The Center of Consciousness on Stage: Henry James's Confidence

THE CENTER OF CONSCIOUSNESS ON STAGE: HENRY JAMES'S CONFIDENCE Martha Collins" Replying to his brother's criticism of the "lightness" of his fifth novel, Confidence (1879),1 Henry James suggested that the lack of "gravity" in his work might come from "the high state of development of my artistic conscience, which is so greatly attached to form that it shrinks from believing that it can supply it properly for big subjects, and yet is constantly studying the way to do so."2 Confidence is ultimately neither grave nor very successful, but it shows James "studying the way." The short novel may in fact be seen as a technical experiment, the product of an incomplete synthesis of two methods James had used the year before: the single center of consciousness, as used in "Daisy Miller," and the basically dramatic method of The Europeans. Although James has been criticized for his handling of each of these techniques,3 the relationship between the two has not been discussed. Most of the fiction James wrote between 1869 and 1878 is presented from the point of view of one character.4 In the short tales of this period, a first-person character-narrator relates what he has seen and heard; in four longer works ("Madame de Mauves," Roderick Hudson, The American, and "Daisy Miller"), most of thenarrative is filtered through a single center of consciousness. In the latter works, the internal drama of observation and discovery is at least as interesting, though inseparable from, the external drama that is observed. The two are particularly well fused in "Daisy Miller" where, as Wayne C. Booth notes, Winterbourne's "slow caution and ready suspicions are admirably suited to make us aware of the pathos of Daisy." If "Daisy's drama is precisely the drama of being misunderstood,"5 Winterbourne's is precisely the drama of misunderstanding. A few months after "Daisy Miller" was serialized, James had completed The Europeans, which he later called "an artistic experiment."6 Quite in contrast to his earlier work, the short novel is essentially a dramatic comedy in narrative form. James presents most of "Martha Collins, a poet and critic, is a member of the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. Her verse has appeared in the New York Quarterly and the Southern Review and an essay on William Collins will appear soon in English Literary History. 40Martha Collins the material in scenes, using synopsis only briefly; he relies heavily on dialogue for character revelation; and he uses no center of consciousness , but "goes behind" most of the characters, especially the four who are most involved in the romantic plot. In contrast to "Daisy Miller" and its consciousness-centered predecessors, the mode of The Europeans is basically comic, its outcome at least partially "happy." It is these two methods which are combined in Confidence. One of the characters, Bernard Longueville, is the observer and reflector of all the scenes, the center of consciousness. Bernard is at times as bewildered by the characters he observes as Winterbourne is by Daisy Miller; and James's original plan, outlined in his notebook, called for a similarly unhappy ending.7 Like The Europeans, however, Confidence is basically dramatic in plot, structure, and emphasis. Its central characters reveal themselves primarily through dialogue which is exchanged in short scenes, and four of them, including Bernard, are almost equally involved in what turns out to be a romantic plot of comic errors. Although the ending may have been changed in the course of composition, James seems to have been aware from the beginning of a possible tension between the two techniques, and to have tried to create a center of consciousness who could fill two roles at once. The narrator says of Bernard in the first chapter: Clever as he often was in talking with his friends, I am not sure that his best things . . . were not for his own ears. . . . His own society was more of a stimulus than that of most other people. And yet he was not for this reason fond of solitude; he was, on the contrary, a very sociable animal. It must be admitted at the outset that he had...