The Feminine Orphan and the Emergent Master: Self-Realization in Henry James

The Feminine Orphan and the Emergent Master: Self-Realization in Henry James by William Veeder, University of Chicago It was of course an impression then obscurely gathered, but into which one was later to read strange passages___and indeed [I] have a strong impression that I didn't at any moment quite know what I was writing about: I am sure I couldn't otherwise have written so much.—(A Small Boy and Others) There is a coherence to Henry James that enables us to bring together basic questions of biography, literary form, and genre. Keeping in mind recent critical admonitions against totalization, I believe I can demonstrate that central to the structure of James's personality was a self-representation that appeared in his childhood, helped shape his adulthood and his fiction from The Portrait of a Lady to The Golden Bowl, and found express articulation in his autobiography. Henry James, like us all, spent his days (and nights) attempting to realize himself, to make exigent who he was and could be. Essential to this process was the creation of a self-representation composed of two figures: one drawn from fantasy, the other from American culture. The fantasy figure is an orphan positioned in a bizarre version of Freud's family romance. This figure James combines with a phenomenon of his culture, the American girl. The compulsive repetition of the feminine orphan throughout James's life and art allows us some purchase on basic questions of biography (where did the self-representation come from and what psychological work did it do?), of literary form (how does the selfrepresentation help shape The Portrait and subsequent novels and tales through the major phase?), and genre (how does autobiography relate to biography? how can we take as "fact" what is posited five decades later in a time of stress and in a mode intensely rhetorical?). Embedded in all these questions is the issue of gender. If self-realization is envisioned by Henry James in terms of "becom[ing] a (sufficiently) great man" (Edel II, 105), why does this process require accommodation with, and indeed assumption of, the role of woman in a culture puritanical and capitalist? Why, in other words, does James need two figures to facilitate self-realization, the orphan of family romance and the heroine of the Gilded Age? I. FIGURES OF FANTASY: DEFENSE AND COMPENSATION With his "imagination of disaster" Henry James felt threatened from his earliest years to his final days, threatened by an intimation of absence, a sense of lack at the center of human existence, a fear of castration and extermination. Danger The Henry James Review 12(1991): 20-54 © 1991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press The Feminine Orphan and the Emergent Master 21 emanated both from within his family and from the culture outside. Against each danger James defended himself by developing a compensatory fantasy. At home young Henry felt threatened, as Edel and others have shown, by the lethal weakness of Henry Sr., by the smothering strength of Mary Walsh James, and by the frenetic intrusivenessness of his brothers. How does Henry defend himself? He fantasizes a bizarre version of family romance.1 James says of himself as a child, "I seemed to have been constantly eager to exchange my lot for that of somebody else" (SB 175). Normally when a child imagines himself somebody else, he imagines somebody grand, some crown prince whose real parents are the King and Queen. Though young Henry James occasionally engages in such fantasies, his core family romance is more bizarre.2 In describing a cousin, Henry exults that "this genial girl, like her brother, was in the grand situation of having no home" (SB 188). The homeless orphan: here is the ideal. In James's negative version of the family romance, parents are replaced not by monarchs but by corpses. Or rather, by absences. "I think my first childish conception of the enviable lot, formed amid these associations, was to be little fathered or mothered" (SB 14). James clarifies what is idyllic about orphanhood when he explains why "cousin Albert, still another of the blest orphans" (SB 120), surpasses even the genial girl: she was encumbered by...