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Overhearing Testimony: James in the Shadow of Sentimentalism
- The Henry James Review
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 27, Number 2, Spring 2006
- pp. 103-125
- 10.1353/hjr.2006.0009
- Article
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This essay examines issues of intrusion and disclosure in Henry James's work and their relation to the sentimental novel. I argue that sympathetic penetration in the novel has always been torn in a battle between the implications of confession and testimony. Although James rejects testimonial narration in the novel because it lacks "authority," his fiction vigorously argues that one has a right, socially, to maintain the non-transparent diplomatic "front" that is the testimonial condition. In terms of his "international theme," James sees this right as taken for granted in Europe, whereas American culture is more likely to demand from an individual the perpetual "transparency" championed by the eighteenth-century sentimentalists.