American Literature I

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American Literature (I)

• Lecture 14
• Local Colorism - Henry James

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HENRY JAMES(1843-1916)

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Henry James Importance

• Promoter of realism in American literature
• Part of the genteel tradition
• Master of the realistic novel of international
  manners
• Predecessor of modernism
• - expatriate
• - mythic levels of the unconscious

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Native of the James Family

• William of Albany
• Henry James, Sr.
• The importance of individual freedom
• The dangers of authoritarian control
• Spiritual values- no member guilty of a single
  stroke of business
• The idea of the vastation

Henry James Sr. and Jr. in 1854. Photograph by
Matthew Brady
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Henry James Education

• To be something, something unconnected with
  specific doing, something free and uncommitted,
  something finer in short than being that,
  whatever it was, might consist of
• Crossing and re-crossing of the Atlantic
• First memories from Paris
• Bred a sense of Europe

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Henry James Education

• Greatest flexibility, a sensuous education
• 1843-1844 the family stayed in Europe
• 1854-1860 again
• 1869 -1870 his first trip to Europe alone
• 1872-1874 travelling with his sister
• 1875 moved to Paris
• 1876 moved to London
• 1877 back to Paris
• 1879 back to London
• 1883 returned to England for good

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Henry James Expatriation

• Reasons
• the death of his parents in 1881
• dissatisfaction with the material world of the
  US thin, raw, monotonous, undefined
  (Hawthorne)
• the attraction of the rich European culture
  form, style, social variety, beauty, art and a
  present suffused with the past
• the ferment of artistic and literary life in
  Europe

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Henry James on Turgenev

• It would have been impossible to imagine a better
  representation of a Nimrod of the North. He was
  exceedingly tall, and broad and robust in
  proportion. His head was one of the finest, and
  though the line of his features was irregular
  there was a great deal of beauty in his face.

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Henry James in Paris

• A letter to William Dean Howells,
• 1876 Yes, I see a great deal of
• Turgenev and Im excellent friends
• with him He has also made me
• acquainted with Gustave Flaubert,
• to whom I have likewise taken a
• great fancy, and at whose house I
• have seen the little coterie of the
• young realists in fashion. They are
• all charming talkers - though as
• editor of the austere Atlantic it
• would startle you to hear some of
• their projected subjects.

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Other Influences

• William James
• His great love, Minny Temple - Daisy Miller,
  Isabel Archer, Milly Theale
• His romantic attachment to Constance Fenimore
  Woolson
• His guilt for not participating in the Civil War

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Writing Career

• Major Phases
• Leon Edels five phases
• The Untried Years 1843-1870
• The Conquest of London 1870-1881
• The Middle Years 1882-1895
• The Treacherous Years 1895-1901
• The Master 1901-1916

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Writing Career

• Nowadays - four
• First Stage - up to 1881
• Watch and Ward, 1871, 1878
• Roderick Hudson, 1875, 1879
• The American, 1877
• Daisy Miller, 1878
• The Europeans, 1878
• Washington Square, 1880-81
• The Portrait of a Lady, 1881

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The Portrait of a Lady

• A novel of entrapment
• Isabel Archer
• The point of view
• The succession of houses
• - the house of darkness
• - the house of experience
• - they represent the accumulated refinement and
  corruption of civilization

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Portrait D'une FemmeEzra Pound

• Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
• London has swept about you this score years
• And bright ships left you this or that in fee
• Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
• Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of
  price.
• Great minds have sought you--lacking someone
  else.
• You have been second always. Tragical?
• No. You preferred it to the usual thing
• One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
• One average mind--with one thought less, each
  year.
• Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
• Hours, where something might have floated up.
• And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.

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Portrait D'une FemmeEzra Pound

• You are a person of some interest, one comes to
  you
• And takes strange gain away
• Trophies fished up some curious suggestion
• Fact that leads nowhere and a tale or two,
• Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else
• That might prove useful and yet never proves,
• That never fits a corner or shows use,
• Or finds its hour upon the loom of days
• The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work
• Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,
• These are your riches, your great store and yet
• For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,
• Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter
  stuff
• In the slow float of differing light and deep,
• No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
• Nothing that's quite your own.
• Yet this is you.

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PORTRAIT OF A LADYWilliam Carlos Williams

• Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms
  touch the sky. Which sky? The sky where Watteau
  hung a lady's slipper. Your knees are a
  southern breeze -- or a gust of snow. Agh! what
  sort of man was Fragonard? -- As if that
  answered anything. -- Ah, yes.

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PORTRAIT OF A LADYWilliam Carlos Williams

• Below the knees, since the tune drops that way,
  it is one of those white summer days, the tall
  grass of your ankles flickers upon the shore --
  Which shore? -- the sand clings to my lips --
  Which shore? Agh, petals maybe. How should I
  know? Which shore? Which shore? -- the petals
  from some hidden appletree -- Which shore? I
  said petals from an appletree.

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Writing Career

• The Second Stage - experimental years
• The Bostonians, 1886
• Princess Casamassima, 1886
• The Tragic Muse, 1889-90
• The Spoils of Poynton, 1897
• What Maisie Knew, 1897
• The Turn of the Screw, 1898
• The Awkward Age, 1899
• Plays
• The American, Daisy Miller, Guy Domville

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• The house of fiction has not one window but a
  million and at each of these windows hanging
  over the human scene stands a figure with a pair
  of eyes.... He and his neighbours are watching
  the same show, but one seeing more where the
  other sees less, one seeing black where the other
  sees white, one seeing big where the other sees
  small, one seeing coarse where the other sees
  fine. And so on, and so on there is fortunately
  no saying on what, for the particular pair of
  eyes, the window may not open fortunately by
  reason, precisely, of this incalculability of
  range. The spreading field, the human scene, is
  the choice of subject the pierced aperture,
  either broad or balconied or slit-like and
  low-browed, is the literary form but they are,
  singly or together, as nothing without the posted
  presence of the watcher - without, in other
  words, the consciousness of the artist.

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• It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes
  importance, for our consideration and application
  of these things, and I know of no substitute
  whatever for the force and beauty of its
  process.
• Really, universally, relations stop
  nowhere...and the exquisite problem of the
  artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of
  his own, the circle within which they shall
  happily appear to do so
• Don't let any one persuade you ... that Form is
  not substance to that degree that there is
  absolutely no substance without it. Form alone
  takes, and holds and preserves substance - saves
  it from the welter of helpless verbiage that we
  swim in as in a sea of tasteless tepid pudding,
  and that makes one ashamed of an art capable of
  such degradations.

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The Bostonians

• Not successful
• The two plots do not merge
• - The struggle of the neurotic Olive Chancellor
  and Basil Random to win Verena Tarrant
• - the portrait of reformist agitation in Boston
  and especially the feminist movement

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Princess Casamassima

• His only political novel
• The revolutionary aspirations of the working
  class in odd conjunction with the aristocracy
• Influences
• - Dickens underworld of London
• - Balzacs social penetration
• - Zolas descriptions of the lower classes
• - Flauberts mastery of form

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The Tragic Muse

• The world of the theatre in London
• Overcrowded
• Unclear plot line
• The message
• - it is impossible to be an artist and a human
  being at the same time

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Writing Career

• The Third stage - the Master
• The Sacred Fount, 1901
• The Wings of the Dove, 1902
• The Ambassadors, 1903
• The Golden Bowl, 1904
• The Outcry, 1911
• The Ivory Tower, 1917

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The Wings of the Dove

• Milly Theale - intense desire for life
• A Christ-like figure
• Mythic levels
• The gross materialism of English society
• The world of mass culture
• Pre-modernist techniques

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The Ambassadors

• Autobiographical Lewis Lambert Strether
• Suspense comes not in the detail of what happens,
  but in the details of how happenings occur, why
  they have occurred as they did, and what might
  have happened in a different scenario
• The point of view
• Picture-scene alternation
• Comic undertone
• The influence of impressionism

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Henry James and Impressionism

• Claude Monet, Springtime
• The tonality perfectly exemplifies the
  violettomania or seeing blue for which the
  Impressionists were repeatedly criticized one
  commentator described the third Impressionist
  exhibition in 1877 as having the overall effect
  of a worm-eaten Roquefort cheese!
• Madam de Vionnet

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The Ambassadors, Hans Holbein, the
Younger,1533The National Gallery, London
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The Art of Anamorphosis

• An anamorphosis is a deformed image that appears
  in its true shape when viewed in some
  unconventional way.
• Webster's 1913 DictionaryA distorted or
  monstrous projection or representation of an
  image on a plane or curved surface, which, when
  viewed from a certain point, or as reflected from
  a curved mirror or through a polyhedron, appears
  regular and in proportion a deformation of an
  image.

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The Art of Anamorphosis

• Forms of anamorphosis
• - oblique, the image must be viewed from a
  position that is very far from the usual in-front
  and straight-ahead position - catoptric, the
  image must be seen reflected in a distorting
  mirror (typical shapes being cylindrical, conical
  and pyramidal)

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The Golden Bowl

• The Ververs Maggi and Adam, Prince Amerigo and
  Charlotte Stant
• The exploration of the father-daughter relation
• The most ambiguous of his novels
• Lost of referents on the grammatical level the
  indicative verbs of earlier novels give way to an
  increasingly subjunctive mode in which
  supposition, desire and contingency all seem to
  displace statements of actual fact.

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Writing Career

• The Forth Stage - autobiographical writings
• Travel books
• A Little Tour in France, 1884
• English Hours, 1905
• The American Scene, 1907
• Italian Hours, 1909
• Autobiographies
• A Small Boy and Others, 1913
• Notes of a Son and Brother, 1914
• The Middle Years, 1917

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Writing Career

• Criticism
• Hawthorne, 1879
• The Art of Fiction, 1884
• The Scenic Art. Notes on Acting and the
• Drama 1872-1901
• The Painter's Eye. Notes and Essays on the
• Pictorial Arts
• The New York Edition - 22 volumes, prefaces

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Major Themes

• The International Theme
• - Americans in Europe
• - the American girl
• - international manners
• The Dilemma of the Artist
• - the critics ( The Figure in the Carpet, The
  Aspern Papers, Next Time)
• The supernatural
• The mythic levels of the subconscious

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James Art

• Psychological realism
• The house of fiction has not one window but a
  million and at each of these windows hanging
  over the human scene stands a figure with a pair
  of eyes... He and his neighbors are watching the
  same show, but one seeing more where the other
  sees less, one seeing black where the other sees
  white, one seeing big where the other sees small,
  one seeing coarse where the other sees fine.
  fortunately by reason, precisely, of this
  incalculability of range.

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Jamess Art - The Preface to The Portrait of a
Lady

• And so on, and so on there is fortunately no
  saying on what, for the particular pair of eyes,
  the window may not open The spreading field, the
  human scene, is the choice of subject the
  pierced aperture, either broad or balconied or
  slit-like and low-browed, is the literary form
  but they are, singly or together, as nothing
  without the posted presence of the watcher -
  without ... the consciousness of the artist.

37
James Art

• It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes
  importance, for our consideration and application
  of these things, and I know of no substitute
  whatever for the force and beauty of its
  process.
• Really, universally, relations stop
  nowhere...and the exquisite problem of the
  artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of
  his own, the circle within which they shall
  happily appear to do so.

38
James Art

• Dont let any one persuade you ... that Form is
  not substance to that degree that there is
  absolutely no substance without it. Form alone
  takes, and holds and preserves substance - saves
  it from the welter of helpless verbiage that we
  swim in as in a sea of tasteless tepid pudding,
  and that makes one ashamed of an art capable of
  such degradations.

39
Homework

• Textbook reading
• Biographical Introduction P.73-75
• The Story of The Portrait of a Lady P.76-81
• Chapter VI and VII, The Portrait of a Lady
  P.81-104
• To understand the extracts better please refer
  to
• SparkNotes Study Guide to The Portrait of a Lady