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  • Fin-de-Siècle James

Introduction

Fin-de-siècle James”—a gentleman in a top hat and intricate waistcoat, peering at a work of art, gossiping wittily, flirting with a male coterie, contriving intricate stories of aestheticism and perversion, writing (open) secrets, creating and concealing closets.

James at the fin of our own siècle: queer, poststructuralist, experimentalist, his inscrutability endlessly intriguing. The theorist who invites, challenges, even masters theory. The student of the art market, analyst of cultural capital, chronicler of shifting sexual and gender constructions, and opportunistic reporter of social scandals—ideal object for the cultural studies that he seems to have practiced avant le lettre.

James’s writing in the 1890s has, as David McWhirter reminds us, been diversely described: the treacherous years, the experimental phase, the awkward period, Aestheticism, protomodernism. The essays included in this forum issue interrogate and revise some of these labels. The 1890s were a period of great productivity for James, whose important role as artist and critic in fin-de-siècle culture is made clear by the number and variety of James works analyzed here, including The Spoils of Poynton, “The Figure in the Carpet,” “The Real Right Thing,” The Awkward Age, What Maisie Knew, “The Future of the Novel,” The Tragic Muse, and his essays on Burne-Jones and Browning.

Nearly as various as James’s writings during the 1890s are the “Henry James’s” who appear in the biographies of the 1990s. A number of the essays in this volume take up the controversies generated by these sometimes scandalous stories about James. In doing so, they attempt not to settle on a single master narrative of James’s life, but to remind us of the richness of what Christopher Lane terms “Jamesian inscrutability.”

In tracing the multiplicity of James’s works and identities, the essays in “Fin-de-Siècle James” repeatedly focus on audience. Millicent Bell begins by quoting William Dean Howells’s judgment that “I cannot doubt that James has every element of success in fiction. But I suspect that he must in a great degree create his own audience.” Bell goes on to explore the parameters of that audience—as well as the ones that James rejected or was rejected by—through a reading of The Spoils of Poynton that demonstrates his acute awareness of contemporary [End Page 215] changes in the literary marketplace. Eric Savoy, on the other hand, opens with a Jamesian lament: “‘No one has the faintest conception of what I’m trying for.’” Exfoliating the embarassments of authorship, both fictional and critical, Savoy effects a dialogue between deconstructive practice and queer theory while tracing the circumlocutions of “A Figure in the Carpet.”

David McWhirter seeks to recover the reasons behind fin-de-siècle readers’ outrage at what James was writing in the 1890s. McWhirter argues that what scandalized James’s critics was not just the “moral squalor” described in his fictions, but also the ways in which what McWhirter terms his “experimental realism” violated contemporary literary conventions.

Christopher Lane critiques 1990s audiences’ assumption that sexuality is the answer to, the deep truth of, James’s life and work. Rather than blaming psychoanalysis for this reductionism, Lane argues that a genuinely Freudian—and Jamesian—reading would recognize the ways in which James’s work both invites and frustrates our search for a buried sexual secret, a figure unraveled from the carpet.

In contrast, Hugh Stevens suggests that a historical reading of James’s queer texts allows us to recognize the ways in which ambiguity might “mean” for the “initiated reader.” Stevens counters a continuing resistance to queer theory among 1990s critical audiences by reading “The Real Right Thing” as “tale à key” about John Addington Symonds.

The final three essays also share this historical emphasis, each looking specifically at James’s relationships with other artists of the 1890s. Wendy Graham explicates in detail James’s writings on Edward Burne-Jones, demonstrating how his changing evaluations of the painter chart his ambivalent relations with the aesthetic movement. Well aware of British audiences’ scandalized reactions to the “decadent” art of the 1890s, James attempts to walk a fine critical line, praising innovative art while...

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