In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

6 Made for Love Olive Chancellor, Henry James, and The Bostonians In the early course of her intimacy with Kate Croy—an “intimacy as deep as it had been sudden”—Milly Theale, death-stricken heroine of Henry James’s 1902 novel The Wings of the Dove, wonders over the labyrinthine silences that so strangely animate her new fast friendship.1 “What had happened,” James writes, his free indirect discourse routed in this instance through Milly’s consciousness, was that afterward, on separation, she wondered if the matter hadn’t mainly been that she herself was so ‘other,’ so taken up with the unspoken ; the strangest thing of all being, still subsequently, that when she asked herself how Kate could have failed to feel it she became conscious of being here on the edge of a great darkness. She should never know how Kate truly felt about anything such a one as Milly Theale should give her to feel. Kate would never—and not from ill will nor from duplicity, but from a sort of failure of common terms—reduce it to such a one’s comprehension or put it within her convenience. (WD, 177) Milly’s curiosity poses a series of questions that are themselves writ large across the whole of Wings, a book famously about “the unspoken” and what it can effect, suspend, or sustain.2 Through Milly James seems to wonder: What happens between people when they want for “common terms”? What happens to something—a relation, a wish, an aspect of being—when it is unnameable, or is somehow rendered so? What does the corralling of something expansive, protean, and elusive—a relation, a wish, an aspect of being—in the narrow parameters of a name, of “common terms,” do to it? Is that namelessness a kind of brutality? (“Kate Made for Love 169 wasn’t brutally brutal—which Milly had hitherto benightedly supposed the only way; she wasn’t even aggressively so, but rather indifferently, defensively and, as it might be said, by the habit of anticipation” [WD, 171].) Or is it pleasure? (“Yet on the spot [Milly] . . . knew herself handled and again, as she had been the night before, dealt with—absolutely even dealt with for her greater pleasure” [WD, 243].) Is it important to maintain, even momentarily, the distinction between these anguishes and delights? James’s consideration of the limits of the speakable are also, that is to say, explorations of the efficacies of wordlessness and namelessness, and they mark his late fiction especially dramatically—fiction composed after the catastrophic failure of his play Guy Domville in 1895, which is also, of course, the year of Wilde’s gripping, terrible trials.3 Whatever else they may have done, those trials could only have brought home the more forcefully to James a painful intractability in questions of sex and sexual naming, an intractability he would spend much of the next decade turning into a singular, even exemplary style of modernist fiction.4 For Wilde’s suit and countersuit mark the moment in which homosexuality, particularly in men, comes at once to be persecuted in the most spectacularly punitive ways but also to establish itself, in “common terms,” as an identity (and, so, as a mode of recognition as well, a locus for a shielding sort of community of organized resistance to the tenor of those common terms).5 We have seen in previous chapters the array of losses entailed in that hardening-into-place of modern sexual identity, losses of errant, oblique, expansive ways of imagining sexual being. James’s career spans the breadth of the period of transformation we have been considering. We have remarked already, in his 1914 letter to Annie Fields, James’s wistful nostalgia for the looser codes, and perhaps more occult legibilities, of a moment before Wilde—and this squares well with the familiar sense of the late fiction as preoccupied with silence, and with the singular power of things left protractedly unspoken. But James’s disposition was not always thus. Perhaps surprisingly, a younger James found room to wonder over not the freedom but the pains, even unto anguish, of namelessness. Such pain is on richest display in The Bostonians, a novel published in 1886, set in the 1870s, and, for my purposes, perhaps most aptly contextualized by Annamarie Jagose. Jagose astutely reminds us that “the novel’s narrative ambivalence is structured less across character than across a sexual field whose defining coordinates have not yet hardened off,” with...

Share