Henry James and Masculinity: The Man at the Margins (review)

224 The Henry James Review K. Barnett's Authority and Speech: Language, Society and Self in the American Novel (1993), and Jonathan Freedman's Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (1990). Certainly Bell's Washington Square: Styles of Money is a richly instructive voice in such a dialogue. Kelly Cannon. Henry James and Masculinity: The Man at the Margins. New York: St. Martin's, 1994. 180 pp. $39.95. By Leland S. Person, Southern Illinois University Since I have been working on a study of James and masculinity for some time, readers should be aware that I bring special interests and, undoubtedly, special biases to Kelly Cannon's Henry James and Masculinity. As the first extensive study of the subject, Professor Cannon's book offers a provocative introduction that all subsequent critics will have to engage. His subtitle, however, more accurately describes his focus—on marginal characters who happen to be male rather than on theoretical questions about James's representation or construction of masculine identity. Notable for deviating from normative masculinity, which Cannon equates simply with aggressiveness and heterosexual passion, James's marginal men suggest his "consciousness of alternative masculinity" and his desire to unsettle rather than to appease the "reader's longing for conventional manhood" (1). Cannon posits a straight line of descent (in chapter one) from Rowland Mallet to Ralph Touchett to Hyacinth Robinson to Lambert Strether, and to James himself—each character evidencing his "impaired" manhood by a lack of aggressiveness and desire for women. This gallery of geldings is ingenious, but predicated on a relatively simplistic definition of "conventional manhood" and, in turn, of male characters' deviations from the norm. Given Cannon's subject—and subtitle—Kaja Silverman's Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992) could have provided useful theoretical ballast; her chapter on James, separately published in 1988 (in Novel), could have illuminated Cannon's analyses of many male characters. As it is, Cannon deals only lightly with theoretical questions involving , for example, the social and/or literary construction of gender identity. Is the marginality he cites simply a condition experienced by many male characters, or is it a condition rooted in masculinity as James conceives it in the late 1800s? Provocatively, however, Cannon does argue that male characters' displacement to the social margins signifies both positively and negatively. That is, marginalization signifies the absence of certain conventional masculine attributes , but it also provides a liberated space. "What James's work finally catalogs, " he asserts, " is not an escape from the margins, but a full embrace of that Book Reviews 225 space" (8). I am not always convinced that the embrace is "full," but the case certainly deserves to be argued. The best chapter in this respect is the second—on the "Private Fictions" that James's marginal males compose to compensate for their marginal conditions. Like James, Cannon argues, these marginal males battle society's "conventional image of masculinity (physical aggression, heterosexual activity)" and yearn "for atypicality (androgyny, homosexuality, passivity)" (41). The results: alternative constructs of male selfhood that protect characters from "internalizing" a "sense of worthlessness," which society would inscribe (32). Rowland Mallet's "in-between" status, for instance, produces imaginative and behavioral failure because he cannot write himself into the role of lover, opting instead for the role of "betrayed father" (45). While the narrator of The Aspern Papers more successfully imagines himself a "scholar-conqueror," he ends up being a "monster" because he denies his heterosexuality. More successful, in Cannon's view, is Lambert Strether because he composes several alternative male selves, including little boy and old man, as well as "an alternative masculinity of surrender as opposed to aggression, risking his survival in a heterosexual society" (51). Cannon's terms and what they suggest about his notion of James's imagination will strike many readers as overly rigid, stereotypical , and totalizing, but the idea of alternative male fictions itself cogently explains James's conception of male possibilities. With help from Michel Foucault, Jeffrey Weeks, and other sexologists in chapter three ("Sexual Surprise"), Cannon surveys various strategies James uses to discover and represent marginal sexual satisfactions, to avoid passionate heterosexual experience without representing a full-blown...