Frames in James: The Tragic Muse, The Turn of the Screw, What Maisie Knew, and The Ambassadors (review)

310 The Henry James Review Paul G. Beidler. Frames in James: The Tragic Muse, The Turn of the Screw, What Maisie Knew, and The Ambassadors . English Literary Studies, No. 59. Victoria, British Columbia: U of Victoria P, 1993. 108 pp. $9.50. By Joseph R. Urgo, Bryant College Paul Beidler is working from two major premises, one familiar and the other quite innovative. The first is an exploration of what James called "the analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist." Beidler's goal in this instance is "a philosophical analysis of the Jamesian novel as painting" (13). So far, so good, historically speaking. It was a commonplace of late nineteenthcentury literary criticism to find aesthetic parallels in the arts, especially in sculpture and painting. Beidler's second premise distinguishes his argument. It is less common to locate the parallel between art and fiction "beside" the aesthetic subject; specifically, in the necessity of a frame to border, limit, and contextualize the work. For this second premise, Beidler draws on Derrida's essay "Parergon" (from The Truth in Painting), in which Derrida inverts the normative aesthetic hierarchy that places the painting in precedence over the frame. In "Parergon," "attention is focused on the frame rather than the painting, the preface rather than the book, and the marginal rather than the primary" (13-14). According to Beidler, "The importance of Derrida's theory of the parergon to literary criticism lies in the fact that the incapability of attaining true primacy (or complete presence) and the need to somehow overcome this handicap by juxtaposition with an 'other' are characteristics of both the work of art and the human spirit" (15). As a result, Beidler suggests, contemporary literary critics turn their attention to the function of frames, borders, and margins as contextualizing devices, identifying them as intellectual regions without which we would have no conception of focus, of structure, or of (to invoke James) the real thing. The insights into specific novels that emerge from this Derridian concept are rich enough to sustain the monograph with very few weaknesses. For example, on What Maisie Knew: "Maisie's own role...is that of a parergon: she is not an integral part of the family, but she frames it....Though Maisie is unwanted, she is necessary; the family would collapse without her... .Maisie, like the column that holds up a building, is both necessary and excluded from the goings-on inside....Without Maisie, her father and Miss Overmore would be exposed as adulterers. The lack that necessitates the frame, then, is simply the lack of decency. A presence is required to atone for this absence, and Maisie is that presence" (61). Or, concerning the Lambinet chapter in The Ambassadors: "if Strether is in the book but not in the story, where exactly is he? He is observing the world, looking at it as a detached and disinterested connoisseur because he is Book Reviews 311 in the frame of the story. Strether jumps, in fact, from his story to ours in the Lambinet chapter" (85). It is at this point in his argument, however; that Beidler rises above the level of one-more-reading of familiar texts, theory-in-hand. A question arises: Must the frame be outside the work of art? The Lambinet section occurs within the text of The Ambassadors, and yet functions as a preface. "The chapters can be called a preface because they disclose, in a completely different style and mode than the rest of the novel, a truth that cannot be expressed in the work but must be expressed of the work. This truth, like those truths that fill the prefaces in The Art of the Novel, can only exist in exclusion" (88). Critics have struggled throughout the second-half of the twentieth century to define this phenomenon. Readers will recall the discussion of "framing devices" in the 1950s, "meta-commentary" in the 1960s, or the "self-reflexive" modes of the 1970s. Indeed, at times Beidler's language is reminiscent of earlier critical generations: "Life becomes art and art becomes life, and the result of this art-within-life-within-art—all within the confines of a...