Bodily Movement as Narrative Strategy in "The Beast in the Jungle"

Bodily Movement as Narrative Strategy in "The Beast in the Jungle" By liana Bar'am, Tel Aviv University "It may be said that, in a certain sense, to express anything is to compromise with one's dignity..." (PP 86) The above statement on the expressive mobility of the French face (as compared with the repose of the English mien) implicitly links body movement and cultural values. Although the domains of the body and geographical space have been a focus of critical attention in recent years, little notice has been taken of the medium that permits the interaction between them—bodily movement. In this analysis of James's "The Beast in the Jungle," I wish to examine the connection between, on one hand, attitudes toward the body and the kinds of bodily movement inscribed in nineteenth-century culture and, on the other, the way movement is represented in narrative discourse. Modes of physical movement derive from hierarchical cultural conceptions of the body. Western attitudes toward the body, from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, were polarized in the hierarchical extremes of high (classical) and low (grotesque) concepts of the body. According to Stallybrass and White, this high/low opposition is the structuring principle of all cultural categories (of which the body is one), a principle that is constantly subverted by contradiction, interpénétration, and transgression within these symbolic hierarchies.1 There is also interchange across the boundaries of categories, and what is excluded at one The Henry James Review 15 (1994): 170-78. © 1994, The Johns Hopkins University Press Bodily Movement in "The Beast in the Jungle" 171 level may be transcoded into a different one (Stallybrass and White 26). In this analysis, I aim to show how these oppositions, transcodings, and transgressions correspond to literary structures representing bodily movement. Another pair of cultural theorists has suggested that this hierarchical conception of the body interacts with what Hall calls "proxemics"—the significance of distance and closeness in physical relationships in space—to generate ideological meanings (see Hodge and Kress 52). These writers, however, apply their theory of "spatial codes" only to static human configurations and ignore the fact that bodily movement is the medium on which the interaction of body and space utterly depends, and in which the social construction of bodies and space is played out. In this paper, I propose that the representation of bodily movement in "The Beast in the Jungle" provides an important narratological tool for understanding the relations among agents (bodies) and between agents and setting, and also reveals cultural assumptions (about the body, self, gender) implicit in the text. James's story has been read as a tale of sexual repression in which the Beast is the unconscious symbol of Marcher's repressed sexuality. In her provocative essay "The Beast in the Closet," Eve Sedgwick argues that what is repressed is Marcher's homosexuality. Sedgwick maintains that Marcher exhibits the same blind conformity to "heterosexual compulsion" and denial of "male homosexual panic" to which James himself was subject (206). According to this reading, the very heart of the story—Marcher's discovery that nothing was to happen to him— is a narrative reinforcement of this imposed heterosexuality. Sedgwick's analysis is fascinating and, for the most part, persuasive; I contend, however, that the specific kind of sexuality—homo or hetero—is less important than the fact of repression itself. Moreover, I am treating repression not in a biographical sense but as symptomatic of a cultural repression of which James is a representative. In this analysis, I want to explore how the structures of bodily movement and stasis transcode with the representation of repression and "the wasting of life" (CN 112) on the psychological and ideological levels of the narrative. On the microlevel of structure, hierarchical order in the tale is expressed stylistically in terms of two broad rhetorical categories of literary expression—the nonmetaphorical and the metaphorical modes, which correspond to the classical/ grotesque conceptions of the body in Marcher's conception of himself. Drawing on Hrushovski's theory of primary and secondary frames of reference, I shall define as nonmetaphorical those structures of movement that appear in the primary world of the fiction...