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The Henry James Review 22.3 (2001) 248-258



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James's Sick Souls

By Pericles Lewis, Yale University


Near the beginning of The Golden Bowl (1904), Prince Amerigo distinguishes the Italian from the Anglo-American "moral sense" for his friend Fanny Assingham; he claims to have what, in Rome, "sufficiently passes for" the moral sense. "But," he explains,

it's no more like yours than the tortuous stone staircase--half-ruined into the bargain!--in some castle of our quattrocento is like the "lightning elevator" in one of Mr. Verver's fifteen-storey buildings. Your moral sense works by steam--it sends you up like a rocket. Ours is slow and steep and unlighted, with so many of the steps missing that--well, that it's as short in almost any case to turn around and come down again. (1: 31)

If the Italians remain stuck in the fifteenth century, Mr. Verver's fifteen-storey buildings belong all to the twentieth. James prepares us to view Amerigo's ethical perspective with skepticism. The image of the winding staircase seems to associate Amerigo, whose family has produced an "infamous Pope" and at least one Cardinal, with the casuistry of the Catholic Church (1: 10). The theme of the difference between Protestant and Catholic cultures underlies much of James's writing, which often shows how right-thinking Protestants, especially Americans like Christopher Newman or Isabel Archer, learn to see their own apparently straightforward ethical beliefs as failing to account for the great complexities encountered on the tortuous staircases of Catholic Europe. Like many of James's earlier novels, the rest of The Golden Bowl demonstrates that the direct, rocket-like route does not always take the American hero or heroine to a morally satisfying conclusion.

Amerigo's definition of these two moral senses hints at some fundamental concerns of James's fiction, concerns which shaped both the themes and the formal techniques of his entire body of work. Religious categories here seem to have been replaced by broader ethnic or cultural identities, theological concerns [End Page 248] by those we might label aesthetic. Articulated religious belief makes little impact on the characters in James's novels. Indeed, the characters often seem to inhabit a moral world in which absolute measures of value such as those associated with God are no longer available (Pippin). Yet James presents a world that remains haunted by some of the ethical beliefs and prejudices associated with the religions from which his characters seem so emancipated. James wrote his late novels at a time when many philosophers and social scientists were trying to explain the phenomena associated with the "sacred" in non-theological terms. William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), for example, seeks to account for people's experiences of the "reality of the unseen" without either affirming the existence of supernatural forces or reducing religious experiences to mere products of mental illness, sexual repression, or other organic causes (53-77). The problem confronting William James, and other thinkers like Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and even Sigmund Freud, was how to explain religious experience without explaining it away. In order to account for the persistence of the sacred in the modern world, each of these thinkers had to reinvent his discipline and turn away from the prevailing positivism of the nineteenth century (Hughes). Henry James, in his experiments with the form of the novel, attempts a similar rethinking of the tradition of realism. Where the social scientists seek new methodologies, Henry James seeks new forms and narrative techniques that can allow him to account for the kinds of experience generally associated with faith while avoiding a judgment as to the truth-content of those experiences. How this works in a story like "The Turn of the Screw" has been the subject of much debate. In this essay, I will suggest that similar problems are at the heart of James's late novels as well. James poses the types of problems that religious belief had traditionally sought to anwer but displays an acute sense of the absence of supernatural solutions...

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