Fingers of Memory: “The Bench of Desolation”

This article considers the roles played by memory in James’s late story “The Bench of Desolation” (1910). These include personal memories on James’s part (of being threatened with a potentially humiliating lawsuit), and literary memories, of others’ work and his own, principally Dickens’s Great Expectations and James’s recent The Wings of the Dove. Primarily, though, the discussion centers on how the story’s central character has been imprisoned for many years by an obsessive memory and the deeply mixed feelings that arise when he is suddenly and unexpectedly offered a release from it.