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  • Apertures in the House of Fiction:Novel Methods and Child Study, 1870–1910
  • Holly Blackford (bio)

Introduction

Chapter 42 in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1881) embodies an important "chapter" in the development of early modernism. In that chapter, Isabel sits by the fire and reflects on her circumstances. Her roving impressions of her feelings for her husband take precedence over her actions, actions so keenly anticipated by the male characters in the beginning of the novel. Chapter 42 focuses entirely on her interior, unfolding consciousness: "She could live it over again, the incredulous terror with which she had taken measure of her dwelling. Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life. It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation" (360). For the first time, Isabel experiences insight, seeing her house of suffocation from various points of view.

The chapter is a hallmark of experiments in focalization to come, both by James and later modernists, who would focus on the active minds of characters in trapped conditions. For example, in T. S. Eliot's 1915 "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Prufrock tragically cannot speak or participate in social life, but he compensates with a rich interior, reflective practice on his alienated condition. Prufrock's question "Do I dare / Disturb the universe?" (lines 45–46) becomes an important intertext in Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War, as Roberta Trites observes in the opening of her book Disturbing the Universe. Trites traces a direct line of descent between modernism and novel studies [End Page 368] of adolescence. Indeed, Mark Twain's novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published three years after The Portrait of a Lady, is a study of child reasoning and moral awareness, parallel to Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, serialized in 1881 and 1882. The subjective perceptions of youth would eventually become the essence of the young adult novel. But what drove modernist practice, and why did modernist experimentation arise in a period that also saw the blossoming of children's fantasy literature? One answer could lie in the very real need of a sister field for new methods to study consciousness. The field of developmental psychology enjoyed a rapid birth in the final decades of the nineteenth century. As a new and widely publicized field, developmental psychology faced obvious and vexing challenges to traditional psychological method. The methodological experimentation required by Child Study could very possibly have shifted writers' attention to the way the mind was constantly engaged in a process of composing and revising, along with the pressing need of researchers to capture the mind's composition.1

Isabel's purpose and practice of unfolding insight exemplify what James would famously call the novelist's purpose in creating "a house of fiction"—a metaphor for consciousness and perception as well as modernist method, which I will explore in this article. In his 1908 preface to the New York edition, James defends his aesthetic against those who accuse him "of not having 'story' enough" (5):

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all together, over the human scene that we might have expected of them a greater sameness of report than we find. They are but windows at the best, mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they are not hinged doors opening straight upon life. But they have this mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other. . . . The spreading field, the human scene, is the "choice of subject"; the pierced aperture, either broad or balconied or...

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