"On the Outer Edge": The Temptation of Bohemia in Henry James

Ce que veut une volonté, c'est affirmer sa difference.

Gilles Deleuze²

Exteriority and Earliness

Over the last three decades, critics have identified in James's narratives three apparently distinctive types—the aesthete, the homosexual and the other.³ Surprisingly, no attention has been given to the bohemian, a figure that is related to these types, but that is sociologically distinct.⁴ Unlike, for instance, the category homosexual, a heuristic retro-projection likely to be impugned as inaccurate or anachronistic, the term bohemian makes up a part, and no small part, of James' own narrative vocabulary. The sociological specification of the category is a recent, largely unfinished, affair.⁵ James's manipulation of it, tentative in his early work and more focused in his mid-period novels, is not merely evidence of its contemporary cultural meaning, but a major factor in the construction of that meaning.⁶

In this article I want to argue three related points. The first is that James's early, ironic resort to bohemia betrays an anticipatory, preemptive, almost defensive investment in aestheticism and homoeroticism, two regimes of commonality whose effective social materialization had, unlike that of anarchism, not yet occurred. Bohemia, by contrast, existed as a commonplace imaginative event. The second claim is that The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, and The Tragic Muse are three mid-period novels (1886–1890) of crisis that not only share a parallel concern with homoeroticism and politics—respectively anarchist, feminist and parliamentary politics—that is exceptional in the James canon, they are also animated by a profound readjustment of the leitwort bohemia in the semantic direction of performative exteriority. By performative exteriority, I mean a purposively non-social "outside" that is, however, performed, i.e. constructed by a subject. Because what claims to resist culture is culturally constructed, bohemia is invariably linked in these novels to fraud.⁷ But James's critique of bohemia as fake naturalness is overrun by elegiac pain. Indeed, my third claim is that these three novels track the social extinction of the young natural female bohemian performer, a figure of moral earliness that James consistently invests elsewhere with pre-sexual radiance and non-social authenticity. By moral earliness, I mean a state of recalcitrant refusal to be held accountable to heteronomic—societal, external—moral norms. Only such anteriority grants, James appears to suggest, the gift for natural performance—the ability, that is, to perform what you already are.

In order to clarify this apparent paradox, let me resort to a visual metaphor. Consider three concentric circles: the first is the core circle of the private self, which may be construed as natural; the second is a wider circle of interior bourgeois socialization (itself an outside to the self) that works as a porous socio-moral enclosure; and the third is an indeterminate periphery that spreads beyond the second circle, zoning an outside to bourgeois convention that is potentially coincidental with nature or authentic life. To be sure, this third realm (this exteriority) is only reached through an exertion (performance) that is dialectical—and therefore compromised—insofar as it depends on the overriding, or the sublation (a Hegelian figure of preservation through overcoming), of the second circle. But James seems to suggest that there is a natural, uncompromising, way of producing the furthermost outside, a way of performing life that is true because it is inherently unsoiled by bourgeois convention. Only the true bohemian girl—true because rooted in what James saw as an "Oriental" difference—reaches the stage of moral absolution where center (self) and periphery (nature) coincide. This is, of course, a romantic delusion. Still, James's narrative method is anything but naïve, for the elegiac awareness that this naturalness fails to exist is made to depend, dialectically, on the prior satirical realization that it cannot be forged.

My overall argument is not sociological, even if it invokes historical-sociological considerations. I seek rather to explore how James's narrative unconscious inflects, with elliptic moral stringency, the cultural prestige of the bohemian imaginary. The argument, which is primarily aimed at offering...