James and the American Sacred

Sacrilege becomes secular in James, a crime against another individual's autonomy. It is an engulfing of Otherness by the desire of a self or the dogma of a creed. When James dramatizes desecrations of the Church or makes scriptural allusions, this is not literary fancywork. He is advertising his ultimate values by characterizing a threat to them as sacrilegious unto Satanic. These values--the sanctity of other people, the rich solidity of the world, equal (not domineering or enslaved) participation in social life--constitute James's American sacred. The values surprise by their commonplace quality, yet for James they are not givens but the very rare achievements of an almost impossible quest against the self's tendency to drown reality in psyche. In what he sees as a time of an unprecedented freedom of thought and belief, James records a shock at the new sorrows of this lonely liberation: it can lead to an unchecked and delusive solipsism. He then proposes the strenuous terms for putting together a world not coequal with the self but redemptively larger.

I want here to consider the achieving of the American sacred in The Portrait of a Lady and to contrast that achievement to two tales of sacrilege, "Daisy Miller" and "The Turn of the Screw." In all three, these characteristics pertain: a questioning of the very existence of evil; the tyranny of absolutist values; the evil eye, as desecration is made an epistemological, even perceptual, issue made literal in an act of viewing; the education of the reader; and the emergence of an American Sacred.

The sacred cannot exist without a notion of evil, and James needs these large concepts if the novel is to fulfill his ambitions for prose fiction. In his criticism and prefaces, James creates a Poetics for fiction; and for fiction to reach the seriousness of poetry, lyric, and epic at once, James must reconcile intricacy--characters in fiction seem never to have thought, really thought, until James--with size. This scope is not afforded by the large social canvas of the Victorians (James tried that only once, as a knowing parody of Dickens in The Princess Casamassima) but by taking up the great themes, the greatest of which, from the early epic through Milton, is the existence of Evil.

But Evil must be put into play as a question because the concept had become creaky, suspect, lame. When in The Portrait of a Lady James brings his heroine to the realization that her great friend and mentor has sold her like a mere thing into a loveless marriage, Isabel Archer does not simply ask herself whether Madame Merle is evil. Rather, James has her question "whether to this intimate friend of several years the great historical epithet of wicked were to be applied" (424). The epithet is introduced as strikingly secondhand, fustian--"She knew the idea only by the Bible and other literary works"--, and the classification of the Bible as itself literature drives home the secular doubt. Yet James renews the consequence of Evil by making problematic its reality. This is the very plot, in fact, of "The Turn of the Screw," as the children are haunted as victims or already conspirators in evil. And social evil is the question of all ill questions that Winterbourne poses regarding Daisy Miller, concerning whether she is wanton or flirtatious but pure.

In the course of the narratives, James will show that the way in which the Governess and Winterbourne pose their questions has more to do with evil than whatever it is they fear and suspect. Putting Evil in question gives James his American quality. Those diminishings of the concept that we find in great Victorian fiction do not happen in the literature of the United States. Jane Austen satirizes the gothic, and Dickens makes the demonic an editorial cartoon (e.g., the Smallweeds before the hellish fire in their parlor), while Brockden Brown and Hawthorne revive...