The Greatest Gift: On the Ecstasy of Reading in “The Beast in the Jungle”

This article compares how William H. Gass in The Tunnel and Henry James in “The Beast in the Jungle” conceive romantic love as the means of access to the creative power of the imagination, thereby continuing in their own revisionary ways ancient traditions of spiritual knowledge. In this context, both “positive” and “negative” experiences become prompts to the ecstasy of reading, that self-destroying knowledge’s fatal grip on human life, at least as James herein dramatizes.