The Historical Eye: The Texture of the Visual in Late James (review)

332 The Henry James Review Susan M. Griffin. The Historical Eye: The Texture of the Visual in Late James. Boston: Northeastern U P, 1991. 189 pp. $32.50. By Veronica Makowsky, University of Connecticut Susan Griffin's relatively brief but complex book has a twofold purpose: to demonstrate the ways James's late works enact the psychology of functionalism and, by doing so, to challenge modernist readings of the late James. In both of these aims, Griffin is part of the new historicism, or, as she puts it, "the current critical movement to rehistoricize our reading of Henry James" (3). To define functionalism, Griffin first characterizes associationism, the eighteenth-century concept of the mind's workings that preceded functionalism and remains more familiar to us: " Associationist psychologists described a mental life comprised of discrete sensations. The mind was merely a tabula rasa, a place where these atoms of sensation combined and recombined" (10). On the contrary, functionalists like William James and James Ward argued that "subjects are active, not passive, in nature, that they alter, as well as adjust to, their environments " (13) and that "mental events cannot be understood apart from their complex, personal contexts" (12). Griffin asserts that for Henry James this process operates largely through the eyes: "the visual is so important a medium of thought for James that it saturates his writing" (6). Building on what she terms critic Richard Hocks's "discussion of the streamlike, active nature of Jamesian mental processes" (7), Griffin uses the functionalist mental processes found in Henry James's late works to attempt to disprove two modernist "critical commonplaces": "the idea that his fictional world is structured by a dichotomy between observation and experience and the notion that the Jamesian protagonist is a 'passive observer,' a cerebral, almost disembodied, being, completely detached from the world of experience" (3). Instead, through chapters on The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, Griffin shows that James's protagonists have an "active and reciprocal" (17) relation with their environments, and, in two chapters on some of James's late autobiographical works, she "contests the critical tradition that reads the stylistic changes of the late phase as evidence of James's retreat from a 'real-world' environment" (30, n47). Griffin's close readings of functionalist perceptual processes are some of the most interesting parts of the book, particularly the analyses of Strether's views of Maria Gostrey's apartment and of Gloriani's party in The Ambassadors and of Maggie's waiting for the appearance of the Prince in parts of The Golden Bowl. The close readings are successful not simply because they illustrate functionalism but also because they make important points about Jamesian themes that disprove Book Reviews 333 modernist notions of James's detached protagonists. Griffin delineates the ways in which Strether "works" a "problem out visually" (39): "what Strether sees ties him to the physical world that surrounds him and to the past that he carries within him" so that "in the act of seeing, Strether shapes his world and his past" (33). In the case of Maggie Verver, Griffin ties her perceptual processes more closely to the social realm dictated by the focus on marriages in The Golden Bowl and argues that "Maggie comes to know her self and her social environment even as she helps to shape them" (58). Through her discussion of Maggie, Griffin also enlarges recent theorizing about "the gaze," asserting that "by displaying the female as perceiver" James "further deconstructs the gendered opposition between seer and seen" (60). The last two chapters of The Historical Eye are more concerned with the visual in the sense of painting than in terms of functionalist psychology, with Griffin's link being John Ruskin's anticipation of functionalism in his art criticism. James himself becomes the active, shaping painter-in-words of The American Scene in chapter 3 and of two short pieces, "Winchelsea, Rye, and 'Denis Duval'" and "Within the Rim" in chapter 4. Griffin is especially astute about the relationship between individual and national identity in The American Scene, which she demonstrates through James's endeavor to relate his own and his country's past to its present through his use...