Tender-Minded Idealism and Erotic Repression in James's "Madame de Mauves" and "The Last of the Valerii"

Tender-Minded Idealism and Erotic Repression in James's "Madame de Mauves" and "The Last of the Valerii" by Dorothy Berkson, Illinois Wesleyan University When William James divided philosophers into two categories, "the tender-minded" and "the tough-minded," he charged tender-minded idealists with a tendency toward optimism and abstraction that falls to acknowledge the full complexity of life. Tender-minded idealists, he explained, allow their faith in "purity and dignity" to blind them to the "tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed." In "explaining away evil and pain," the tender-minded Ignore the "world of concrete personal experiences" and "the contradictions of real life." William James's distrust of any approach to life that oversimplifies or fails firmly to acknowledge the empirical evidence of experience was the cornerstone of his philosophical and psychological writing. It was a distrust shared by his younger brother, Henry James, whose fiction Is full of tender-minded idealists filled with illusions and theories, who are time and again brought face to face with the "tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed." Isabel Archer, Lambert Strether, MiIIy Theale, Fleda Vetch: James compassionately reveals the limits of their optimistic theories and ideals when confronted with a complex and often sordid reality. George Santayana noted that both the James brothers transcended the idealistic optimism of the genteel tradition by understanding it and subjecting it to rigorous analysis.2 Henry James's analysis of the genteel tradition focused most often on relations between the sexes. Courtships, marriages and sexual indiscretions are the hinges on which his plots swing. An earlier generation of critics accused Henry James of ignoring sex and of creating passionless characters who live "off the tops of their minds," who are "Incapable ... of carnality," and for whom "the worst crime, next to being poor, [is] to be sexual." They accused him, in effect, of reflecting the genteel Victorian horror of sex, and of avoiding the subject in his fiction. More recently critics have begun to recognize what Santayana was astute enough to realize In 1911: that Henry James was one of the most perceptive critics of the genteel tradition and that, far from evading sexuality in his fiction, he subjected the genteel sexual code to penetrating analysis. Indeed, E. L. Volpe has gone so far as to suggest that "sex is real Iy the core of !James's] finest novels."^ 1. William James, "The Present Dilemma in Philosophy," The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 365, 369, 372. 2. George Santayana, "The Genteel Tradition In American Philosophy," The Genteel Tradition: Nine Essays by George Santayana, ed. Douglas L. Wilson (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), p. 54. 3. F. 0. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Phase (London: Oxford UnIv. Press, 1944), p. 93; E. M. Forster, "The Ambassadors," in Henry James: A CoI lection of Critical Essays, ed. Leon Edel (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 77; Maxwell Geismar, Henry James and the Jacobites (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), p. 6. 4. Edmond L. Volpe, "James's Theory of Sex in Fiction," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 13 (1958), 37. Other critics who tend to take a more positive view of James's treatment of sex are Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), and Laurence Bedwel I Holland, The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964). 78 Although It may not be evident immediately to readers accustomed to the explicit treatment of sexual themes found In twentieth-century fiction, Volpe is correct In his perception that sex Is really at the core of much of James's finest fiction. The sexual element In James's fiction Is revealed only occasionally in the explicit physical embrace, however; more often It expresses itself in the implied Intimacy of a glance, a clandestine meeting, or a stolen word. Indeed, James was fully aware that a more explicit treatment of sexual passion would make his fiction unpubl I shable. In the winter of 1895-96, James wrote a commemorative piece on Dumas flIs which was rejected by Robert Underwood Johnson, the editor of Century magazine, for containing references to Dumas' sexual themes...