Esperienza e memoria. Saggio su Henry James (review)

226 The Henry James Review scants the question of how Morgan Moreen as a male falls victim to the family's language—as well as the question of how masculinity itself might be imperilled by language. Similarly, he asserts that Lambert Strether's language "inherently serves the heterosexual code" (114), but he does not explain how the oft-cited "indirect speech" of Paris destabilizes Strether's masculine identity or speech acts. In chapter five ("Absent Fathers"), Cannon shifts his attention to sonpatriarch relationships in James's fiction, and after a small dose of Lacan he discovers that "the patriarchy is all-powerful even when absent" (125). James's own efforts to combat his brother William's patriarchal influence and to find (in Europe) a marginal space where he could wander more at ease create the paradigm of this effort to "escape the influence of fathers" (132). Cannon surveys the same set of fictions—The Portrait of a Lady, "The Pupil," The Princess Casamassima, The Ambassadors—he had cited in previous chapters, but he adds The Turn of the Screw because Miles "symbolizes the spirit of childhood released in the marginal male at the moment he is freed by patriarchal absence" (141). This focus enables a neat, unexpected comparison of Miles and Lambert Strether, whom Cannon sees enjoying a "second childhood" during his second visit to Paris (144). Despite its theoretical lacunae, Cannon's book provides a seminal service to Jamesian gender criticism in identifying James's "marginal males" and especially in analyzing their efforts to compose fictions of alternative masculinities. Critics who write on James's male characters, including this one, will have to write in the margins of Cannon's study at least to start, but—thank goodness—they will find ample room of their own in which to address questions about James and masculinity. Luisa Villa. Esperienza e memoria. Saggio su Henry James. Genova: il melangelo, 1989. pb. 180 pp. 20.000 lire ($13.40). By Nancy L. D'Antuono, Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame In the Preface Luisa Villa establishes the parameters of her study. She takes as point of departure the words of Agostino Lombardo, "il problema critico[...] è quello di determinare quale sia la realtà espressa da James, quale la vita nel cui mistero egli indaga, alla cui 'confusione' cerca di portare l'ordine dell'arte" [the critical problem...is that of determining what the reality expressed by James might be, what is the life into whose mystery he searches, to what "confusion" does he seek to bring the order of art]. The work that follows is an attempt to define, from a historico-critical perspective, the idea of life (of experience) that is at the heart of James's narrative in his later years, as well as the problems of the consciousness that is the subject ofthat life. Her methodology is to bring into play Book Reviews 227 around James's works a series of contemporary texts, primarily in the area of philosophical reflections on experience (Spengler, Maeterlinck, Simmel, Hegel, Marx, Dilthey, Symons, Arnold, Ellis), relative to that area of literary experimentation between decadentism and symbolism. Villa declares her specific debt as concerns methodology to the works of the Frankfort critics and especially the young Gyorgy Lukács. Although she recognizes the obligation to elaborate further on the specifics of her approach, she chooses to allow the work to speak for itself. The introductory chapter (entitled "Prologo") centers on images of cities. By her own admission, Villa eschews the traditional introduction that would situate her work in the context of recent Henry James studies and proffers, instead, a series of historical images of the city, the preferred setting for James's novels. Lukács's discussion of Romantic subjectivity (Theory of the Novel) serves as introduction to the theme of the city. Villa offers a background of a conceptual nature to announce the traits and problems of the Jamesian consciousness in urban settings. The cities studied are Emerson's New York (the city of the inauthentic self where the intellect is smothered in detail, separated from reason and instinct, the attributes of the countryside); "London Town" as the "city of decadence" (the city as...