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The Henry James Review 22.1 (2001) 97-101



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Book Review

Henry James and Sexuality


Hugh Stevens. Henry James and Sexuality. Cambridge UP, 1998. 217 pp. $54.95.

From the start of this excellent study, Hugh Stevens approaches the nuances and complexities of his two challenging subjects--Henry James and the discourse of sexuality--with the nuance and complexity that they deserve. According to Stevens, James's works should not be seen as advancing either an essentialist or a constructionist model, but as "interrogating these very terms" and working through the association of sexuality with "a crisis of seeing, a trauma of perception" (2, 4). If the "notion of the sexed self" made trouble for James's fictional enterprise, it was a highly effective trouble, as his texts assiduously probe "the very construction of sexual identity according to a fixed object-choice" (5). Stevens attributes James's "very elliptical way" of figuring the erotic to new circumstances of social regulation, but also to the "absence of a language" in which to describe complicated intimacies--or alternatively, as in the case of What Maisie Knew (1897), to a "linguistic excess" that suffers the same limitations (7). More broadly, the emergent "ontology of sexuality, an equation of sexual taste [. . .] with being," only fostered "an incitement to perform" the self in resistance. This performative self, along with the "Paterian aesthetic of delay" elaborated in his fiction, marks James's distinctive contribution to a more general "chip[ping] away" at prevailing authority structures (8, 9).

Thus sexuality must be central to our reading practice, Stevens contends, even as its "evanescent, fleeting qualities" and its ambiguous articulation in James tease our efforts of interpretation and require us to live with his "infuriating (if immensely pleasurable) vaguenesses" (13). Given the "functioning of silences [. . .] [End Page 97] in constituting the erotic" both in James's texts and in their political contexts, we should also attend to such narrative features as "an excess of suggestion with an emptiness of content" (a rhetorical strategy James shares with Wilde) and to the connotative gestures that signal an "unofficial subtext of [male-male] desire" as early as Roderick Hudson (1875) and a fantastic region of "(quasi-incestuous) adultery and female masochism" as late as The Golden Bowl (1904). Stevens maintains that this newly polarized homo/hetero binary, as well as the "growing visibility of sexual alterity" in late-Victorian society, animates especially a work such as The Ambassadors (1903), as Strether encounters an "intimidating, but also creative and exhilarating" theater of difference abroad. As the introductory chapter well summarizes, "money and sexual desire are the two generative acts of shame" in James, yet the consequent "refusal to name the sexual [. . .] operate[s] as a productive value, [. . .] creating pleasure, humour, generating narrative itself" (17-19).

Turning to The Wings of the Dove (1902), Stevens argues that James's pursuit of seamless narratives is "analogous to a suppression of eroticism," but that he remains alert to "the potential for cracks" and thus for an influx (à la Foucault) of "the ideological and the sexual" (22-23). On these terms, an "erotics of uncertainty" plays through Milly Theale's European adventures, while the "battles of authority" that swirl around her are so complex that even "pretences of disinterest" constitute power moves. Stevens thoughtfully styles Kate Croy's struggle as "implicitly" feminist, akin to that of the New Woman (24-25, 27). Merton Densher, meanwhile, pursues a "physical possession coupled with a regulation of knowledge" that positions him as a "paternal authority," involving Kate in a repetition of her "entrapment" with the degraded Lionel Croy (30, 32-33). Stevens suggestively associates Milly's physician, Sir Luke, with James himself, practicing a form of "love and care" that is "conflated with [. . .] masculine force" but that permits the practitioner to remain "blank and enigmatic." By contrast, Milly is "all representation [. . .] subject to the constructions of others" while seeking, no less than Kate, to "avoid the violence of representation" (40, 41). Stevens calls our attention to how James functions as "his own self-accuser"--partly by troping the tubercular heroine and...

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