Henry James

ELT : VOLUME 35:4 1992 chapters clean the Augean stables.) I also agree, grosso modo, with his remarks about a decadent drift in the profession. But remarks, it has been said, are not literature. Neither are they critical theory, nor criticism of theory. Avrom Fleishman The Johns Hopkins University Henry James MillicentBell. Meaning in Henry James. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. xiii + 384pp. $45.00 IN THE INTRODUCTION to this comprehensive, chronologically organized study of James's work, which begins with Daisy Miller and concludes with The Ambassadors (following The Wings of the Dove), Millicent Bell links her critical practice as a reader to that of James's own freedom-seeking protagonists. Contextualizing her method by setting it off from both reader-reception and deconstructionist theory, Bell offers an adventure in "impressionistic" meaning-making predicated on noting "what comes up as it comes up," resisting a single line of narrative truth while recognizing the inevitability of salient ideas, since "our minds are machines for making constructs." For Bell, James's delight in the riches of consciousness is mirrored in the impressionism he promotes in the reader, who experiences his narrative as a "jostling progression through provisional interpretations," encountering and discarding possibilities of meaning encoded in plot and character types whose traces may remain with us, even after a story is "solved." like Lambert Strether who serves as Bell's culminating example of the generous reader of life, when we "engage... in the temporary imagining of fictions other than the one that emerges as final . . . these have a status in our imagination . . . that. . . cannot be altogether expunged. When revelation comes it cannot have the significance it might once have had." There is wit in Bell's aim to make the reader the ultimate Jamesian protagonist—and in terms of explicating James's compositional adventures she succeeds. Bell's strength is in textual analysis. Her multiplex mode of slow reflective reading testifies to a long encounter with James and yields much insightful commentary on the design and designs of character and plot. Her appraisal of verbal implication is always subtle and judicious. In discussions of The Spoils ofPoynton and "The Aspern Papers" she gives full weight to James's ambivalent relation to aesthet522 BOOK REVIEWS icism and his recognition of its appeal to the materialistic appetite. She is excellent on the larger theme she finds in the work of James's middle years, "possession as a mode of relationship to life," which leads into a fine discussion of the Manichean world view of the governess in The Turn of the Screw. But there are "final meanings, after all." Hers lies in the pursuit of James's concern with freedom which she explores as a constant textual struggle—at once thematic and structural—between the realist aesthetic which emphasizes the conditioned nature of identity and the romantic one which resists fate and seeks an ever-expanding openness to the possibilities of life. Bell finds this tension concentrated in James's treatment of the marriage plot which she considers the key structural feature of his work, because it is the primary evidence of the individual's bond to society. "James's resistance to a marriage solution for his characters is thus the most conspicuous sign of his resistance to prescriptive form, an assumption of finalized being, an end to potentiality." James, she argues, identified most closely with his female protagonists because the condition of women, so dependent for social survival upon the constraints of marriage, reflects "more absolutely, the human condition as he sees it." It is for this reason, one assumes, that Bell has structured her book largely as a study of James's successive heroines and the qualities that connect them to one another. There are, however, limitations to Bell's approach which become apparent in her chapter, "Isabel Archer and the Affronting of Plot." Bell believes that although Isabel's high hopes for herself end in failure, James's refusal of closure allows Isabel to keep her destiny open. It is because she never does achieve the status of portrait which the title promises and which would fix her forever in a rigid social frame that our sense of her possibilities...