The Novels of Henry James: A Study of Culture and Consciousness (review)

In questioning the presumed uniqueness of drama to express the themes and philosophy of tragedy, these novelists thus also suggested that In the modern world "it was life, not death, that is tragic" (p. 13). Following the aims of traditional tragedy, "these novelists stressed the need for different subjects for contemporary versions of tragedy which could perhaps only be expressed through narrative forms" (p. 13). The deliberate emphasis on "passivity, helplessness and dull monotony" by novelists produced the dominant role of pathos in the Victorian tragic novel. King thus correctly argues that "the finest work of the period resulted from a balanced interplay between the novel and tragedy, the tension between the realistic bias of the novel and the dramatised, idealised principles of tragic drama" (p. 15). From King's theoretical perspective, "The tragic view of life affirms both the inevitability of suffering and evil, and their irrelevance" (p. 16). The determining qualities which differentiate George Eliot, Hardy, and James are a direct result of their portrayal of that inevitability and of their implicit recognition of its irrelevance. In George Eliot, for example, heredity, familial restrictions, and the system of human relationships in general shape the individual. Yet, as engaging and persuasive as King's argument is, one cannot help wondering whether the systems of abstractions King identifies as the causes of tragedy in George Eliot's novels continue to impose their effects on character in isolation, or whether their combined interaction does not finally produce, as in a resolved dialectic, some larger, overriding force (such as History in general) which creates the tragic life. A similar objection might be raised against her thesis that "James's vision of life shows similarities with George Eliot's, which makes him, rather than Hardy, her literary successor" (p. 19). As for Hardy, King argues that natural instinct in combination with social forms leads to characters' undoing. But Hardy's major novels show that the undoing of character is always already the condition of life, whether or not a character's general "dissatisfaction" is fostered by external factors. And yet, by keeping before us in temperate and cautious manner many fine discriminations concerning the uses and forms of the tragic in her readings of The Mill on the F loss, Fe I i χ Holt, and Daniel Deronda, of Hardy's four tragic novels, and of James's The American, The Portrait of a Lady, and The W ings of the Dove, King adequately performs a much-needed task. With her compelling discussion of "The Woman's Tragedy" ("internal and unseen") in George Eliot (pp. 73-76), her clear argument for the Importance of law and legal forms In Hardy's novels (pp. 107-22), and her valuable distinction between "form" (as tragedy) and "freedom" (as a novel istic enterprise) in James's novels, King adds to the corpus of significant texts concerning the Idea of the tragic in the nineteenth century. This is by no means an inconsiderable achievement. Ramón SaldTvar University of Texas at Austin Brian Lee. The Novels of Henry James: A Study of Culture and Consciousness. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978. 117pp. $14.50. This brief book addresses one of the most important subjects in the artistry of a novelist, the relation between the world he reveals and his modes of revealing it. Lee adds interest to his rather stale thesis that James progressed toward an increasingly refined idea and dramatization of what human consciousness can be in the context of modern culture by seeing James's development as an expression of 198 "the dominant theme in American thought of the nineteenth century ... 'of the authentic American as a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities, poised at the start of a new history'" (p. 2; Lee's quotation is from R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam). According to Lee, James did not, as Quentin Anderson has argued, take this figure of an American Adam from his influential father, but he shaped his own model out of his high hope for "a vast intellectual fusion and synthesis of the various national tendencies of the world" in a native American character distinctive for its "unprecedented spiritual lightness...