Henry James and Queer Modernity (review)

To outmaster Henry James, simply attribute his subtleties to sexlessness; read those endless sentences as "verbal hedges" (102) against sexual candor, and call his forays into consciousness evasions of physical passion. If your James is at bottom a repressed, inactive homosexual (as he has been for many of his successors and critics as well as a small host of recent novels), his greatness is a kind of accident, for it is but a lucky by-product of a compulsion to hide the truth about sex. Then, your relative lack of talent or genius is justified and even preferred, since it is the cost anyone would happily pay for an active sex-life. Then, his aesthetic and moral sophistications become but a cautionary precursor to our sexual freedoms. Sublimations, they are tragic tribute to a sexual intensity we now have the courage and privilege to express directly, and we can forget about art, duty, judgment, because James has proven (conclusively because unwittingly) that they are only nervous resistances to the brave way we let physical desire shape personal life and cultural commitment.

Since a gay James is too often no James at all, what to make of his queerness is a very tricky question. But Eric Haralson handles it beautifully. Henry James and Queer Modernity is inspired and essential for the way it makes James's sexuality not only a positive part of his signature aesthetic but a source of trenchant cultural critique beyond what we normally expect from him. Other accounts of James's queerness might diminish him, but this one enhances our sense of why he matters, and in the process offers up an important theory of the relations among art, sex, and politics.

Things begin here with a fresh and compelling connection between Jamesian style and the ambiguity of the word "queer." Reversing the tired question of when and how "queer" narrowed into what it means for us today, Haralson stresses the fact that the word's early breadth of meaning made it the operative term in a daring set of cultural refusals; "its very shadowy quality and multireferentiality constituted a latency that lent itself to the gradual elaboration of a signifying linkage" (9). This linkage, ultimately between art, manhood, and sex, would resist the way sex came more and more to enlist exaggerated manhood against art. This powerful redefinition of "queer" becomes a great way to rethink James's sexuality and indeed his modernity, as Haralson tells us how homosexuality came to be understood as the essence of the queer, and how this one particular homosexual made his supersubtle evocations of that process a powerful cultural critique of modernity itself.

The modernity in question is that informed by the "new sexological order and the sociopolitical formations it primarily served" (57), the "rigidifying grids of the modern sex/gender system" (25), those norms of sex and gender that streamlined western identities into types most useful to modern political and economic power. James was on to it from the start, and from the first his fiction took queer aim at normative masculinity, especially when its norms tried to damn the aesthetic by association with male inadequacy. In the queerness of his early male characters, we get "experiments in obscuring the national-cultural specificity of a certain masculinity in order to liberate it, as much as possible from systems of sex regulation that are intricately bound up with national norms and needs" (49). Then a "career-long campaign" ensues, wherein James writes political allegories that are also defenses of art and erotic dispatches—novels (from The Americanto The Turn of the Screw to The Ambassadors) that are so much more than evasive sublimation, since they make up a "powerful prolepsis" of our queer modernity and its most effective forms of resistance.

The Turn of the Screw, for example, becomes a "fable of jeopardized masculine emergence" (89). Manhood untainted by mystery is what is really under threat here, and by making us worry about it along with the governess charged...