The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James (review)

314 The Henry James Review was published in the Century for November (99), "Tina Aspern" is a slip for Tina Bordereau in The Aspern Papers (86), and the "Count Gemini" is referred to instead of the Countess Gemini in The Portrait of a Lady (127), to mention three examples. A few matters relating to biography are debatable. Constance Fenimore Woolson's "suicide" has never been proved beyond a doubt and yet Maini refers to it on three occasions (381, 383, 384) without remarking on the problematical circumstances surrounding her death as given in John D. Kern's Constance Fenimore Woolson (1934) and in Rayburn S. Moore's Constance Fenimore Woolson (1963), or as summarized in Robert L. Gale's Henry James Encyclopedia (1989). Nor, seemingly, is there any doubt in Maini's view about Woolson's socalled "love" for James, though the evidence for this passion is quite tenuous and based upon inference. Moreover, despite James's reaction to her death (he, too, inferred that it had not been accidental and reacted accordingly, but he was not in Venice when she died), there is no discussion in the appropriate chapters of the Companion of James's possible use of this experience in such works as The Ambassadors, "The Beast in the Jungle," "The Jolly Corner," or "The Bench of Desolation." Indeed, the tales as a whole receive far less coverage than they deserve. But, as Fogel points out early on, no one volume can include everything, and there is actually God's plenty in CHJS, as the work undoubtedly will be cited. All serious students of James will use it with gratitude. Priscilla L. Walton. The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992. viii + 179 pp. $40.00. By Linda Wagner-Martin, University of North Carolina Professor Walton's study opens many of James's texts judiciously and reasonably. Bringing dominating elements of feminist theoretical approaches into James criticism is long overdue: Walton's critique provides readers with strategies for legitimating their gendered sympathies. She begins by setting out the rules of her critical discourse. She assumes most readers are comfortable thinking of James and his work as Realist, a trope she labels Masculine even as she questions its efficacy. Using the theories of Pierre Macheray and Louis Althusser, she contends that the best of James's work is polysemous and therefore Feminine. It accordingly deserves reading with attention to polyvocality, gaps and indeterminacies, and openness. As Walton notes, "The absences within the works manifest the 'pleasure of the text,' for they enable readers to create meanings and characters to create fictions; they generate textual Book Reviews 315 'jouissance' "(163). Her study, then, is an attempt to explicate ways of reading the "plural and immeasurable possibilities" of James's work. Walton's introducing her position and her terms in a section on "The Turn of the Screw" is both helpful and provocative. Claiming that the text "undercuts its own supposed Realist impetus when it generates indeterminacies and contradictions that disrupt Realist readings of it," she uses historical readings juxtaposed with her own careful views of narrative to prompt the reader to accept new arguments, pointing out that James's purpose in the text is to question its supposedly Realist plot (3-4). About the differences in the visions of the governess and Mrs. Grose, for example, Walton privileges the view of the latter because Mrs. Grose "sees nothing." Therefore, according to the critic, "This scene functions, allegorically, as a Realist/referential critique, since what the governess has made 'clear' returns to its original indeterminate and inconclusive 'Other' state" (1112 ). In her conclusion to this discussion, Walton assumes that "femininity and absence" are the same—and are similarly unknowable as James creates them. For that reason, she summarizes, the tale itself remains inconclusive, and the role of critic is bound to be frustrated. Unfortunately, in the early 1990s we are far from agreement about the word Femininity; and to draw upon its resources to counter narrow, Masculinist readings might be to open a box larger than Pandora's. So long as the reader stays within the parameters Walton provides, conscious of the way she has...