Henry James and the Visual, and: Henry James, Women and Realism (review)

The "Henry James and" formula in these titles signals the pervasive contextual bent of current literary studies. Both books treat James as part of a network of writers, visual artists, cultural critics, and specialists in emerging disciplines like ethnography, collectively challenging tradi tions of national, racial, class, and gender identity. Neither book deals with James's career as an independent and specifically literary construct, nor is interested in what sets his writing apart. The focus is on similarities, on what might be called "group work," not individual achievement. James often seems like a seconder-of-the-motion rather than an innovator. His texts mirror or echo others, visual and verbal, imaginative and discursive. The seemingly disparate works, traditions and mediums can be read through a single set of lenses. As Kendall Johnson puts it in Henry James and the Visual, James's use of "visual metaphors" challenges "the categorical integrities of images and words, and of romance and realism" (6).

This approach has served for years now to heighten our understanding of James's cultural embeddedness and multiple affiliations, despite the declaration of independence enacted by his expatriation, his singular success in creating a loyal international audience, raising the status of fiction and revolutionizing its methods, and virtually patenting subjects and techniques soon associated with his name. The older vision of James's triumphant emergence as "The Master"—like Arnold's Shakespeare, "out-topping knowledge"—has been displaced by a sense that his work is shaped and contained by the pervasive cultural conflicts of his time. He is rooted; at times he even seems mired.

In Henry James and the Visual (which might more accurately be called "James's Cultural Spectatorship") the focus is on his "visual language in representing types of national culture, and, more broadly, in conceptualizing 'culture' as the kernel of national cohesiveness" (4). The group stereotypes, verbal and visual, are treated as the joint construction of Punch cartoons, ethnographers, authorities on race like William James's Harvard mentor Louis Agassiz, painters and theorists of the picturesque, as well as organizers of popular spectacles like the great national expositions or Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Anywhere, everywhere, it seemed, a set of cultural stereotypes defining nation, race and region was under construction.

How does this visual/verbal dispensation affect James, and what does he contribute to it? At his most "ethnographic," for example in The American or The Europeans or The Bostonians, and in his travel books from Italian Hours to The American Scene, his attention is focused on the manners and mores of nations and regions. Recall his brilliant account of the Bellegardes's introduction of Christopher Newman to their exclusive set—a disaster of utter mutual incomprehension. Or James's description of his visit to the noisy, vital world of the Yiddish theater in The American Scene, when he realizes that he is not the returning but the displaced native, adrift among "the representatives of the races we have nothing 'in common' with" (165). Johnson's chapters on The American and The American Scene seem to me the best in the book—informative, rich in parallels between text and context, though not always acknowledging James's questioning of the stereotypes he uses. Newman is surely right to dismiss the label of "great Western Barbarian" thrust upon him, insisting that despite his lack of sophistication, he is "a highly civilised man" (109). And though James in The American Scene is repelled by the sight and sound of the alien others pouring from Ellis Island to take over lower New York, he also allows that his linguistic and cultural primacy may give way not to chaos but to a rich polyglot tongue "destined to become the most beautiful on the globe."¹ These are nuances; but they do not challenge the importance of the stereotypes Johnson...