In Possession of a Secret: Rhythms of Mastery and Surrender in "The Beast in the Jungle"

The most common reading (or misreading) of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) runs somewhat as follows: John Marcher is the benighted author of his own sorry fate. Unable to see that it is up to him to bring about the major event for which he secretly feels destined, he never musters the courage to act and ends up a miserable failure. May Bartram, with whom he has shared his secret, is perceptive enough to see the nature of his problem, yet she cannot impart her insight to the obtusely self-absorbed Marcher during her lifetime. Only after May’s death does Marcher come to realize her importance to him and see that she loved him. Too late, he understands that he should have acted by returning the passion she felt for him.

Thus summarized, the story is a romantic tale with a palatable moral. If only the hero had been less self-preoccupied, he would have responded to the love of this warm and selfless woman. ¹ Or, with a slightly different emphasis, if only the hero had not dreamed in such lofty terms of a strikingly rare destiny, he would have embraced the worthwhile opportunities offered by common reality. ² A recent variation on this romantic-moral reading has proposed a less palatable moral, suggesting that Marcher’s problem is panic in the face of homosexual desire. If only the hero had admitted this sexual possibility, the reasoning is, he could have been liberated for a fulfilling erotic life. ³

These interpretations are certainly appealing. Perhaps their greatest attraction resides in their allegorical simplicity. A neat opposition is suggested between a selfishly blind Marcher, “stupidly” waiting for a special fate, meanwhile demonstrating “the chill of his egotism,” and a selflessly loving May, standing by helplessly as Marcher’s “kind, wise keeper” (Berthold 134). The reader is placed in the agreeable position of being able to see through Marcher’s delusion and to appreciate May’s painful insight into her friend’s condition. We can see that the secret which Marcher possesses and so carefully protects is in fact a secret that possesses him—and through him also May. Both are reduced to wretched servants of an all-consuming secret.

There are a number of problems, though, with this way of summarizing the reader’s apprehension of the story. We should note, for instance, that the phrases just quoted to characterize Marcher and May can all be traced to Marcher’s consciousness. This is most problematical with regard to our understanding of May’s kindness, wisdom, and protectiveness, which is suspiciously close to Marcher’s perception of her throughout the story. We may seem to be on safer ground in adopting Marcher’s self-assessment at the end of the story, from which the descriptions of his stupidity and selfishness have been borrowed. Yet, a few critics have questioned whether Marcher really does reach the insight there with which he is usually credited. Jones has wondered whether Marcher’s focus on his chilling egotism is not yet another way of compulsively marking his own distinction from common humanity (233). Harris is sure that Marcher remains blind to the end: “Marcher does not fail to live, love, suffer; with his consciousness trained obsessively on the future, he fails to realize that he has lived, loved, suffered and that he is continuing to do so with every breath he takes” (152). Is the story, then, such a clear-cut allegory of the “unlived life,” embodied in Marcher (Berthold 129), versus “the good, the desirability, of love and sexuality,” exemplified by May (Sedgwick, Epistemology 196)? Is it a morality tale in which Marcher stands for “a man obsessed with metaphor,” who “flees in terror from ordinary human contact” (Yeazell 167), while May is “a devoted companion who represents the possibility of a more fruitful life” (Gargano 160)?

I propose that we move away from the stark oppositions that are prevalent in the allegorizing, romantic-moral interpretation of the story—its tendency to cast Marcher as the “cannibalistic” villain...