Bringing It All Back Home: Henry James and the Mother-Complex

WENDY GRAHAM Bringing It All Back Home: Henry James and the Mother-Complex In the following review ofjames's relationship with certain of his family members, as seen through the lens of Fteudian and postFreudian psychoanalysis, I posit connections between these relationships , James's sexuality, and his literary productions. However, I want to address an obvious problem with employing Freudian concepts of homosexuality before proceeding. Implicit in Sigmund Freud's various formulations is the notion that failure to identify with the homogenital parent and to take the parent ofthe opposite sex as a love-object results in regression to the pre-genital stages of development.1 Freud's successors from Carl Jung to WR.D. Fairbairn also view homosexuality as a regressive phenomenon.2 This failure to consider the psychical factors underlying homosexual object-choice is to deny that choice its rightful status as an alternative to heterosexual development. It was Freud, after all, who pointed out that "normal sexuality too depends upon a restriction in the choice of object."3 As a reader ofjames's fiction, letters, and autobiographical volumes, as a visitor to James's early emotional experiences and fantasies, I am interested in his motivation for repudiating heterosexual intimacy. I believe this renunciation has more to do with disappointment in his mother's love than with homosexual panic, a theory which does not fully explain why James never detached his passions from their earliest emotional sources.4 I hope to demonstrate that James's celibacy is not incompatible with conscious homoerotism. In highlighting James's Arizona Quarterly Volume 54, Number 1, Spring 1998 Copyright © 1998 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1610 28Wendy Graham sexual fantasies, I have no intention of judging his petsonal maturity, morality, or well-being. My aim is to modify a specific psychoanalytic characterization ofHenry James as an emotional eunuch and to suggest how object-relations theory may yet lead to a better understanding of James's sexual persona. Ever since Harry Guntrip in 1969 called James "a relatively 'normal' schizoid personality," it has been difficult to see beyond James's emotional detachment, his "evasion ofpermanent ties."5 Certainly, James's contradictory longing for and avoidance of intimacy are characteristic of the 'in-and-out' pattern of the schizoid personality, which exhibits a regressive urge to remain dependent and a developmental need to establish a separate identity. In "The Sense of Desolation in Henry James" (1977), B. D. Horwitz picked up where Guntrip left off, identifying James's libidinal investment in his mother as a key factor in his sexual anesthesia. Horwitz identified patterns of regression, as well as repression of anger, in many ofjames's male characters, reflecting their need to maintain a dependency relationship with an unreliable mothet.6 Regression to the natcissistic stage is obvious in "The Great Good Place" (1900) where the story's characters are said to dwell like "babes at the breast."7 Henry James addressed his mother as "Mammy" throughout her lifetime, a moniker associated with her powers as a wet nurse. Mrs. James understood the source of Henry's affection for her. She reminds her lonely, homesick son of the comforts of the maternal bosom shortly after he moved to London: "your life must need this succulent, fattening element more than you know yourself."8 The memory of separation from the maternal breast produces a sense of exclusion in James. He represents earthly glory through a maternal metaphor in A Small Boy and Others. When young Henry spied the infant prince of Second Empire France on parade in his carriage, the first privilege of royalty that came to mind was that of having first tit: "the baby Prince Imperial borne forth for his airing or his progress to Saint Cloud in the splendid coach that gave a glimpse of appointed and costumed nursing breasts and laps, and beside which the cent-gardes, all light-blue and silver and intensely etect quick jolt, rattled with pistols raised and cocked."9 However, the novelist expresses his cynicism about the ideality of the mother-infant bond in The Princess Casamassima (1886), where the protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, imagines the eponymous heroine, a kind of nineteenth-century Jane Fonda...