Love and the Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Henry James (review)

Philip Sicker. Love and the Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Henry James. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 198a Xv, 196 pp. $16.00; pb $8.50. As his title i nd i cates, Phi I i ϕ Sicker has I ¡mi ted h is study to one concern; in taking Balzac as his model, James by contrast viewed his fictional world as surveying a vast range of experience. But through step-by-step, sometimes virtually syllogistic reasoning, supported by representative evidence, Sicker demonstrates that love or the illusion of it Is primary in alI of James's stories. Sicker begins with James's recognition, accentuated during the late 1890s, that the imaginative mind is oppressed, even to the point of terror, with a sense of isolation, and that it may seek desperately to escape from Its solipsistic world. The outer universe perceived as mere objects in flux offers no escape from se If-consciousness, and so one turns to another human being. Obviously, physical attraction or vague emotional yearning cannot serve, as the other person still remains alien. What is required Is a communion of spirit. This, however, is no simple matter, for it invites delusion and thus a return to isolation. The natural tendency, revealed in James's own lifelong adoration of the memory of Minnie Temple, Is to create a fixed Image of the beloved. As Sicker notes, in so doing one sets up an equally fixed and superficially satisfying image of oneself as lover. A somewhat comic example occurs in "Maud-Evelyn" (1900), in which by becoming the husband of a dead girl, the hitherto inconsequential Marmaduke achieves a comforting self-image as a bereaved widower. But the theme recurs throughout James's most serious fiction. As readers may especially recall,- In "The Altar of the Dead" Stransom a lmost w ishes that friends will die so that he can more securely possess them. In the early stories, some of the men are "Victorlan-age courtly lovers" who "cherish the idea of their own suffering" (32, 35). But even as late as The Awkward Age (1898), Mr. Longdon, a much more profound and sensitive person, resembles them in holding fast to his image of the dead Lady Julia and in trying to see her granddaughter Nanda as a fixed image reminiscent of Julia. Nanda, of course, does not remain static, though she regrets that she does not conform to the traditional concept of a lady. Similarly, despite contrary evidence, Strether, in The Ambassadors (1903), seeks to f it an idealized Madame de Vionnet as a central figure in a set piece of Parisian culture to be retained forever In his memory. Perhaps we could depart from Sicker's text to note that for Strether that memory will include the Image of Marie de Vionnet as a very human soul weeping unreservedly before him and thus will provide him, as it did his creator, ample substance for contemplating the eternal human predicament. This is surely the ultimate escape from solipsism. The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl , as Sicker demonstrates, have In common a preoccupation with both illusionary and true love. Densher and Kate are telepathic In mutual understanding, but because they have no imaginative appreciation of Mi I Iy or of the rest of humanity—Densher at last comes to this appreciation—they have in effect only a fused self-conscicusness that remains solipsistic So with Charlotte and the Prince and with Maggie and her father. They love what is like themselves, not what is distinct from their own mirror Images. In contrast, MiIIy transcends such self-merging in her love for Densher, and Maggie also eventually breaks the stifling bond when she comes to imagine the feelings of her husband. Strether, It could be added, has a telepathic relation with Maria Gostrey, but because of his attraction to Marie he is not the victim of a mere fusion of spirit. Sicker believes, as others may or may not, that at the end of The Golden Bowl Maggie is entrapped once again by the singleness of her love for the Prince as she was earlier by that for her father. Sicker reminds us that it...