Intensely Family: The Inheritance of Family Shame and the Autobiographies of Henry James (review)

248Reviews Holly, Carol. Intensely Family: The Inheritance ofFamily Shame and the Autobiographies of Henry James. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1995. 227 pp. Cloth: $50.00. Paper: $23.95. In her informed and careful study, Intensely Family: The Inheritance of Family Shame and the Autobiographies ofHenry James, Carol Holly continues the work of critics such as Howard M. Feinstein and Alfred Habegger in uncovering the tangled pathologies of James family relations. In her treatment , these pathologies derive from a "multi-generational system of interaction " that creates "a shame-based 'emotional field' which permeates, even imprisons, the emotional life of family members" (p. 9). The James family, she argues, had a formidable history of physical and emotional disaster, the denial ofwhich produced a family bonded by concealed and unspoken shames. These emerged in a rhetoric of psychosomatic wounds through which family business was transacted and in a need shared by William and Henry to redeem and transcend the messy whole through achievement. The key figure in this legacy is Henry James, Sr., whose monstrous, smothering inconsistencies shamed and blighted all of his children. A sense of the James family as a poisonous swamp will be familiar to readers of recent biographical treatments, liberally cited in Holly's text. Her contribution is to suggest the analytic framework of family-based shame for understanding the James family's interactions, and carefully to narrativize the persistent effects of family shame on Henry's career, the central focus of her study. In her documented view, James's personal writings suggest "time and again . . . that he built his impressive literary career out of a determined effort to disassociate himself from his own shame or negative identity" (p. 43). When his faith in his career periodically collapsed, consequently, so did James, into a variety of psychic and psychosomatic symptoms. The largest sections of Holly's book conduct a careful and important reading of the two late autobiographies, A Small Boy and Others and Notes ofa Son and Brother. She makes valuable use of unpublished letters to illuminate the context of their composition, and to resist in particular Edel's "partial and idealized" reading of James's late years as a triumph of aesthetic consciousness (p. 6). In Holly's reading, the autobiographies "were not a means by which James could re-experience and come to terms with the obscure but painful feelings that shaped his life. Quite the opposite, in fact" (p. 195). Rather than therapeutically working through his family relations, James perpetuates the family legacy of shame, idealizing and protecting his father; coercively using his illnesses to manipulate surviving family members ; and, especially, ignoring the painful and oppressed realities ofthe James family women. The autobiographies cannot rescue him from the effects of problems they so thoroughly replicate; instead, Holly suggests in a powerful conclusion, his apparent recovery after their composition cames from their public acclaim. "The only balm for James's pain," finally, was a "patent and Studies in American Fiction249 resounding success" (p. 195). My reservations concerning Intensely Family have to do with the potential of its internally consistent narrative to contribute to a monolithic and negative portrait of James that cannot do justice to the full complexity of his life. "Shame" as a metaphor—though I am far from sure about this—may have the liability of contributing to essentializing psychological narratives. It seems so recognizable and stable, so blunt and basic, so dangerously the same in its various manifestations. Given a broader narrative focus, for example , characteristics and responses of James appear less reprehensible than they do in the context of his shame-based family relations. Ambitions that are "grandiose" responses to his family problems must commonly accompany literary achievement of the magnitude of James's (p. 52). A desire for acclaim that in the context of family strikes one as an even pathetic substitute for honest knowledge, in the broader context of a life monkishly devoted to literature hardly dismays. It also surprises, I might add, that Holly fails to take into account James's homoeroticism, a topic that would seem to have a complicating and necessary relation to the problem of shame in James's life. The gravest danger is that...