Henry James' Narrative Technique: Consciousness, Perception, and Cognition (review)

This is a book about impressions, and the first impression it makes is a surprising one: despite its title, the book is only peripherally concerned with Henry James's narrative technique. It is not a narratological study, and matters of style and perspective are of secondary relevance to its argument. The subtitle does not give much away either, but it does gesture toward the broad field of nineteenth-century philosophy from which the study takes its interpretive approach. Kristin Boudreau's engaging, readable study places James's writing in intellectual proximity to pragmatic empiricism, which he would have encountered in the thought of Emerson, Dewey, Peirce, and, not least, his brother William. Taking her cue from T. S. Eliot's much-quoted pronouncement that James "had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it," she argues that "idea" at the time meant something very like "ideology" and was distinguished from what Eliot called "thinking with our feeling" in his review (and "sensibility" later, it seems to me) (xi). She traces this distinction back to the opposition between Emerson's call for spontaneous, sensual perception and the elder Henry James's communitarian idealism, which in his sons' view put preconceived principles above direct experience. Seen against this intellectual background, James the novelist emerges as an admirer of "Emersonian virtues of surprise, bewilderment, and spontaneity" whose works "confront his readers with the problem of how to decipher the world . . . without embracing dogmatism in the hope of a plain answer" (23-24).

Boudreau's first chapter, on The Bostonians, not only proves her point about James's preference for sensitive perception but is itself a model of sensitive, perceptive reading. Rather than side with any of the various ideologies presented in the novel, she carefully dissects these ideologies and examines their effects on the characters, especially on Olive and Verena. Both women are deeply emotional and thus given to "thinking with their feelings," and both come into contact with an ideological feminism that, as embodied by Miss Birdseye, requires complete submission of individual feeling and personality to the cause. While the two friends respond very differently to this challenge, Boudreau shows that each response is characterized by an excess of feeling. Verena understands the reasoning behind feminism but does not feel oppressed, so that her loyalty to its principles remains tentative and is ultimately submerged by her feelings for Ransom. Olive, by contrast, adopts feminism wholeheartedly because she has always felt disadvantaged, but unlike Miss Birdseye she cannot repress divergent aspects of her personality, such as her purely aesthetic response to music. In constant struggle with her emotions, Olive emerges from this reading as a rather likeable figure and as the focal point of James's own reflections on the manifold tensions to which she is exposed. Against the many ideological interpretations The Bostonians has seen, Boudreau commendably stresses that "we should be careful to distinguish between the content and the form" of the politics the novel discusses, and she points out that James is criticizing the "impersonal, abstract" quality of political ideology in general rather than of specific policies (33). To adopt her terminology, The Bostonians is a novel of thinking and feeling more than a novel of ideas.

Chapter 2 takes these dynamics to the economic sphere and offers a reading of The Princess Casamassima against Hegelian and Marxist philosophy. Hyacinth Robinson's dilemma in this reading is not his discrepant parentage or his conflicting loyalties but the incompatibility of sensibility and idea: a sensitive young man receptive to the aesthetic pleasures of the world, he tries but ultimately fails to force his contradictory perceptions into the one-sided categories of communist ideology. Somewhat surprisingly, it is Hegel rather than Marx whom Boudreau casts in the role of economic ideologue-in-chief. "The Marxist view of history that informs James' depictions . . . preserves a deep respect for the act of human creation," she claims, while "the limitations of James' revolutionaries" spring from a Hegelian...