A "Native-Expatriate" Reads Henry James

I’m sure that most graduate students resist the pressures of specialization at some point in their careers. But perhaps I, a graduate of Bennington College with a double major in philosophy and literature who found herself enrolled at a conservative graduate school, resisted more than most. The daughter of an attorney and an artist, I had been the beneficiary of the most liberal of liberal educations for my entire life. Knowing that my dream job would be at a small, liberal arts institution, I put off donning a graduate school identity as a “medievalist,” “creative writer,” “theorist,” or “Americanist” as long as possible, even after I decided to write my dissertation on Henry James’s The Ambassadors.

My approach to the study and teaching of literature disoriented my graduate school professors more dramatically than it did my students and eventual colleagues at an undergraduate institution. The professors had never known quite what to make of me, how to place me. I was an African-American woman at a school where I had to beg to teach the only course in minority literature (“This isn’t 1968,” the department chair told me. “I’m not sure there’s enough interest.”) As a member of a graduate student body often antagonistically divided between “academics” and “creative writers,” I was a “theory person” working on a novel. A mother of several small children, I was a “non-traditional” student who drove 140 miles round-trip to get to class. When I got pregnant in the second year of the Ph.D. program, my first mentor abruptly dropped me, assuming that I would have to put my nascent career in literary studies on hold for the next eighteen years at least. My professors in graduate school already thought that I was odd, and my decision to write my dissertation on Henry James, and then to accept a tenure-track position in African-American literature was met with confusion and consternation.

A female professor was one of the first to express dismay at my choice of a dissertation topic. Although she is a well-respected Renaissance scholar, she exclaimed, “But there are no black people in Henry James’s work!” (I never told her about The American Scene or the proprietor in Washington Square, or the woman in Maisie). She then proceeded to tell me what a waste of my “talent” it was for me to focus on “The Master” when there was yet so much work to be done on the frontiers of African-American and women’s literature. Other people advised me that I would offset my alleged advantages as a black woman on the job market by “specializing” in such an overtilled field as Henry James studies. Only my dissertation reader had a sense of how my love for James’s work and my fascination with the problems his texts posed was consistent with the interest in books I had developed as a child. Influenced by my undergraduate studies at a time when entire English faculties were enthralled by deconstruction, my situation as a minority woman in twentieth-century America, my long-held conviction that stories create meaning in the world, my Catholicism, as well as an assortment of less articulable predilections, psychological knots, and chance, I find James’s work fascinating.

My temperament and social status have always ensured that I look at the world around me with the eyes of an “outsider.” One of my professors once commented with amazement, on hearing a short version of the story of my childhood, that it was “so very strange, so very Jamesian.” I was raised in a sort of black bourgeois household which has become an environment of the past—past hopes, past investments, and past optimism: rich with books, ideas, exposure to art, and a peculiarly black bourgeois politicized take on the Arnoldian concept of the kingdom of Culture.

My world, with the exception of what seemed to be relatively unimportant forays into the world of school, was defined by our extended family and the stories my sisters and I obsessively read and wrote. I spent about half...