The Aboriginal Hawthorne: Mastering the Master from Beyond the Grave

162 The Henry James Review "faU of aUegory" named by my title thus refers at once to James's reading of Hawthornian aUegory as a "faUen," mechanical, and derivative narrative form, to Roderick's literal and figurative faU as aUegorical artist, and to James's own repetition of Hawthome in his aUegorical plot. This repetition is itself an allegory of poetic influence. For to exorcise a Uterary forefather is inevitably to memoriatize him. We are reminded of Rowland's paradoxical injunction to himself about the woman with whom both he and Roderick are in love: "Remember to forget Mary Garland." To remember to forget Hawthome is to remember him with a vengeance. No wonder James finds on rereading his novel that, like the "valuable moral" Hawthome is said to exemplify in the 1879 study, Roderick Hudson "point[s] almost too stem a moral." In a way, James's involuntary repetition of Hawthome is the most rigorous possible articulation of the questions of identity and influence the novel raises. Surely this is the real "moral" of the story. Leland Person, Jr.—The Aboriginal Hawthorne: Mastering the Master from Beyond the Grave In his 1879 book for the EngUsh Men of Letters series Henry James caUed Nathaniel Hawthome the "last of the old-fashioned Americans." James's Hawthorne , of course, is as much self-revelation as literary biography or criticism; writing about Hawthome, for James, means defining himself against a selfinterested construct of Hawthome—trying to write himself into being in a kind of epitaph, over Hawthorne's grave. "What I mean," James admits, "is that an American of equal value with Hawthome, an American of equal genius, imagination , and, as our forefathers said, sensibUity, would at present inevitably accommodate himself more easily to the idiosyncracies of foreign lands. An American as cultivated as Hawthome, is now almost inevitably more cultivated, and, as a matter of course, more Europeanised in advance, more cosmopolitan." If Hawtiiorne is tiie "last of the old-fashioned Americans," it should be obvious whom Henry James is nominating as the "first of the new-fashioned Americans"—more cultivated, more Europeanised, more cosmopoUtan. But in advancing himself at Hawthorne's expense, James of course marks his debt to Hawtiiorne as the point of comparison—the landmark by which James can know his own position. In different ways, each of the three papers we have just heard suggests, for James, just this sort of ironic belatedness, but I think they also go further—to suggest a James haunted by Hawthorne's ghost, a James who, try as he would, could not help but rewrite Hawthome, in fact, could not help but figure as something of a blank page (like Pansy in The Portrait of a Lady) on whom a ghostly Hawthorne inscribed himself, a James who does not Master but is Mastered by this stronger precursor and, in Sheila Teahan's words, involuntarily repeats his predecessor. Professor Teahan makes the most explicit case for James's belated relationship to Hawthome. Roderick Hudson, she maintains, "interrogates James's own relation to Hawthome, the forefather whose influence weighs so heavily in the novel." Roderick "becomes a figure for Hawthome himself," the "doomed precursor who plays out the via negativa of James's own controUed, mediated , and transumptive relation to tradition." Furthermore, in noting that James's novel "swerves in mid-course" toward an "aUegory of the problem of the wtil," Selected Papers on Henry James, 1988-1990 163 she suggests that James's attempt to "exorcise" Hawthome—through Roderick's deadly faU—"takes die form of allegory itself." Thus, despite his determination to free himself from Hawthorne's aUegorical influence, James unwittingly repeats Hawthome and "discovers that he has written an aUegorical novel in spite of himself." Emily MiUer Budick also concludes tiiat James retells a Hawtiiorne story, a mythic story of mother-daughter relationship. She argues tiiat The Portrait of a Lady not only inherits Hawthorne's insight into the "sexism of Puritan patriarchy ," but perpetuates his error in casting his heroine's skepticism in "decidedly male terms." Like Hawthome, she says, James places a woman "in the position of the man"—that is, in the position of skeptic, doubting what...