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"Doing Good by Stealth": Alice Staverton and Women's Politics in "The Jolly Corner" by Russell J. Reising, Marquette University At the conclusion of "The Jolly Corner" Spencer Brydon recovers consciousness (after swooning at the sight of his double) in the lap of his friend, Alice Staverton. In sharp contrast to the complex and sometimes violent imagery of Brydon's experience throughout the extraordinary middle section of the tale, the mood of the brief, concluding section is mild and conciliatory. Significantly, it is Alice Staverton, not Brydon, who dominates that final scene, both physically and verbally. The barely conscious Brydon is aware, as he comes to, of his head "pillowed in extraordinary softness and faintly re-freshing fragrance ... and he finally knew that Alice Staverton had made her lap an ample and perfect cushion to him" (JC 478). Throughout this section Brydon and Staverton engage in a remarkably conventional and sentimental dialogue. Brydon, for example, remarks, 'Yes—I can only have died. You brought me literally to life. Only,' he wondered, his eyes rising to her, 'only, in the name of all benedictions, how?' It took her but an instant to bend her face and kiss him, and something in the manner of it, and in the way her hands clasped and locked his head while he felt the cool charity and virtue of her lips, something in all this beatitude somehow answered everything. 'And now I keep you,' she said. 'Oh keep me, keep me!' he pleaded while her face still hung over him: in response to which it dropped again and stayed close, clingingly close. (JC 480) The tale ends with an embrace, projecting this emotionally lush and intimate final scene into an implicitly romantic future. Too sentimental? Perhaps. StaverThe Henry James Review 13 (1992): 50-66 © 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Women's Politics in "The Jolly Corner" 51 ton's clasping and locking Brydon's head as she stays clingingly close, however, jars with the cloying tone of these final lines and much of the con-eluding of the tale. "The Jolly Corner" has been regarded solely and obviously as an examination of Spencer Brydon's character and crisis, and James criticism has marginalized Brydon's friend, Alice Staverton, viewing her as an appendage to the "hero" of the tale. Critics offer hope that Spencer Brydon will achieve a sense of psychic wholeness "through [this] woman's unselfish, all comprehending love," or view Staverton as Brydon's conscience, as "the integrating spirit, the principle of divine love which makes selfhood possible in the fullest sense," as a "prize" for Brydon, as an "all-forgiving, all accepting mother figure," embodying the "redemptive power of love," as an "example for the reader of the tale" (by virtue of her understanding the complex figurative reality of Brydon's vision), and as a "frame character," whose "most important function is to be sensitively aware of those muffled vibrations" of Brydon's.1 Such readings share the view that the tale valorizes Brydon's priorities, while Staverton is valuable primarily insofar as she validates his identity. Such readings do not take as problematic either the uncharacteristic sentimentality of the final scene or the appropriative implications of Staverton's locking and keeping Brydon.2 Nonetheless, while viewing Staverton as typical of many women in James's tales—more a passive sounding-board for a man's ideas than an active participant in the narrative action—may be normative, it is not, I feel, correct and should not go unexamined. In fact, Alice Staverton's role in "The Jolly Corner," like so much of that tale, is an anomaly in James's canonical short fiction. Staverton, no less than Brydon, is situated in a complex historical and political world that, in her case, defines and constrains her options, priorities, and rhetorical strategies as a woman in turn-of-the-century United States. The historical frame of James's tale encompasses the later half of the nineteenth century (Brydon leaves the United States as a young man at about the time of the Civil War and returns just after the turn of the century), and James's representation of Staverton draws extensively...

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