The Roman Lotus: Digestion and Retrospect

This paper traces retrospective references to the constipation James suffered in Italy in 1869-1870 and 1873 in some non-fictional works of the fourth phase. Proposing an alternative to queer readings of James's constipation by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Gert Buelens, it argues that the temporal aspect of digestion – an assimilation over time – provides James with a metaphor for the retrospective processes of re-reading and alluding. In allusions to Tennyson's "The Lotos-Eaters" in the essay "Honoé de Balzac" (1902) and in William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903), James successfully digests the hazards and difficulties of his early experience of Europe.