"Saying the Unsayable": James's Realism in the Late 1890s

If contemporary reviews of his late 1890s fictions are any indication, James’s fin-de-siècle readers knew he was up to something different; what’s more, they didn’t much like it. James’s novels from this period (roughly The Spoils of Poynton [1897] through The Sacred Fount [1901]) struck many of his contemporaries as strange, shocking, and “thoroughly disagreeable”—even, in one instance, as “hopelessly evil” (Gard 294; Kimbrough 175). Review after review accuses James of having abandoned “normal and wholesome themes” for a “delineation of the detestable” worthy of “the most unnatural French creations,” of “squander[ing] his immense talent on the study of malarial psychology,” of practicing a “literary art . . . of spiritual defilement” (Gard 282, 285, 306; Kimbrough 175). One reviewer of What Maisie Knew (1897) is grateful that James at least refrains from having Beale and Ida marry each other again, a move “that would have exposed him to the charge of attempting to enter into rivalry with the hideous finale of Jude the Obscure” (Hayes 285). Another opines that “what little one is able to understand” of the novel “is alike repellent to taste and feeling, to law and gospel”—a judgment echoed in F. M. Colby’s extraordinary and suggestively entitled essay, “The Queerness of Henry James”: “This is plain enough. Any other man would be suppressed. In a literature so well policed as ours, the position of Henry James is anomalous. He is the only writer of his day whose moral notions do not seem to matter. His dissolute and complicated Muse may say just what she chooses” (Hayes 294; Gard 337).

In light of late-twentieth-century James criticism’s concerns—those highlighted by recent gender, queer, and new historical and cultural studies approaches—it is difficult to say which is most striking about these reviews: the almost explicit threats of censorship, the pervasive allegations that James has succumbed to “intellectual coquetry” and “foppery” (“one feels in the reading,” remarks one commentator on Maisie, “that every manly feeling . . . has become atrophied in Mr. James’s nature”), or the simple fact that this most genteel of Masters once provoked such outrage in his contemporaries (Gard 331, 265, 272). ¹ What I want to focus on here, however, is the persistence with which these reviewers recognize a connection between the scandalous modernity represented in the late 90s fictions and their formal and stylistic innovation. Indeed, when they use terms like “queer” and “unnatural” to describe these texts, the reviewers are responding not only to what they see as the “moral squalor” of James’s characters and plots, but also to the ways in which these texts undermine the normative perspectives and conventions of James’s own earlier realist practice (Hayes 291). Thus James is said “to have lost whatever gift of narrative he may once have possessed” through “overcultivation” of his style, or again, is accused of deliberately refusing to provide “a normally unfolded episode or series of episodes in actual life” (Hayes 333, 245). If James’s characters are perverse, in other words, it is partly an effect of the “periphrastic perversity” of his writing (Gard 308). If his fictional men are foppish and feminized, so are the novels themselves: one reviewer, lamenting James’s drift away from his own “creed of realism,” even asserts that “for the sheer honor of the masculine half of humanity it must be contended that James is no realist” (Hayes 268).

Colby’s attack is especially suggestive insofar as it reads James’s increasingly “complicated” formal strategies—his abandonment of the “creed of realism”—as nothing less than a deliberate tactic for concealing the “dissolute” nature of what he is representing: “It has been a long time,” Colby warns, “since the public knew what Henry James was up to behind that verbal hedge of his” (Gard 335). ² Without wishing to recuperate the anxious, sometimes jingoistic, and ubiquitously homophobic Anglo-Saxon masculinity displayed in these reviews, I think the connection they perceive between the scandalous subjects represented in the late 90s texts and the scandal of James’s “dissolute Muse...