Henry James, Women and Realism (review)

In an era that witnessed an American president who styled himself, without discernable irony, as "The Decider," ambivalence, as an analytical category and an affective posture, may seem either dated or dangerous. Political conservatives at the turn of the twenty-first century have often read uncertainty and equivocation as signs of weakness and interest in negotiation as a symptom of naivete. In Henry James, Women and Realism, however, Victoria Coulson argues that ambivalence was the restive stance of James and the conservative women writers who variously loved, admired, and rivaled him. In chapters that are themselves an ambivalent hybrid of biography and literary criticism, Coulson situates James's fiction alongside the writings of his younger sister Alice, his would-be lover Constance Fennimore Woolson, and his friend Edith Wharton. In each instance, Coulson marshals detailed close readings to show how Woolson, Wharton, and the Jameses reconciled realism's signature concerns (referential meaning, parental prerogative, and middle-class norms of separate spheres) with their opposites: metaphorical play, non-familial or queer affiliations, and the imbrication of public and private. The simultaneous urge to comply with and resist bourgeois authority yields what Coulson calls "ambivalent realism": the "productive equivocation" between various social and aesthetic binaries—fact and fiction, autonomy and contingency, purity and contamination (8). In the tradition of Eric Haralson, Ann Ardis, and Leslie W. Lewis, Coulson rejects a supposedly decisive rupture between the twentieth-century's rebellious modernists and their nineteenth-century realist forebears in favor of a more complex account of turn-of-the-century American literary history. Indeed, with recent critics, Coulson insists that "modernism has its roots, its auguries, its restless beginnings in the expatriate lives of the ambivalent realists," whose work, she argues, manifests a "disavowable estrangement from the status quo . . . [an] anxious, alert apprehension of change . . . and [the] discovery of feminine experience as a synonym for the resisting self" (10).

In making these claims, Coulson follows James's life chronologically—from his upbringing in a father-dominated family as a child, to the sexual diffidence that characterized his relationship with Woolson at midlife, and finally to the anxious longing for an audience that informed his late-life friendship and rivalry with Wharton. For Coulson, James's art is profoundly relational, a "shared object of communion within a culture whose inner boundaries [were] shifting" (24). In fact, only one chapter of Henry James, Women and Realism is devoted exclusively to James, and in this section Coulson shows how his writings miscarried when he drained them of familial, erotic, or companionate interaction. Here, Coulson's representative text is The Tragic Muse (1890), a novel she finds "surprisingly boring" (69) due in large part to the actress-heroine, Miriam Rooth, a character completely "free from interiority" and familial origins (82). In dissociating Miriam from the conventional touchstones of cultural authority (a backstage existence, a demanding parent), James experiments with a kind of radical representational practice in which signifier wanders further afield of signified, just as public identity loses its hold on a private counterpart. Released from semantic and experiential constraints, The Tragic Muse is "so uninvested, so unburdened by affect, that it, too, is safe from hermeneutic violation" (85). Like the content-free Verena Tarrant of The Bostonians, Miriam is a "wishful projection" of James himself—an artist liberated entirely from her referential matrix by virtue of a wholly theatricalized identity. This "fatal freedom," however, is neither productive nor interesting, Coulson contends, for inasmuch as "children are at risk from their parents, and survive by contesting the originary authority of their familial past," so "representation is a parallel struggle between the semantic authority of origins and the lure of metaphorical possibility" (92). Without this "generative conflict," realism fails to elicit its trademark tension and interest.

If Henry James experienced an unexpectedly euphoric sense of liberation and relief in the wake of his parents' deaths, his sister Alice found no such release. A realist in the literary and vernacular senses of the term, Alice saw birth as...