The Pleasures of Conspiracy in Henry James's The Princess Casamassima

"Shouldn't I find [a defense of my 'artistic position'] in the happy contention that the value I wished most to render and the effect I wished most to produce were precisely those of our not knowing, of society's not knowing, but only guessing and suspecting and trying to ignore, what 'goes on' irreconcilably, subversively, beneath the vast smug surface?"

—Henry James, Preface to The Princess Casamassima¹

Over the last twenty years, critics including Ross Posnock and John Carlos Rowe have helped us rediscover Henry James as an author who harbors a certain relish for feelings of overwhelming surprise and alienation. Works such as What Maisie Knew (1897), The Turn of the Screw (1898), The American Scene (1907), and the novels of James's major phase, are all characterized by an approach to consciousness, which finds exhilarating forms of pleasure at having one's expectations about the world overturned. James's writings reveal, as Posnock puts it, "a desire to experience contemplation as action" through the rendering of subjects striving to achieve certainty in the face of realities that only yield further uncertainty and estrangement. This reading tends to place James not as the "master formalist" but as a "peripatetic cultural critic" attuned to the rhythms and sensations of public culture.² This other side of James typically has been observed as a feature of his late works. In this essay, I would like to pull on this thread by exploring this side of the Jamesian oeuvre in one of his earliest and most significant experiments with the aesthetics of the modern public sphere, The Princess Casamassima (1885), James's tale of anarchist terror and conspiratorial intrigue.

Critics have often regarded The Princess Casamassima as an anomaly or a brief, abortive experiment within James's body of work. After all, the world of terrorist violence and radical politics depicted in The Princess Casamassima would initially seem far afield from the fine psychological interiors, aristocratic manners, and transatlantic travels that James explores in most of his other fiction. But to see it this way is to misunderstand both this novel and its importance within James's larger body of work. In The Princess Casamassima James explores the manner in which conspiracy narratives offer a quintessentially modern form of pleasure—a relief from the doldrums of everyday life through irrationalist forms of speculation and wonder. While this may not initially seem like a typical Jamesian theme, it coheres closely to his longstanding project of exploring the psychology of uncertainty. Rather than directly representing the inner sanctums of a terrorist conspiracy, The Princess Casamassima focuses on recreating the eerie sensation of "not knowing, but only guessing and trying to ignore" how a conspiracy might be underfoot and underway. James's novel pursues this task by submerging its reader's perspective in the active imagination of the sensitive protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, a character whose "impressions" of anarchist conspiracy simultaneously "delight" and "threaten to asphyxiate" him.³ Far from a detour, James's encounter with conspiracy narratives marked a stylistic turning point towards the experiments with perspective that would come to define his work years afterwards.

James wrote The Princess Casamassima while he was in London during an intense period of terrorist activity in Britain and the United States. The years of 1883-86 witnessed a rash of bombings and assassination attempts that prompted many observers to speak of a new sense of immediacy between the calm façade of daily life and the fiery politics of class conflict. For instance, following a particularly spectacular series of bombings in 1883, the London Times called for the end of an era of self-deception, noting that readers need only look to "the assassination literature of America" for signs of an impending class "war carried on with all the appliances of modern science."⁴ As the passage from the Times suggests, many saw incidents of terrorism as clues of a criminal underworld, containing elements wanting to wipe out the existing cultural and social establishment.⁵ On one hand, these terrorist incidents seemed to give credence to fin-de...