Realism & the Romance: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and American Fiction (review)

294 The Henry James Review Essay after essay is enriched with astute and memorable insights obviously earned by deep immersion in James's oeuvre and expressed in a flexible, engaging prose style. Maini's book deserves more critical attention tiiat it received in 1973. It is one of die most discerning short appraisals of a writer whose ironic view of his heroes and heroines and whose often generous understanding of his "unsympathetic" characters make any unqualified or categorical description of his achievement untrustworthy. Yet many readers may feel that a number of Maini's assured pronouncements cry out for fuller contexts to justify them. I cannot understand why comical, opportunistic Mrs. Wix in What Maisie Knew is singled out as die sole example of evil in a novel replete with promiscuous characters who manipulate the child protagonist to pursue their own irresponsible amours. Maisie's mother uses her daughter as a grim pawn in a sordid game of hate with her husband, and botii parents and step-parents think nothing of plunging the child into abnormal and compromising situations. I wish, too, that Maini had been less hard on die narrator of The Sacred Fount and a little more concerned widi die degenerate social circle whose worldly disguises he attempts lo penetrate. Finally, despite Maini's many references to James's indirection, I would have expected a more diorough analysis of die stylistic and structural devices by which James achieved his indirect vision. James W. Gargano Washington and Jefferson College Elissa Greenwald. Realism & the Romance: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and American Fiction. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1989. 159 pp. $39.95. To die evolving critical literature on Hawthorne and James must now be added Elissa Greenwald's intellectually stylish Realism and Romance, a slender volume that, because it is so tightly written and closely reasoned, has a greater density tiian its length might suggest The scope of its reference is large, taking in not only Hawthorne and James as well as the scholarship surrounding diem but also much critical tiieory of the romance genre in die nineteendi and twentieth centuries. The book, less an extended study of influence than of relationship, focuses on the evolution of Hawthornian romance in James's practice of realism. Greenwald begins by noting how James in his essays reveals an ambiguity in his attitudes toward romance. In "The Art of Fiction," for example, he praises the interaction between conscious and unconscious impulses in fiction, so that a strict realism versus romance distinction breaks down. James's Preface to The American, written late in his career for üie New York Edition, is regarded as being especially telling; here James begins by regarding the romance element in die novel as a flaw, yet by the end he comes to see it as an asset as well since it embodies a critical dimension of experience üiat cannot be directly known yet that touches "our thought and our desire" most deeply. Greenwald views the preface as a key to James's work as a whole, which moves from the visible world to "invisible tilings." It is her position that in certain earlier works, but especiaUy in the novels of the major phase, James incorporated romance into his narrative vision, and in so doing revolutionized the form of the novel. Greenwald approaches James in his relationship to Hawtiiorne tiirough four major essays that James wrote on Hawthorne from 1872 to 1904, in which his attitude to his predecessor changes from critical to ambivalent lo reverent. In an 1872 review of Hawdiorne's posthumously published French and Italian Journals, James defines Europe as the "fact" that Hawthorne cannot confront; and in his 1879 Hawthorne, he regards Hawüiorne as being deficient insofar as he was not a realist He finds fault particularly with his use of allegory as belonging more to fancy than imagination, and he rejects his use of symbolism. Yet in his 1897 essay on Hawthorne, written just before the novels of Book Reviews 295 the major phase, James has reconciled himself to Hawthorne's symbolism. Finally, in his 1904 Hawthorne Centenary essay, produced in the same year as The Golden Bowl, James writes approvingly of die interpén...