"Much Less a Book than a State of Vision": The Visibility of Race in Henry James

Recalling the impact of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel on readers, James concludes in A Small Boy and Others that, finally, Uncle Tom's Cabin was "much less a book than a state of vision" (159). "Mrs. Stowe's picture" (160), according to James, required that readers "walk[] and talk[] and laugh[] and cry[]" (159) but never merely read the novel. The "pictorial lustre" cast by her "great novel" (250) proved so powerful that when a child was beaten during a theatrical production of the text, many in the audience, including one of James's family members, believed that a child was in fact being abused. Freud, like James, identifies Stowe's novel and its depictions of slave life as a powerful imaginative catalyst when he writes in "A Child is Being Beaten" that it is "almost always the same books"—books "such as [. . .] Uncle Tom's Cabin [. . .] whose contents give a new stimulus to the beating phantasies" of his patients (108). But whereas Freud edits racial content out of the psychic reality that he gives the child—whereas he concludes that the child inevitably begins "to compete with [such] works of fiction by producing its own phantasies [of the] wealth of situations, and even whole institutions, in which children were beaten"—James, I would like to suggest, posits the child as a rich site for representing the social meanings that continue to inhere in race once slavery is abolished and the political work of Stowe's "picture" is seemingly done.

My interest here is not so much to document the presence of racial otherness in James's work, as a number of critics ¹ have already ably done, as to suggest that James represents contemporary understandings of race as a latent and inevitable element of the child identity with which much of his 1890s short fiction is interested. Many have noted that James's frequent depictions of child protagonists during the last decade of the century reflect a renewed interest in his own childhood and in the self that, as Carolyn Steedman and James Kincaid, among others, have shown, the child comes to represent for the nineteenth-century middle class. Less well understood has been how these child protagonists might also include James's commentary on the role that contemporary accounts of race have in the constitution of that middle-class self. Understanding how such children as Miles, Flora, and Maisie might reflect the role that race inevitably plays in constituting a self requires that we attend to the ways in which post-war accounts of racial identity increasingly posit race as existing beyond the realm of the visible—as a subcutaneous element of the self that can be determined not so much by the color of one's skin as by one's developmental progress, aptitudes, and behavior. In other words, if, as Stowe's friend and correspondent the Earl of Carlisle contends, Stowe was able to make readers "see" the "real and vital essence" of the black slave in addition to his "external appearance" (Letter 9), other representations of slaves (such as the two children featured in fig. 1) require readers to consider what happens when essence and appearance do not coincide—when white-looking individuals may, in fact, "be" black and therefore slaves. This potential misalignment between visible and "real" racial identity became an urgent social concern once slavery's abolition destroyed the institutional structure that clearly distinguished white from white-looking individuals.

Searching for ways to determine once and for all the true racial identity of persons, psychologists, like scientists in many disciplines in the late nineteenth century, turned to a newly discovered world of matter that was largely indiscernible to the naked eye. ² Charting the extent to which these psychological accounts of racial identity organize the interior lives of James's...