Lessons of the Master: The Artist and Sexual Identity in Henry James

Lessons of the Master: The Artist and Sexual Identity in Henry James Michael Wilson, University of Texas at Dallas Editor's note: Professor Wilson's talk is printed here as delivered (without scholarly apparatus) at the Henry James Sesquicentennial Conference "Rethinking Gender and Sexual Politics: Henry James in the New Century," June 2, 1993. Early in 1914, and late in their long friendship, Henry James received from Henry Adams an evidently rather despairing letter. In response to this "melancholy outpouring," James wrote urging Adams to continue to cultivate an interest in life. How it was that James's own consciousness had retained its interest he, characteristically, could not precisely say. Still, he ventured that: "It's, I suppose because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility." I find this document striking in a number of ways. The letter is quite emphatic, though not unsympathetic, in stressing that, despite their many ties and shared experiences, James sees himself as fundamentally different from Adams. The form of that difference lies in James's self-identified vocation, and James insists on the centrality of the role of artist to his consciousness. That this "queer monster" represents for James an intersection of the social and the psychological is evident from the constellation of qualities by which he is characterized, the sense of alienation tied to obdurate self-knowledge or fascination. Moreover, it is difficult at this moment not to read anachronistically the particular locution by The Henry James Review 14 (1993): 257-63. © 1994, The Johns Hopkins University Press 258 The Henry James Review which James identifies the artist as some sort of knowing yet unwitting confession. Such a (mis)reading is all the more tempting given the familiar conjunction of the queer, the monstrous and the artistic in the historical construction of "homosexuality " in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I have been trained, however, as a historian—that is, as one for whom anachronism is supposed to be anathema rather than an opportunity. Still, the gap between the possible and the probable meanings of this phrase has started me wondering—wondering in what, for James, the queerness of the artist obtains. To put it another way, what might be the relations in James's work between artistic and sexual identity? To pursue this question I'd like to explore several of the many texts James wrote in the 1880s and 1890s about artists and writers. In particular, I'd like to focus on The Tragic Muse, the "unsuccessful" novel that immediately predates James's even less successful career as a playwright. I focus on this phase of James's career because of its historical salience. The final decades of the nineteenth century are now commonly understood as a period of increasing codification and commodification of artistic identity in European society. The constructions of artistic identity during this period are varied, and are to a large degree implicated in what historians have termed the late nineteenth century's "crisis of masculinity ." The social identity of "artist" becomes one among a range of emergent modalities of masculinity, one way among many of attempting to exempt male privilege from the destabilizing effects of monopoly capitalism, consumer culture, and the advances of first-wave feminism. Gestures of refusal, whether understood as reactionary or progressive, are central to almost every conception of the artist—and especially important among these gestures is the practice and display of an unconventional, even transgressive desire. Sexuality, in short, figures prominently in contemporary representations of the conflict between art and society, a conflict that James describes as "one of the half-dozen great primary motives" in his fiction. To indicate the particularity of James's contribution to these social processes , I'd like to contrast his representation of the artist (and his possible sexuality) to that constructed by a less-known group of his contemporaries, the members of fin-de-siècle Parisian bohemia. I've been working for several years on a study of the subculture that, from approximately 1880 to 1910, made Montmartre a center of bohemian life equal to, if not more important than, that of the Latin Quarter. The members of...