Desire and Love in Henry James: A Study of the Late Novels (review)

Book Reviews David McWhirter. Desire and Love in Henry James: A Study of the Late Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1989. 218 pp. $34.50. The inveterate assumption, maintained by uiree generations of critics, that Henry James was incapable of understanding or representing romantic passion has been persistently challenged in recent years. David McWhirter's study is the third book witiiin me past decade to explore die evolution and encompassing significance of what the young novelist announced in 1865 as his chosen subject: "tiie great relation between men and women, die constant world renewal." That McWhirter's reading of this "relation" should depart so provocatively from tiiose that precede it (my own in Love and the Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Henry James [1980] and Carren Kaston's in Desire in the Novels of Henry James [1984]) suggests both die complexity and centrality of this long-neglected dimension of James's art. Confining himself to die final trio of completed novels, McWhirter attacks the prevailing belief, first advanced by F. O. Mauhiessen, diat diese late works constitute tiirough a shared vision and style one homogeneous "phase" or "Uterary triptych" (2). For McWhirter, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl differ as greatly from one anotiier as from any of the earlier works. James's long-delayed recognition of die potential for genuine intersubjectivity in intimate relationships, he contends, produced radical shifts in the Master's epistemology and mediod between 1900 and 1904. In brief, James's final novels embody a progression from unconsummated desire to "realized and reciprocated love" (3), from Lambert Strether's "imagination of loving" (5), which seeks not to affirm die beloved's existence but to perpetuate by irresolution and delay its own solipsistic yearning, to Maggie Verver's "existential choice" (xiii) to "remake" her marriage in die full awareness of her husband's betrayal. By "enacting" tftis love, Maggie also "makes herself' in Sartre's sense, "forging an identity" (193) through her decision to realize authentic emotional and erotic possibilities and to abandon the infinite but sterile freedom of "mere desiring." More definitive than Milly Theale's desperately affirmed but unanswered love for Densher, Maggie and Amerigo's final embrace, for all of die terrors, restrictions and responsibilities it encompasses, marks a "breakdirough" (9) for a novelist who had for forty years refused "to accommodate mature, fulfilled love" (3). While tiiis synopsis does scant justice to die range and intricacy of McWhirter's argument, it illustrates die conceptual poles of "desire" and "love" diat organize his thesis (5). "Desire," which characterizes Jamesian protagonists from his earliest stories tiirough The Ambassadors, finds its most "appalling" exemplar in Strether. James's envoy creates from his daily whiffs of Parisian ufe a "proliferating narcissistic fantasy," a state of deliberately protracted "wanting" (59) tiiat seeks to deny the reality of temporal loss by fleeing all forms of consummation. As a substitute for action, "desire" cultivates die free play of transfiguring imagination upon objects tiiat must remain ever undefined and elusive. Since, as McWhirter observes, desire ends where even a knowledge of the other begins (for to know is to possess), Strether denies even a provisional comprehension of Madame de Vionnet by continually "refiguring" her in new images culled from mytiiology and art. And since die sustaining condition for desire is absence, die awareness of "a lack and never a possession" (77), Strether, like Proust's Swann, must invent barriers to even the most tentative satisfaction or understanding. Ultimately, by enveloping Chad's lover and all other alluring objects in a haze of multiplying significations, Stretiier hopes to overcome die destructive force of temporality: each new response must erase all previous meanings (personal, historical, or utilitarian); each moment of desiring must become "an The Henry James Review 12 (1991): 184-97 01991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Book Reviews 185 intransitive beginning tiiat prefigures no particular end" (33). The consequences of this habit are altogether ironic: Stretiier's self-deception about the erotic trudi of Chad and Marie's "beautiful friendship" betrays not a squeamish New England conscience but an unwillingness to characterize definitively a relationship tiiat he has vicariously invested with a plethora...