Henry James and Queer Modernity (review)

Eric Haralson's brilliantly reasoned, witty, and erudite study discovers the emergence of a variously inflected, incrementally evolving, and broadly comprehensible queerness operative in or, better, unavoidably definitive of, Henry James. It is a critical history of the inevitability of James's queerness. One would be wrong to imagine that the inevitability is merely governed by indisputable facts of sexuality. With the example of Haralson's fine synthesis of the excellent Jamesian sexuality scholarship of the past decade, the best of James studies is clearly well past such simplistic essentialism in diagnosing queerness. His book rightly turns away from any "misguided critical and popular obsession with genital proof of James's homosexuality" (221 n. 21) and smartly jettisons limited arguments based on lexical dating of "queer" as a synonym for homosexual, denying Jamesian diction the possibility of such reference. The great generosity of Haralson's work, especially to Jamesians and scholars and critics of international modernism, twentieth-century American literature, and queer studies is its methodological example, a specific alternative to unsophisticated impasses by way of historically assiduous close reading and marvelously entertaining instruction.

Haralson's book unfolds as a series of such readings, chronologically patterned in six chapters, plus an introduction and "coda." The first four chapters track James's own evocation of "the broad, complex cultural process—a process uneven, shadowy, and multiply sited—by which 'queer' came to include 'homosexual' among its meanings" (5): from the inchoate sexual significations of "protogay aesthetes" in Roderick Hudson and The Europeans to James's deepening interest in alternative styles of masculinity, male friendship, and queer camaraderie in The Tragic Muse and "The Author of 'Beltraffio'" to "The Turn of the Screw," for Haralson a "monitory fable about the contagion of boyhood homosexuality" (24) in which the governess frantically envisions the very limits of Victorian insight into "the most unnamable of things" (83). The Ambassadors marks the "apogee" of James's challenge to gender and sexuality norms (102). Haralson decodes the queerness of Lambert Strether's affinities for Little Bilham, the sexual implications of Strether's celebrated outpouring of "tutorial effusion" (104), his bachelor respectability as an inclination toward "rare youth[s]" (AM 133), and his envious fascination with women who can elicit outbursts of male virility.

By the 1950s, Hattie Jacques and the international ado of Lamebrain Stretcher and Chapstick Nuisance from Asshole, Mass. were camp allusions, fully available to queer mockery, tribute, and the like (103). Haralson's last chapters track how James could become Hattie Jacques, focusing on how he signifies for Cather, Stein, Hemingway, and their contemporaries. Via rich readings of novels, correspondence, criticism, and attributed remarks, which my hints can only schematize, James emerges as a paragon of "sensuous yet ethically earnest and sufficiently masculine aestheticism" (25) for Cather (in contradistinction to the catastrophe of Oscar Wilde), as a paranoiac phantasm of male effeminacy for Hemingway, and, for Stein, as a heroic general of extraordinary distinction, unwilling to "forfeit . . . a self resistantly 'queer' to normative pressures, and possessing the integrity of its difference" (210).

Reassuringly aware of queerness's inexorable defiance of the mere platitude of statement, Haralson distinguishes James, in his own writing, as an increasingly savvy celebrant of a queerness "at once powerful and elusive" (1), not to mention typically powerful because elusive. Cautiously resistant to readings that would presume to impose alien matrices of logic and identity, Haralson discerns in James's writing—and in those all-important modernist readings that imagine "Henry James" into literary and broader cultural existence (as exemplar or admonitory arbiter or effete monstrosity or fag, for example)—the emergence of such structures in and for their time. As its account of queerness's liveliness and multiple functions unfolds, Haralson's book is superbly cognizant of the specific phases of its vexed legibility, particularly as queerness orients and productively disorients normative surveillance and regulation during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first few of the twentieth.

Haralson is exactly right when he observes, "Feeling or reading the...