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  • Henry James at Moo U
  • Sheila Teahan

On a campus whose principal cultural icon is “Sparty,” a larger-than-life ceramic statue representing the school’s mascot—an ostensible Spartan soldier whose dress and physiognomy display a strange conglomeration of Greek, Roman, and midwestern iconography—much would seem to militate against Henry James as a strong curricular presence. I teach at a large midwestern land- grant university whose background and best-publicized research strengths are agricultural, whose College of Arts and Letters is chronically underfunded, and whose English department is under no illusions about its status and value in the eyes of the administration compared to such fields as swine research, chicken oncology, and advanced plant breeding. Add to this that our undergraduates nearly all work at least part-time, making it difficult to give long or intense reading assignments. At my job interview, prospective colleagues were curious to hear whether I intended to attempt to teach James at M.S.U., and if so, how. They seemed especially doubtful about the viability of teaching James in the context of literary theory (my dissertation had had a strong theoretical emphasis). I inferred that Henry James and Michigan State were a bad fit, and by the time I arrived in East Lansing I had already inwardly performed a Jamesian renunciation of the hope of teaching my primary area of interest.

Unlike the Jamesian renunciations with which we are all familiar, mine was not irrevocable. The problematics of teaching James at “the nation’s premier land grant university,” as our administration likes to call us, are considerable, but the rewards are more so. The challenge of teaching James here is both practical and political. It is practical insofar as our undergraduates, though generally able, often are poorly prepared for the study of a writer as demanding and allusive as James. It is political insofar as the ideological climate of the institution tends to peg James as an elitist white male aesthete who exemplifies the dubious values of [End Page 242] an outmoded canon. (Some colleagues have labeled me as “conservative” simply because I write on James. Even worse, I do not write about race, class, or gender in James.) Despite these drawbacks, I have found students here to be remarkably receptive to reading James, especially if they have not been forewarned to dislike him.

More than any other James text, The Portrait of a Lady has been pedagogically invaluable in a range of undergraduate courses for training students to read closely. In my realism and naturalism class, which attracts a number of non-majors, Portrait teaches extraordinarily well to relatively inexperienced students; even weaker students can, with guidance, respond to the novel at increasingly sophisticated levels. I deliberately foreground its verbal and formal complexity, which some students find daunting. I warn them that the novel demands slow and attentive reading, and before the first assignment I outline some important figurative patterns to watch for (door/lock/key figures, architectural imagery, images of coins and art works, and so on). I also begin to define some of the formal issues we will be considering, such as James’s theory of the reflective center, its bearing on the narrative construction of Portrait, and its relation to the novel’s doubly structural and thematic concern with “seeing” (and with correlative issues of reading and interpretation.) I mention that, in preparation for class, I am myself reading the novel for the fourteenth (or whatever) time, and that I never reread it without discovering new details or dimensions. Students find it eye-opening, and mainly liberating, to hear this, and to realize that they are not expected to master the novel the first time through.

Once they have been forewarned about its formal and linguistic complexity, students respond well to the novel, though some are slow to warm to it, and a few never do. One student remarked on the course evaluation, “I have fallen in love with Henry James! I can’t believe I have never read anything by him before.” A second expressed surprise that he/she had “ended up truly liking Portrait”; a third wanted to know whether an abridged edition was available; and...

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