In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Manet, James’s The Turn of the Screw and the Voyeuristic Imagination
  • Daniel R. Schwarz

I

Phoenix-like, the relationship between literature and its contexts has been reborn as the field of cultural studies—a field which stresses power relationships among genders, races, and classes. New historicism and its child, cultural studies, have been skeptical of the older historicism’s positivistic stories of “A” influencing “B” and of reductive drawings of the boundaries between foreground and background. While both new historicism and cultural studies have sought to see literature as one of many cultural artifacts, these artifacts are usually understood in terms of socioeconomic production. But the stress on micropolitical and macropolitical relations should not prevent this welcome return to mimesis and to historical contexts from attending to other kinds of cultural frames. Specifically, the return from the formalism of deconstruction to mimesis should be a catalyst for examining and juxtaposing figures and movements without regard to simple patterns of influence. What I am interested in is the process of examination of cultural figures in configurations that put new light on cultural history. My goal is to isolate essential ingredients of modernistic culture, ingredients that spill over the borderlands between genres and art forms. While we have learned in recent years to be wary of locating essential or transcendent themes, it is still necessary to understand the genealogy of modernism and the figures who contributed to the modification of the cultural genetic code—particularly since these modifications live with us now in contemporary art and literature. Specifically, I am going to frame contextually an odd triptych: Edouard Manet, Henry James, and Thomas Mann; as I weave a narrative from particular strands of similarities, I shall inquire into what cultural forces produced this configuration.

From our vantage point in 1996, we can understand that the cultural revolution known as modernism originated as much with the paintings of Picasso and Matisse, and before that, with Manet and Gauguin, as with literary figures. [End Page 1] Modernism questioned the possibility of a homogeneous European culture even as it sought to propose diverse and contradictory alternatives. As John Elderfield puts it, “history was not always thought to be quite possibly a species of fiction but once comprised a form of order, and might still” (203). One might recall James Clifford’s comment that in 1900, “‘Culture’ referred to a single evolutionary process. The European bourgeois ideal of autonomous individuality was widely believed to be the natural outcome of a long development, a process that, although threatened by various disruptions, was assumed to be the basic, progressive movement of humanity” (92–93). The major modernists felt estranged from orthodox political and historical assumptions and from the cultural values in which they were educated. Yet artists and writers paid homage to those very traditional ideas of art by their strong response to their predecessors and their need to modify and transform them.

Modernists often tried to insulate art from history and to apotheosize the aesthetic. Indeed, new criticism was not only a response to modernist texts, but originated in part from modernist aesthetics, such as Eliot’s objective correlative, Joyce’s concept of epiphany, Lawrence’s insistence that we believe the tale not the teller, and James’s emphasis in his prefaces on the inextricable relationship between the aesthetic and ethical (see Schwarz, chapter 1). But the recent emphasis on historicism seems to be particularly apt for modernism which was shaped by World War I, the Depression, the women’s suffrage movement, and the disappointments in the promise of industrialism and urbanization. English modernism questions the mythical idealized Victorian family; European artists were also addressing bourgeois expectations and myths. As we shall see, in keeping with my hedgehoggy integrative spirit that eschews foxlike linearity, my account of the genealogy of modernism will include such varied data as the sexual repression of the governess in The Turn of the Screw (1898), 1 paintings of Manet (1860s, ‘70s and early ‘80s), and that strange bachelor novel of Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1912), that owes much to Huysmans. All address the question, “What shall we do about loneliness?” The need to be noticed, seen, and read relates to...

Share