The Man of Action: Henry James and the Performance of Gender

The Making of Americans

The rehabilitation of Henry James’s reputation has become something of a legend in the folklore of literary history. As the well-known story goes, a group of devoted critics in the late 1930s and early 40s transformed an eccentric and increasingly unread author into one of the most important writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. ¹ James may have earned his place in the revised canons of British and especially American literature because of shifting literary priorities that resulted in a new understanding and respect for modernism that his experimental late narratives seemed to prefigure. What has not been so often noted about the rise of James’s literary fortunes, however, is how pivotally issues of gender played in his redemption.

The critical anxiety had been (and to some degree remains) whether James was “man” enough to be a major writer. Fellow novelist E. M. Forster, hardly the adventurer when representing sexuality in his own rather decorous fiction, declared that James was a supercilious dilettante of the European drawing room who could only write of “maimed creatures” “incapable of fun, of rapid motion, of carnality, and of nine-tenths of heroism” (205–206). James’s contemporary George Moore took the implications even further, contending that James writes “like a man to whom all action is repugnant” and having reputedly remarked, “Henry James—the eunuch” (qtd. in Gard 172, 15). With Forster’s claim that James could only write about “maimed creatures” and Moore’s description of James as a self-made “eunuch,” both men resort to castration imagery—that is, that James was less than a complete man.

More recent critics also see the dilemma of Henry James as involving an intersection of his writing and his mysterious personal life. John Carlos Rowe believes that some of the ambiguity in James’s writing stems from “James’s own ambivalence (his psychic contradiction) regarding...his own sexuality” (154–55). Alfred Habegger maintains we can see in the work of James that “American realism descended from popular women’s fiction by way of...sissies” (Gender 65). Apparently untroubled by his homophobic description, Habegger defines “sissy” using a 1917 definition by Alexander Harvey: “a boy who was called a sissy was supposed to excel in feminine traits rather than in masculine traits” (180). Habegger posits that Henry James had “conspicuously failed to get himself initiated into male American society...and he was very sensitive about this” (“Woman Business” 24); consequently, the reason that he could intimately identify with someone like Gilbert Osmond’s daughter in The Portrait of a Lady is that, as Habegger puts it, James “must have been a Pansy” (“Woman Business” 179). Similarly, Georges-Michel Sarotte contends that “James was the prototypical ‘sissy,’” a role that made him “both passive and feminine and from which he was never able to free himself” (198). Even as subtle a Jamesian critic as Kaja Silverman asserts, “The author ‘inside’ James’s stories and novels bears so little resemblance to what is popularly thought of as the ‘Master’ that I can only think of that...as a compensatory construction” (180–81). ² Sounding as if she were writing a parody of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Donna Przybylowicz declares that James’s “primary allegiance is not to an intersubjective, heterosexual involvement but essentially to an intrasubjective, self-mirroring relationship, which maintains the homosexualizing capture of the self in the Imaginary through the identification with the specular other” (217–18). ³

At least in the 1930s and 40s (and essentially still today), this perception of failed masculinity is what has to be challenged if critics dare to champion Henry James as a new member of the cultural elite. Such a dilemma becomes especially evident in F. O. Matthiessen’s Henry James: The Major Phase (1944), a work that proved central to the revival of academic esteem for the American novelist. ⁴ Matthiessen’s project was to rehabilitate in several ways Henry James’s literary reputation, which had faded in the decades after his death. The primary task was, as his title indicates, to establish...