Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation (review)

Many books about James’s art of fiction have been written without any reference to his ideas about race. But after reading Sara Blair’s ambitious and challenging study one should find it difficult to separate James’s esthetic principles from his politics of race and culture. From the beginning of his career, as Blair shows, James was engaged in exploring, challenging, and redirecting current beliefs about racial and national identity while simultaneously defining himself as an artist and experimenting with different literary forms. In her searching analyses of selected works of fiction and literary criticism, reviews and travel essays, she demonstrates that James’s acts of self-invention were inseparable from his complex and often ambivalent responses to the “race thinking and nation-building habits and institutions of emergent modern Anglo-America” (2). As the theater, which fascinated James all his life, is “a stage of culture” (2), Blair argues, so “literary culture,” comprising both the writer’s acts of self-representation and the texts he creates, is a “theater” in which “performances of race and nation are produced” (6). Thus, any distinction between esthetics and cultural politics collapses, as James, in Blair’s words, “constructs a literary ‘internationalism’ through which definitively national and racial feelings, aspirations, and characterologies are elaborated and transfigured” (3).

In each of her five chapters, Blair analyzes James’s texts within the context of American and European intellectual and cultural history. In the first chapter, for instance, she discusses the reviews and travel essays of the 1870s in light of the evolving disciplines of ethnography, anthropology, and linguistics, in their relation to the culture of “leisured travelling,” as well as the imperialist goals of military conquest. By placing James with his contemporaries, Blair can show that James not only expressed pervasive ideas about racial determinism, and racial and national types, as many critics have noted, but also exposed and challenged the assumptions underlying the ideology of race and the anxieties it bred. Significantly, what James most urgently resisted, Blair’s analysis reveals, were the “racialized norms of masculinity,” the ideal of manliness based on aggressive self-confidence and sense of racial superiority that legitimated acts of conquest and domination. That James expressed sympathy with this ideal when embodied by his English friends of high military and diplomatic rank is evident in his correspondence with them, but Blair makes a strong case for James as the critic of “racial romances,” who sought instead “an open-endedly modern, internationalist, self-consciously shifting style of cultural subjectivity and response” (58). Particularly compelling is her reading of the 1882 essay “Venice,” which reveals James cultivating passivity and indolence as the better alternative to attempts at “cultural acquisition” exemplified by Ruskin and typical of the “manly style of response” (54) which James believed was powerless to apprehend the impenetrable mysteries of Venice.

In chapter 2 Blair makes the most explicit connection between James’s ideas about narrative art and race. Her key texts here are his essay “Trollope” (1883) and “The Art of Fiction” (1884), which, in Blair’s words, make the “good health” of fiction dependent upon “the constitutional freedom of a vibrantly Anglo-American culture” (82). To the degree that the novel fulfills the office James assigned to it in “The Art of Fiction”—to create “the air of reality”—it becomes, according to Blair, “an instrument of cultural renewal” (85), specifically “the renewal of the Anglo-Saxon character and culture” (82). In Trollope’s obsessive industry, overproduction, and indifference to matters of form and point of view, Blair argues, James saw racial as well as personal decline. When Trollope broke the illusion of reality by dropping “the historic mask,” he repudiated his authority and vitiated his power to represent a people and its culture. But as Blair observes, James ascribed to Trollope the highest moral qualities of “the English mind” which even in decline augured greater racial vitality, hence greater art, than what he termed the “intellectual vivacity” of the French...