"The Tie of a Common Aversion": Sexual Tensions in Henry James's The Other House

The Other House, published in 1896, marks Henry James’s first and only foray into the textual world of murder mysteries and suspense thrillers. More akin to a nineteenth-century sensation novel than to The Portrait of a Lady, The Other House concentrates on a desiring single white female and dramatizes the dangers she poses to familial social structures. The novel ostensibly details Rose Armiger’s love for a man, Tony Bream, who is bound by a promise made to his dying wife (and Rose’s best friend) that he will not remarry during their child’s lifetime. In order to release Tony from his promise, Rose kills the child, and her actions render her an early, if unacknowledged, precursor of characters like those played by Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, and Rebecca DeMornay in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. The Other House, however, did not generate the mass attention accorded to its twentieth-century offspring; it was virtually ignored in its day and has since largely escaped critical notice. ¹ But the novel did eventually excite cinematic interest, if at an incongruous time—the feminist-inspired 1970s—and if from an unexpected quarter—the French New Wave. Nonetheless, Jacques Rivette’s assimilation of The Other House into his 1974 filmic tribute to female friendship, Celine et Julie vont en bateau, highlights an aspect of the Jamesian narrative that has gone unnoticed and opens a line of inquiry into James’s anomalous and neglected thriller.

The Other House may seem an odd choice for inclusion in a film that focalizes women’s intimacy. But I will argue that Celine et Julie builds upon elements latent in the text and hence offers a sort of palimpsest through which to read James’s novel. Celine et Julie vont en bateau features the work of two actors, Dominique Labourier and Juliette Berto, whose improvisational performance engenders a narrative about the re-construction of narratives. In the film, the actors play and replay scenarios from various perspectives, and their actions foreground the potential of female transgression. Celine and Julie intrude on narratives already in progress, alter them, and shift their trajectories. One of these ongoing narratives is culled from The Other House; the two characters infiltrate scenes from the novel, revise them, and ultimately rescue the child.

Celine et Julie’s engagement with pre-scripted texts engenders a series of repetitive cinematic spirals that invite alternative inscriptions and re-constructions. Julia Lesage, inspired by the space the film opens for role-playing, defines its female-centered fantasy as “lesbian”:

not because of its depiction of sexual activity (none is seen) but because of the kind of intimacy between women it depicts. . . . [Celine et Julie] symbolically contrasts “childlike playfulness” with “adult rigidity” to critique the institution of heterosexuality itself.

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Lesage suggests that Celine et Julie’s concentration on women’s intimacy provides an analysis of heterosexuality. And, while cinematic transformations may be problematic mediums through which to view literary texts, I would assert that Lesage’s comments illuminate an important twist in the narrative movement of The Other House. Indeed, the lesbianism that Lesage finds in Rivette’s film is constructed quite differently in The Other House, which incorporates tropes of demonized lesbianism to intensify its censure of female desire, but same-sex relations do underpin the novel and unsettle its heterosexual dynamic. On one level, The Other House works to dramatize the dangers single women pose to familial structures; on another, it too offers a critique of heterosexuality.

Just as The Other House’s condemnation of lesbianized women marks a point of departure from its later cinematic adaptation, so it deviates from James’s earlier treatment of lesbianism in The Bostonians of 1886. The Bostonians, perhaps inspired by Alice James’s relationship with her longtime companion, Katherine Loring, covertly juxtaposes the tensions between heterosexual and homosexual love. ² While The Bostonians is by no means a tribute to same-sex desire, the contrast between its implicit depiction of lesbianism and that of The Other House points to a shift in the...