From Melodrama to Monologue: Henry James and Domestic Terror

Beginning with Henry James's profound connection to Robert Browning's poetry, this essay investigates the evolution of James's style in relation to both melodrama and the dramatic monologue and further relates these formal developments to his portrayal of sexual violence. Through the use of both melodramatic and monologic techniques, James probes the limits of masculine authority in an upper-class world that does not permit the open display of brutal physical force. Indeed, in his late novels, James suggests that the will to mastery latent in masculine connoisseurship is extraordinarily powerful but not always total, an ambivalent view of male authority--and authorship---that deeply troubled his nineteenth-century readers.