Henry James's Thwarted Love (review)

Wendy Graham. Henry James's Thwarted Love. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. 289 pp. $49.50 cloth; $19.95 paper.

Wendy Graham's study of repression, sublimation, gender confusion, and what one critic called "cerebral lechery" (27) in four of Henry James's novels is an outstanding contribution to two growing areas of James studies: the increasingly sophisticated body of work devoted to the representation of sexuality in James's life and work, informed by the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and queer theory, and recent studies, such as those by Ross Posnock and Mark Seltzer, which situate James "within the context of crossdisciplinary conversations about modernity and market culture" (6). A "hybrid study" (2) consisting of biography, cultural history, and textual exegesis, Henry James's Thwarted Love rigorously contextualizes James's fictional treatment of sexual ambiguity and his personal history in relation to the various discourses that shaped late-Victorian gender roles and identities: mental hygiene, energy conservation, sexology, psychiatry, and cultural anthropology. Graham's extensive analysis of primary sources from these discourses provides a broad and convincing context and allows her to uncover threads of cultural meaning in the fiction that would otherwise remain invisible to contemporary readers.

The first three chapters of Henry James's Thwarted Love are heavily biographical, focusing on Henry's and William's relationships with their father, Henry Sr., and with each other. Graham paints a detailed portrait of both brothers' struggles with physical and mental crises throughout their lives. She pays special attention to the James brothers' anxiety about their hereditary tendency toward mental illness and their subsequent efforts to combat this tendency through self-control, repression, and the exercise of willpower. The second half of the study moves away from biography into cultural history--in each of the last three chapters Graham focuses on one of the social and medical discourses that informed James's identity and his work. The bulk of the textual analysis is found in this section--in the first three chapters Graham reads only one novel, Roderick Hudson, through a biographical lens as a fictional rewriting of William's and Henry's struggles against their father's attempts (successful in William's case) to dissuade them from pursuing artistic careers. The final three chapters include readings of The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, and The Wings of the Dove, each in relation to one or more late-Victorian theoretical discourses.

Graham's argument is two-pronged--on the biographical level she argues that James's famous celibacy obscures the extent to which he was familiar and comfortable with the subversive eroticism of friends, acquaintances, and fellow writers who embraced decadence and aestheticism and were more or less openly homosexual (Howard Sturgis, Hugh Walpole, William Morton Fullerton, Edmund Gosse, John Addington Symonds, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others). James's decision to remain celibate as a way of avoiding confronting his same-sex longings was, Graham argues, conditioned in large part by his brother William's influence: always the more dominant brother, William served both as Henry's consulting physician and as his advisor on matters of mental health and sexuality. It was also through William that Henry gained early access to the medical and mental hygiene discourses that shaped late-Victorian attitudes towards homosexuality.

From a textual perspective Graham argues that James's representation of sexual ambiguity and confusion is far more critical of the political and social systems that constrain sexual identity than has previously been acknowledged. Her sympathetic reading of Olive Chancellor in The Bostonians argues that James depicts Olive's psychological problems not as punishment for her deviant sexuality, as they have generally been read, but as the result of a lifelong struggle to resist the sexual and social status quo. Olive's problem, Graham writes, is not that she is uninterested in heterosexual love and marriage, but the fact that "she lives in a society that does not tolerate her proclivities" (173). In her reading of Roderick Hudson...