Male Authors, Female Subjects: The Woman Within/Beyond the Borders of Henry Adams, Henry James and Others (review)

While this review will focus on van Oostrum’s account of Henry James, the critique of the Dutch author Multatuli with which the book opens forms a good backdrop against which the discussion of James may be situated. As van Oostrum points out, Multatuli’s Max Havelaar (1875), a novel that exposes the inhumanity of Dutch colonial rule in the East Indies, is firmly established in “the Dutch literary canon” (47). He joins recent feminist criticism of the book in emphasizing the extent to which its sentimental strategies form “an appropriation of female concerns” and its conclusion a “reestablishment of power . . . with Havelaar,” the male protagonist (33). Van Oostrum’s self-identified “male feminist” charges against Multatuli (258) might carry force if they were not so blighted by his failure to distinguish between author and character. Though he refers in passing to the closing pages of the novel, where Multatuli “kill[s] off . . . the ‘half-baked dreamer’ Havelaar,” van Oostrum allows insufficiently for the possibility of an ironic distance between writer and protagonist throughout the book. This possibility gains in likelihood when one considers the full extent of the political challenge that Multatuli, in his own voice, lays down at the end of the novel, threatening to translate it into the manifold languages of those under Dutch colonial rule so as to incite them to “legitimate . . . violence”: “I am no fly-saving poet, no half-baked dreamer, like . . . Havelaar. . . . This book is only a beginning . . . I will augment the force and sharpness of my weapons, to the extent that it prove necessary” (1: 294, my translation). Intent as he is on establishing “the autobiographical link” between author and character (57), van Oostrum would have done well to read up on Multatuli’s nonfiction, which contains material that makes questionable his claim (solely based on Max Havelaar) that “Multatuli . . . distinctly holds on to hierarchical gender relations” (67). “What do you turn our daughters into, oh morality!” Multatuli writes in the Ideas, “You force them to lie and dissemble. They must not know what they know, feel what they feel, desire what they desire, be what they are. . . . And when such a poor, indoctrinated child . . . has stayed good—that’s what morality calls good!—then one swain or another may offer her the wages for so much goodness by appointing her supervisor of his linen chest and patented machine for the perpetuation of his sanctified posterity” (2: 410–01, my translation).

Van Oostrum’s chapter on Henry James (99–154) deals almost exclusively with The Wings of the Dove, though side-glances at The Portrait of a Lady, The American Scene, and the Autobiography serve to flesh out the discussion. Entitled “Annexation and Possession: The Appropriation of Women in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove,” the chapter examines the shifting distribution of power within that novel, finding that the penniless and diffident Merton Densher ultimately vanquishes both the wealthy Milly Theale and the scheming Kate Croy. In itself, this reading of The Wings of the Dove is already somewhat debatable. Clearly, Kate Croy’s designs fail to pay off. But I am not sure that the distinction between “Milly’s actual life” and her “memory” is capable of supporting van Oostrum’s claim that only a safely appropriated, “idealized femininity” can play a role in Densher’s existence at the end of the book, whereas the male protagonist is able to possess real “‘life’ as ‘master of his theater’” (120).

Van Oostrum’s main argument, however, is that this ending allows Densher finally to assert his own masculinity (135). If the opening scenes of the novel feature “a powerful female community and marginalized men,” ultimately “James’s use of female influence and female power serves not to ‘get the women out of the kitchen’ but to actually send them back into the home” (109). When one considers The...