Love, Identity, and Death: James' The Princess Casamassima Reconsidered

LOVE, IDENTITY, AND DEATH: JAMES' THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA RECONSIDERED Joel Salzburg It is perhaps unjamesian for a study of a James novel to draw attention to a seemingly self-evident and, by now, a tired modem problem. But at the risk of sounding aphoristic, the significance of the obvious is often slighted in extended analyses because it is supposedly self-explanatory. Thus, despite the continued critical interest that The Princess Casamassima has generated in the last twenty years, what I take to be its central theme—the relation between love and identity—has received curiously abbreviated critical treatment in this important transitional work.1 As a case in point, Lionel Trilling, in what is perhaps the most sensitive essay on the novel in the Fifties, observes in passing that "It is as a child that Hyacinth Robinson dies; that is, he dies of the withdrawal of love."2 The insight is acute, but the major thrust of his essay, hke so many commentaries contemporary with Trilling's, is primarily concerned with the social and political aspects of the novel to the neglect of its central truth. Reduced to its essence, the novel emerges as a study of how love galvanizes Hyacinth's identity into being and how lovdessness destroys it. As a form of thematic counterpoint, James explores the personal desperation of the Princess Casamassima and Lady Aurora, women whose futility and pointlessness lend perspective to the problems of his protagonist. Among recent critics, John L. Kimmey argues convincingly that there "is no more ambiguous [and bewildered] figure in all James," but unconvincingly that Hyacinth is tragic.8 While enlarging our understanding of 1WaItCT Dubler, "The Princess Casamassima: Its Place in the lames Canon," Modem Fiction Studies, 12 ( 1966), 44-60, sharply attacks the notion that The Princess Casamassima is an eccentricity in comparison to lames' other novels, and effectively demonstrates that it recapitulates the essential characteristics of the early and late lames. 2TlIe Princess Casamassima, The Liberal Imagination (New York: Anchor, 1953), p. 72. s"The Princess Casamassima and the Quality of Bewilderment," Nineteenth Century Fiction, 22 (1967), p. 47. Like Kimmey, Oscar Cargill, "The Princess Casamassima Beconsidered: A Critical Beappraisal," PMLA, 71 (1956), p. 116, inflates Hyacinth's role by attributing to him an "acute perceptiveness" which supposedly marks Hyacinth, like Hamlet, as tragic. Cargill, in making this judgment, seems to have confused Hyacinth's acute sensitivity with acute perceptiveness. James' hero has no real concept of social evil, lacks awareness of his companion's motives, and develops but one significant insight (much less a cumulative vision of life) about the world in which he fives. Typically Jamesian in his goodness and innocence, Hyacinth dies as a pathetic victim of his own anguish—he becomes figuratively if not literally ignored into death. In this connection Hyacinth's commitment to assassination for the anarchist cause is less ideological than psychological : he is motivated by his need to identify with the members of the movement rather than through moral conviction or loyalty. 127 128RMMLA BulletinWinter 1972 Hyacinth's functions and chararterization, he does not touch the heart of the novel as closely as D.G. Halliburton, whose essay rightly concerns itself with the nature of Hyacinth's identity problem. In essence, he feels that Hyacinth Robinson and die Princess Casamassima arrive at tentative setf-definition only through relating to the identities around them as appropriate models for social behavior, and he concludes that these models are largely taken from the revolutionary movement.4 Halliburton's otherwise stimulating essay tends to be simplistic in this conclusion, for it ignores the emotional ties that are quietly generated in Hyacinth's associations, but are nevertheless decisive in the development of his sense of self. Perhaps this is due to our matter-offart acceptance of a basic Jamesian type; Le., the American (or orphaned American) in Europe, seeking to extend his consdousness and identity primarily through interaction with his social milieu and contacts. We are rarely, if ever, cued to examine the emotional spillover of his friendships, except in this unusual context. Consequently, critics in general have given little attention to the human dynamic of Hyacindi's relationships, even though it is the controlling...