Henry James and the "Woman Business" (review)

Book Reviews Alfred Habegger. Henry James and the "Woman Business." New York: Cambridge U P, 1989. 281 pp. $34.50. Alfred Habegger's Henry James and the "Woman Business" is a provocative and informed refutation of T. S. Eliot's oft-quoted remark mat Henry James "had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it." Habegger's study situates James's early fictional representations of women in üie historical, literary, biographical, and psychological contexts capable of foregrounding the density of James's novelistic imagination, its responsiveness to undercurrents of familial, social, and gender struggle. What emerges from Habegger's reading is a truly new sense of James's tense loyalty to his father's ideas relating to women's issues and the sexual radicalism of midcentury American culture, his involvement and competition with a latter-day "mob of scribbling women," and his complex relationship to his cousin, Minnie Temple. Habegger negotiates the interrelationships among these areas of cultural practice and individual imagination in James's early work, culminating in two sustained and impressive readings of The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians. The reader leaves Habegger's study with a decidedly new sense of Henry James and the "woman business," but also with much more. Habegger constructs an impressive biographical scenario of vast importance for James's early work. First, at least in a chronological sense, is the impact of the elder James's career and influence on his namesake. Habegger's work in mis area offers important correctives to previous assessments of this area of James's life. Resisting the tendency to see in Henry James, Sr., a "strenuously original reconstruction of die Calvinism he thought he left behind in his youth" (29), Habegger returns to me father's own works and clarifies a philosophy of women and of marriage consistendy dedicated to maintaining beliefs in a totally separate women's sphere and in women's intellectual inferiority. Habegger outlines tiie beliefs of James, Sr., on marriage, for instance: "The history of each man and of civilization itself follows the same path: First man glimpses in the 'downcast eyes' of the woman he has enslaved a radiant glory; he binds himself to her for life; and eventually the confinement of marriage proves to be a saving discipline for him through which he transcends himself [and the beastly carnality of his own nature]" (35). But Ulis image itself is Üie product of personal struggle, and Habegger nicely traces the elder James's own experimentation with sexual radicalism and Fourieristic Utopian communities, suggesting Üie instability and rhetorical hazards of his voluminous writings on me "woman business." While Habegger grants the difficulty of knowing with any certainty just how deeply embedded the father's lessons were in the son, he does document the younger James's dedication to and affirmation of his father's contradictory sexual thinking, primarily by often referring to three statements made by Henry Jr. in 1870 endorsing energetically and ramer warmly Üie major drift of his father's thinking about women and their difference. The suggestiveness of Habegger's account of the father's influence on the son is one of the major strengths of mis study—though he does overstate his biographical argument at times—and his sensitivity to such unevenness and stress remains operative throughout. James's relationship with his cousin, Minnie Temple, constitutes the second biographical strand in Habegger's argument (he pays decidedly less attention to William and Alice James, though one wonders how much more iUuminating this book could have been had the siblings been brought more clearly into die picture). Temple's vivacious personal force and the strength of her ideas function in Habegger's recreation of James's early fictional work: "Minnie simultaneously enabled James to distance himself from his oppressive father-philosopher and to write about the sort of person his father preached should not exist—die independent woman without family who affronted the world. Minnie Temple became Henry James's heroine, and in so doing brought his imagination to life" The Henry James Review 12 (1991): 282-303 © 1991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Book Reviews 283 (140). However, the tension and struggle that Habegger...