The Cold World of London in "The Beast in the Jungle"

Studies in American Fiction227 "Stanley J. Kunitz, ed., Twentieth Century Authors, First Supplement (New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1955), p. 439: "So complete was Hergesheimer's retirement that long before his death critics wrote of him only in the past tense. Partly this was because the world of so many of his novels—the elegant, refined, and decadent world of 'an international leisure class'—seemed so remote to the modern reader." Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942), p. 236: "His novels were like a museum devoted to the households of the past." Obituary, New York Times (April 26, 1954), p. 25: "Without having skirted the small inner circle of the nation's greatest writers, he has left profuse evidence of the fact that he was a hard worker, a diligent scholar and a competent stylist, a teller of tales of dead days who made them live, and an inquisitive historian who brightened his facts with the art of the novelist and the disposition of a minor philosopher." '0A few of the others are available in expensive scholarly reprints. Remembered by some are the silent motion picture versions of two of his works: The Bright Shawl with Dorothy Gish and Richard Barthelmess, and Tol'able David, a short story in his collection The Happy End, also with Richard Barthelmess. THE COLD WORLD OF LONDON IN "THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE" O. P. Jones Ohio State University The overemphasis on point of view in Henry James's fiction has led critics to underemphasize the conditions or circumstances which may qualify and impinge upon a character's consciousness. As Fredric Jameson has noted, what appears to be freedom or independence is often, upon closer examination, estrangement or alienation.1 James himself stresses in the "Preface" to "Daisy Miller" that an "adventure" is to be understood as a "situation." Consequently, the "adventure" is a "matter of interpretation and of the particular conditions; without a view of which latter some of the most prodigious adventures . . . may vulgarly show for nothing."2 In many of James's later tales, the "particular condition" is the world of London, and, indeed, the characters appear to have very little to "show" for their adventure. Only ifone appreciates the presence of London, what James once termed the "awful doom of dishumanization," can one begin to interpret the "adventure" as a "situation."3 One sees, then, a story such as "The Beast in the Jungle" (1903) from a new angle. London is the force threatening at a distance, the beast in the jungle. Rather than a simple tale of detach- 228Notes ment and self-isolation, it is a story which highlights the correspondence between the operation ofJohn Marcher's mind, the operation of the material and social world, and the position of language visa -vis these contexts.4 F. W. Dupee, in his excellent study of HenryJames, observes that John Marcher, the central figure in "The Beast in the Jungle," lives in an "unpeopled medium," withdrawn from others in hope ofsome great fate. In Dupee's words, Marcher "passes, so to speak, into a condition of nightmare, falls out of the world into the universe."5 Marcher's desire for some "distinction," some extraordinary fate, is so obsessive that the tale takes on an air of abstraction, of unreality. The "condition of nightmare" is the condition of alienation, what Dupee sees as Marcher's "fall" into the "universe." The fantasy of the Beast, as in a nightmare, seems to have a life of its own. Marcher is so detached from the operation of his imagination that he is unable to see, until the end, that the image of the Beast springs from his innermost thoughts and reflects his conduct. Furthermore, he fails to see that his inner state corresponds to his outer condition; London operates at a distance upon Marcher and his "unpeopled medium," and the image of the Beast is also a representation of such forces. In Chapter I, the reader sees the impact of London on Weatherend, a country estate outside the city, in the way people associate with one another. Weatherend is no longer a "knowable community ," as Raymond Williams calls it, where...