Hawthorne, James, and the Fall of Allegory in Roderick Hudson

158 The Henry James Review Portrait James dramatizes a different aspect of female experience, which may also provide an alternate female form of doubt. This is female sexuaUty itself. Isabel's final confrontation with Goodwood is made expUcitly to reconstruct and recaU several earlier scenes of Isabel's confrontations with male sexuality and hence (diough she doesn't reatize it eartier) with her own. The scene also recaUs Isabel's powerful death-wish on the train ride back to England, which is diere rendered in closely-affiUated sexual images. In her encounter with Goodwood, when the white lightning of his kiss spreads tiiroughout her, Isabel experiences her own sexual being and reaUzes its utter inaccessibiUty to concrete knowledge, representation, and control. This is the "nothing" Isabel sees as she moves through darkness to her "way" back to her daughter. Isabel, who "had not known where to rum," knows "now." Her rum must be, like Hester's at the end of The Scarlet Letter, a return. On the one hand, tiiis is a return to social responsibilities, in Isabel's case to the obligations of mothering. It is also, however, a re-turn, in the sense of a turning again toward something from which one has turned away. For Isabel, as for Hester, tiiis re-turn is back toward the inescapable conditions of shadow and doubt, toward the nothing, of which her own sexual being is one figure. Shadow, doubt, and sexuality may, as the imagery suggests, prompt us toward death, as one solution to die uncertainty of existence. Or it may turn us, or return us, to Ufe. What awaits Isabel upon her re-turn is not knowledge but the possibiUty for what CaveU caUs acknowledgment. Such acknowledgment makes Isabel, in James's word, "free": for to acknowledge is neither to possess or to be possessed by the world and otiier people (the condition threatened by Goodwood's love for her) but freely to choose to engage other people and be engaged by them, without any binding knowledge of what, indeed, defines such engagement. For James, as for Hawthorne, to parent, as to love, is not to enter into a chain of inevitabilities and certainties, biological or otherwise. Rather it is to choose the path of acknowledgment, however straight and narrow and shaded by doubt. To choose Pansy is to choose Ufe, and to choose life in this particular way is also, as Ralph knows, to choose love—though what constitutes that love neither Isabel nor we can ever reaUy know. Sheila Teahan—Hawthorne, James, and the Fall of Allegory in Roderick Hudson Roderick Hudson is perhaps the single work of the James corpus in which the presence of Hawthorne is most strongly felt. As many critics have noted, the novel is particularly indebted to The Marble Faun, whose plot of American expatriate artists in Europe James appropriates and develops into the "international theme" that recurs through the major line of his works. Further, Roderick Hudson reopens the questions of transmission, originality, and belatedness that had been staged in The Marble Faun, which expUcitly tiiematizes the relation between American artists and their European forebears. In his preface to the novel, Hawthorne laments the impossibUity of writing what he terms "romance" in America, "a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity," a passage that James was to echo in his critical study of Hawtiiorne written in 1879, four years after Roderick Hudson. The Marble Faun is haunted by a sense of tiie Selected Papers on Henry James, 1988-1990 159 inevitable belatedness of an indigenous American art: the character Miriam, for example, argues that sculpture is an exhausted art form, incapable of producing original works, and throughout The Marble Faun, as in Roderick Hudson, the city of Rome operates as a figure for the stagnant, paralyzing, even pestilential weight of the past. Like The Marble Faun, Roderick Hudson is expUcitly concerned witii problems of artistic identity; the entire novel turns on the question of whether Roderick wiU develop his own voice as an artist or be reduced to the stature of mere copyist, like Hilda in The...