Who'se Henry James?: Further Lessons of the Master

Who'se Henry James? Further Lessons of the Mastert by John Carlos Rowe, University of California, Irvine "Is it going to be bad for me?" he said. "Find out for yourself!" "Break the seal?" "Isn't it meant to break?" she asked with a shade of impatience. * * * * "Isn't it an ivory tower, and doesn't living in an ivory tower just mean the most distinguished retirement?" —Henry James, The Ivory Tower Rosanna Gaw and Graham Fielder ask these two rhetorical questions during the episode in which Rosanna delivers her father's sealed letter and Graham locks it up in the ¡vory tower. The questions are particularly interesting because their narrative proximity and grammatical similarities suggest a figurative interplay between the sealed letter and the locked tower. In fact, Gray answers Rosanna's rhetorical question with his own question concerning the convention of "distinguished retirement" represented by an ivory tower, which prepares us for his act of secreting the letter in the lower drawer. Gray's action seems to signify quite clearly his refusal to break the seal on Mr. Gaw's letter and to discover the almost certainly destructive writing within. In view of this episode's witty play on virginity, sexuality, and romantic courtship, it also seems fair to conclude that Gray's action is a polite refusal of Rosanna's overtures and that he hides the letter in a symbolic effort to preserve both 2 psychological and sexual innocence. Yet the act of placing the letter into the ivory tower is itself a violation of the tower's "perfectly circular" form, its "total rotundity" (p. 148). James makes it easy to interpret Gray's action as a metonymy for sexual transgression by having Gray add the key to Rosanna's tower to the "silver ring carried in his pocket and serving for a cluster of others" (p. 149). In the midst of this sexual punning, however, we are somewhat at a loss to read aright the significant instruments in such play. It is, of course, Rosanna's tower that Gray opens and into which he inserts the letter. Yet even if we leave aside the usual phallic suggest iveness of towers, we cannot fail to notice that the letter has been delivered by Rosanna but written by her father. Sealed virginal Iy and enveloped in such a way as to suggest feminine sexuality, the letter nonetheless contains a man's writing. Simply put, the tower and the letter both share and confuse masculine and feminine characteristics that encourage us to view them as doubles. The conceptual relation of the tower and the letter is further emphasized in Gray's discovery of the ivory tower "'on the top of the secretary,'" which connects the tower with writing even TA somewhat different version of the following remarks was read by Professor Rowe at the Henry James Society meeting in San Francisco in 1979 [editor's note). 1. Henry James, The Ivory Tower (New York: Scribner's, 1922), p. 146. Subsequent parenthetic references to the text are to this edition. 2. See Peter Buitenhuis, The Grasping Imagination: The American Writings of Henry James (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1970), p. 256: "The ivory tower . . . wiI I also represent Gray's isolation from sexual involvement. Once safely inside the tower, Haughty says, Gray can have all the fun, while Haughty takes all the trouble. Gray admits the truth of this, and also admits that he is an anachronism, a survivor from a leisured and cultivated class that has all but disappeared." before Gaw's letter has invaded it (p. 146). And the "appropriateness" of the tower as the hiding place for this letter—Rosanna pronounces herself "stupid not to have anticipated him" in selecting it (p. 149)—further complicates the developing interrelation of tower and letter in terms of the fundamental themes of this unfinished narrative: that is, sexuality, writing, secrecy, corruption, death, and art. The ambiguity of the tower/letter in relation to James's own rnetadrama concerning writing and its communication of a message or a truth—its procreative function—is fundamental and irreconcilable. It is simply one more instance of James's often-repeated parable of linguistic indeterminacy...