertain it, he is left, like the author in “The Death of the Lion,” divided against his own feminine imagination: it is “inveterately against himself” that he makes his imagination work (DL 109).

“Greville Fane” (1892)

The question of what male writers ought to do with female writers opens “Greville Fane.” A telegram asks the narrator to write half a column on the dying female novelist Greville Fane and to “[l]et her off easy, but not too easy” (GF 433). The difficulty of the assignment, the narrator thinks, is not in letting the writer off easily but in defending that indulgence. He does not admire her professionally, but he likes her personally and has known her long enough to feel now heartless about his “feast of indifference” (GF 433). Indifference, however, scarcely describes his ambivalence toward the female writer. Letting her off easy by describing her victimization at the hands of her parasitic son becomes merely the ruse whereby he buries her professional...