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  • Henry James's Permanent Adolescence, and: A Form Foredoomed to Looseness: Henry James's Preoccupation with the Gender of Fiction
  • Gale Temple
John R. Bradley . Henry James's Permanent Adolescence. New York: Palgrave, 2000. 172 pp. $90.00 (hardcover).
Cecilia Mazzucco-Than . A Form Foredoomed to Looseness: Henry James's Preoccupation with the Gender of Fiction. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. 264 pp. $57.95 (hardcover).

In his 1938 work, Enemies of Promise, British writer Cyril Connolly described his adult sexual desire as a form of "permanent adolescence," a melancholic yearning for his days at Eton when sexually undifferentiated forms of intragender camaraderie and togetherness imbued life with seemingly infinite promise (325). In Henry James's Permanent Adolescence, John R. Bradley argues that James's engagement with sexuality in his life and writings should be understood according to this paradigm, for James both longed for the homoerotic intimacies he experienced as a youth and, in a way that Freud would have viewed as characteristic of homosexual narcissism, longed for himself as a sexually inexperienced young man, when opportunities for acceptable same-sex intimacies had yet to be foreclosed. Bradley eschews those studies which he says either ignore James's sexual orientation or overtly defend James against charges of homosexuality, as well as those which read altogether too much homosexual significance into James's work, and instead focuses on creating "valuable gay readings of some of James's most important novels and tales" by "focusing on character, plot, structure, style, historical context and sensible biographical speculation" (10).

Bradley does indeed create an intelligent, historically attuned, and academically responsible genealogy of James's response to and representation of homosexuality [End Page 188] in his life and fiction. He looks specifically at four stages in James's life—an initial focus on a confused, improbable, yet defiantly heterosexual masculinity in James's early career; an ensuing desire to portray same-sex intimacy as informed by a classical model; an increasingly open treatment of homosexuality influenced by James's association with an emergent countercultural aestheticism; and, finally, an encrypted portrayal of homosexuality in response to turn-of-the-century homophobia, epitomized in the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1894 and the scandalous trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895.

One of Bradley's strongest readings is of James's 1890 novel, The Tragic Muse, which Bradley interprets in light of shifts in thinking about the nature of homosexuality in the final decades of the nineteenth century (homosexuality as a "form of behaviour . . . to a condition" [93]), as well as in light of early modernist formal concerns. The Tragic Muse, in Bradley's view, illustrates the pattern of "permanent adolescence" more clearly, perhaps, than any other of James's novels or tales. In Bradley's reading, the protagonist Nick's sexual confusion—his propensity to view his adolescent friendships as more emotionally resonant than those he forms in later life, his preference for an ineffably alternative aesthetic lifeway over a staid career in law, the "emotional and psychological security" (96) that results from his bond with the eccentric aesthete, "Nash"—indexes the novel's debt to "the radical changes in thinking about sexuality and gender in the years surrounding its composition" (101).

While Bradley's treatment of James's sexuality is indeed careful and judicious, at times his readings can seem too cautious, adhering with unnecessary fidelity to a model of interpretation based on biographical evidence and authorial intent, a tendency that limits his ability to develop more fully the political and ethical ramifications of James's treatment of homosexuality in his fiction. Bradley's desire for restraint might also have something to do with his unnecessarily disparaging allusions to "queer theory," which he sets up as a kind of straw man against which his own ostensibly more responsible readings achieve focus and definition. Still, Bradley's book does an admirable job tracing the effects of changing social mores and conventions (and, indeed, laws) on the ways James and other writers and intellectuals of his day conceptualized their own sexual desires and their portrayals of intimacy between men. The James that emerges from Bradley's study is a fastidiously cautious gay man who was...

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