Romance and the Prima Donna Image in the Fiction of Henry James

128 The Henry James Review would be no point in our making any interpretation at aU since we have no access to any other sources of information. On balance, then, it is quite possible that Tina is Juliana's daughter, either by Aspern or some other man, but not, I think, overwhelmingly likely. For my money, the critical liberties one needs to take to make this possible are just a shade too high-handed and illicit. FinaUy the precise information to make such an interpretation cast iron is simply not there. J. Peter Dyson—Romance and the Prima Donna Image in the Fiction of Henry James Very few readers associate Henry James with an interest in opera: with drama, of course, and with the visual and plastic arts, but with music in general, and opera in particular, scarcely at aU. Nevertheless, just as many of James's works have provided the basis for successful plays, an ironic fate for poor James the frustrated playwright, any opera goer interested in the contemporary scene is aware that in the last thirty years several of his works, including Washington Square, The Turn of the Screw, "Owen Wingrave," The Wings of the Dove, and now The Aspern Papers, have been turned into operas. But despite James's lack of interest, there are occasional scenes in his fiction where characters go to the opera and, more interestingly, passages in which operatic metaphors play a central role. Only in his turn-of-the-century fiction does James explore the idea of opera in any depth. Two aspects of the topic seem to interest him: the first is the operatic prima donna, which he uses as a figure for investigating the moraUty of artisticaUy or histrionicaUy shaped behavior, the second is the nature of romance, a subject mat preoccupied him for most of his Ufe and tiiat was to culminate in his analysis of it as a literary mode in the preface to die New York Edition of The American (1907). (I might mention in passing that James's most formal treatment of histrionic behavior faUs outside the scope of tiiis paper, in his presentation of the aspiring actress Miriam Rooth in The Tragic Muse [1890].) There are three operatic instances in which these aspects appear: the first is a passage James revised in The Portrait of a Lady for the New York Edition (1908); the other two occur in late tales, "The Two Faces" (1900) and "The Velvet Glove" (1909). James's interest in using opera at this period stems no doubt from his observation of it as part of the London social scene in the nineties, a scene described by die most brilUant music critic writing in London at the time, Como di Bassetto, alias George Bernard Shaw. Corno di Bassetto was remorseless to many composers and performers, but never more so than to a number of contemporary operatic prime donne. Nothing stimulated his sardonic wit more vigorously than their self-serving egocentricity, or their self-aggrandizing reductions of artistic integrity to a shambles. "The operatic stage is improving," Shaw writes in 1890. "But it is stiU possible for a prima donna to bounce on the stage and throw her voice at die heads of the audience with an insolent insistence on her position as a public favourite, and hardly the ghost of a reference to the character she is supposed to impersonate." He comments that the "offences against artistic propriety" of Adelina Patti, probably the most legendary of contemporary opera singers, "are Selected Papers on Henry James, 1988-1990 129 mighty ones and miUions. She seldom even pretends to play any other part than that of AdeUna, the spoüed child with the adorable voice. . . . [She] will get up and bow to you in die very agony of stage death if you only drop your stick accidentaUy." He concludes by remarking how far the opera house is behind the tiieater in England and how any aspiring young singer may "by die exercise of the simplest good sense and taste, attain a higher normal level of dramatic sincerity" than any of her famous operatic predecessors. Whether James ever read this particular passage of Shaw's...