The Thing in the Jungle: Objects and Openness in Henry James

This essay attempts a reading of “The Beast in the Jungle” that would integrate it into the so-called material turn in Jamesian scholarship. It argues that John Marcher and May Bartram model two distinct modes of relation and locates the crisis at the story’s heart precisely in that distinction. Marcher’s paralyzing apprehension is, on this reading, borne out of his inability to open himself and respond to the conjunctive allure of the object in the way that Bartram is able to. Ultimately, it reads this closedness as an ethical failure to respond not just to the object world but to the nonhuman world, tout court.