Jamesian Gossip and the Seductive Politics of Interest

". . . gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality."

--Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde could pack a lot into a one-liner. At a stroke he invokes all that a study of gossip must account for: pleasure, morality, and the status of discourse. But his language paradoxically enacts the very discursive confusion it describes, for if gossip is charming, it remains nonetheless a dirty word, a put down; it is itself a scandal with its reckless pleasures, its unaccountability, its status as the not-quite-domesticated discourse of women. For Wilde to say that history is merely gossip thus wields the power of gossip as a term of diminishment even as he enlarges its scope and frees it of hypocrisy. Wilde may not, as I do, have the concerns of feminism in mind, but his rhetoric shows how feminism might navigate the hazards of gossip for itself. Such a critical practice might soften the stigma of gossip, emphasizing the value of discredited female discourse, while at the same time turning male discourse against itself. And while a feminist account of gossip must expand Wilde's categories of charm and tediousness, they may offer more of a starting point than first appears. For it is interest, to round off Wilde's discussion, that makes our pleasure something we actively pursue, and thus something with possible moral consequences. Indeed, if we pose the problem of the novel as the problem of taking an interest in the private lives of other people, the questions we can ask are morally--and politically--fundamental: In whom should we take an interest, and how should we show that interest? What is the difference between kind attention and cruel interference? Between mercy and neglect? What are the limits of human sympathy, identification, or generosity? ¹

Far more than his brilliant contemporary, Henry James was to pursue these questions to vast artistic effect. ² Moreover, in light of his own extensive critical contributions, James represents an unusual opportunity for refining the study of gossip and the novel. Begun by critics such as Homer Brown and Patricia Spacks, and carried on most memorably in studies of Jane Austen, ³ discussions of gossip at their best have emphasized its affinities with novelistic discourse itself, making gossip and its less-than-lofty concerns into the novel's own primary, if unofficial, business. But gossip is the business of criticism too, a point which becomes most clear when James blurs the roles of author and critic, particularly in his famous prefaces to the New York Edition of his works. Only with this in mind can we continue to develop what I see as James's most important legacy, a sustained commitment perhaps best described as a cultural politics of interest. What James and feminist criticism share most of all is simply a deep preoccupation with the risks and rewards of placing female characters at the center of attention.

Despite this shared concern, it would be a mistake to imagine James as too much of a feminist prophet. Clearly problems of interest proved so generative in his work precisely because he could not resolve them. Consider the unease James articulates in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady:

By what process of logical accretion was this slight "personality," the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a Subject?--and indeed by what thinness, at the best, would such a subject not be vitiated? Millions of presumptuous girls, intelligent or not intelligent, daily affront their destiny, and what is it open to their destiny to be, at the most, that we should make an ado about it? The novel is of its very nature an "ado," an ado about something, and the larger the form it takes the greater of course the ado. (xi)

Lingering over this passage, we catch a...