Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

1977

Keywords

Henry James (1843-1916), Criticism and interpretation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English, General Literature, and Rhetoric

First Advisor

John Hagan

Second Advisor

Vincent Freimarck

Third Advisor

Melvin Seiden

Abstract

Any act of literary criticism is presumptuous, but to contribute still another treatise on Henry James to the profuse analyses which already exist might seem sheer arrogance. I am not, however, so bold as to claim that the following study blazes with originality. It does offer, I think, more precise insights into James’s moral discriminations than they have received, for it concentrates on an aspect of his characters which has often been misunderstood or not accorded the central, extensive treatment I give it here.

My concern in this dissertation is with the relationship of will to the lives of James’s characters; more specifically, I attempt to determine his moral evaluations of the ways the characters manifest it or fail to show it. As a way of introducing my subject, let me quote Jacques Barzun. In the famous 1943 Kenyon Review issue devoted to James, Barzun says a very curious thing: “Lovers—on whom James lavishes his manly tenderness—are separated by money or the lack of it; by misunderstanding or excessive insight; by secrets or revelations; by pride or humility. Free will makes the wrong choice in either case simply because it is will” (514-15). The last sentence in this passage should make a reader pause. The word “will” can have different definitions, but by it I believe we generally mean, to cite the Funk and Wagnalls dictionary, “the power of conscious, deliberate action; the faculty by which the rational mind makes choice of its end of action.” This is, indeed, the sense in which I use the term throughout my text. Yet in declaring that James opposes “will,” Barzun indicates that James does not concede people the right to direct their own lives. Surely, though, James is not guilty of such a patently absurd attitude. In fact, he expects human beings to acknowledge themselves as the shapers of their own existence, and he brands as unethical those like Owen Gereth and Merton Densher who merely submit themselves to others instead of personally facing the task of determining what their purposes in life should be.

It is quite possible that, despite his mention of “humility,” Barzun is loosely invoking “will” when he really means that particular form of it which we might call assertiveness, a definite effort at making one’s presence felt and honored in the world. Yet James does not necessarily disapprove of this, either. Certainly he indicts those like Vanderbank who exert their wills to effect a retreat from life, withdrawing from passionate experiences and authentic relationships with others to protect their own security. And James actually exalts forwardness when it reflects a will working together with awareness, sensitivity, feelings of responsibility—in short, when it constitutes will acting as a moral influence. To me, a great deal of James criticism is marked by a serious failure to realize or share James’s endorsement of the forceful promotion of one’s views provided one remains alert to its possible consequences and sympathetic to other people. I suspect that what are for me unfair attacks on characters like Fleda Vetch, Maisie Farange, the governess of Bly, and Maggie Verver have been largely sparked by this inability either to understand or concur with James’s belief in such an entity as an emphatic yet moral will. Of course, even his most virtuous characters have constantly to guard against too much self-assertion; James finds the tension between will and the faculties which discipline it to be perpetual, despite whatever moral pressures one might have been capable of exhibiting. Fervent advancers of ethical values must always beware of lapsing into the callously manipulative behavior which does, in fact, distinguish numerous people in James’s fiction. Often in the following pages I describe this latter kind of conduct as “willfulness,” since the term conveys how those guilty of such undue aggression are consumed by a desire to impose their will upon others.

In the text I undertake a careful scrutiny of figures who demonstrate the characteristics to which I have referred—submissiveness, fearful distrust of the world, willfulness, and James’s ideal of potent moral willing. However, a cautionary note about language is in order. I hold that terms like these can, indeed, be useful in summarizing the judgments which James makes of his characters, but in employing them I have, at the same time, sought to avoid giving the impression that he prefers quick, moralistic generalizations about people to incisive probing of them. Writing about James has been, and should be, for me, a process of continual revision, directed toward capturing the fineness of his discriminations, the nuances of his reasoning. No one in his fiction is merely a villain or merely a neurotic or merely a weakling or merely a saint, for even those who ultimately earn his disapprobation are revealed in all their human complexity, and those who receive his glowing acclamation are shown to be imperfect mortals capable of moral error. Sooner or later, a critic does have to resort to generalizing terms, and I hope that the reader will find mine adequate. Yet I hope even more that he will appreciate the close attention with which I have endeavored to treat the characters whom I examine.

Because James’s concern with the subject of will pervades his fiction, it has been difficult for me to decide which works I should select to comprise the five I thought I could handle reasonably well, within the limits of a dissertation. While the novels I have chosen to discuss certainly reflect my own personal interests, I have not rested my choices on mere subjectivity, and the result is not a haphazard collection of self-contained essays. I wanted to examine first a book which comes from the beginning of James’s career, and which, in its intense concentration on the issue of will, could serve as an introduction to the intricacies of later novels. I could have selected The Portrait of a Lady, but I think that enough intelligent criticism of that novel already exists. The Bostonians was also a logical candidate. But I decided to analyze The Princess Casamassima. It elaborates an important aspect of willing, the desire for an aesthetically satisfying life versus the need for an inclusive attention to the complexities of experience. Characters like the Princess, Paul Muniment, Millicent Henning, and Hoffendahl prove unduly committed to the furtherance of their visions of what constitutes an ordered world, disdaining the imperatives of those who interfere with their attempts at self-gratification. The novel concludes with the suicide of the protagonist, an event sufficiently uncommon in James’s fiction to warrant renewed probing of the will-related motives for it. Hyacinth Robinson avows loyalty to the will of anarchist leaders, hoping that by acting as a revolutionary, he can attain a life of worth and meaning. While he does submit himself to radicals, he ultimately seeks through such an action to acquire a transcendent identity for himself. He realizes, however, that those to whom he has committed himself are willfully blind to the values of civilisation as it stands, and that he would be propagating willfulness by participating in the apocalypse which they and he have sought to bring about. He kills himself when he is unable to decide between renouncing his promise to undertake the mission which he is assigned, and performing it to confirm his lack of willful caprice. That the whole apocalyptic theme, incidentally, has not been explored much by critics, makes the novel additionally worth new study.

The next three novels come from the period of the nineties. While I would hesitate to claim that this stage of James’s fiction is marked by his greatest, most complex attention to will, certainly his tight focus at this time on the moral will confronting a world rife with corruption, and the difficulties of interpretation he poses to the critic here, justify my choosing most of the works for my discussion from this phase. Again, I have excluded some likely candidates for analysis, such as “The Turn of the Screw” and The Sacred Fount, and again because others ultimately seem more receptive to new examination. I chose The Spoils of Poynton because I desire to resolve the often irrational debate over the merits of Fleda Vetch. In contrast to Mrs. Gereth and Mona Brigstock, who are dreadfully manipulative with regard to other people, and Owen Gereth, who prefers to delegate will and all its responsibilities to someone else, Fleda for the most part stands as a forceful articulator of moral values, although she sometimes restricts her awareness of the consequences of her actions. What Maisie Knew demanded my consideration, since it depicts the education of its heroine as largely involving how to assert oneself strongly but properly in a society characterized by aggressive selfishness. And I selected The Awkward Age for the interesting insights it provides into two particular characters, Vanderbank and Mr. Longdon. The former, afraid of the challenges to his will that might be entailed in a love relationship with Nanda Brookenham, uses that will to reject her, even though she is really an exemplary human being. Longdon does not neurotically recoil from Nanda and life as Van does; rather, he manifests a courageous, responsible power of assertion when he comes to appreciate Nanda’s virtue and removes her from her loveless world.

It is natural to conclude with a novel from James’s major phase, and any, I think, would suffice. I decided to write about The Wings of the Dove, because it greatly stresses the necessity for will to be both powerful and responsible, while at the same time it sensitively explores the reasons why someone might be tempted to avoid honoring one or the other of these requirements. Milly Theale, while not guilty of an act harmful to others, does ignore to her own injury the chance of Merton Densher’s not being as available for marriage to her as he pretends. Her blind infatuation with him is understandable in that, faced with imminent death, Milly fervently longs for a love which will vitalize her during the time she has left. Kate Croy wishes to escape poverty and degradation when she employs Densher in a willful scheme to obtain Milly’s fortune. Densher is primarily guilty of being so afraid of losing Kate’s love that he submits himself to her plotting, instead of wielding a moral influence upon her.

A final point about methodology. Critics have often neglected opportunities to show James’s relationship to modern psychologists and philosophers of will. While my handling of the subject involves literary criticism rather than intellectual history, I do, where pertinent, suggest how James’s particular views on will relate to those of such theorists as his brother William, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Rank. Each of these connections—especially the Kierkegaard and Rank ones—could be examined at considerable length; my intention here, however, is merely to point out how Jamesian doctrine is validated by significant modern analysts of human nature. By such parallels I hope not only to place James more accurately in the context of a philosophical tradition, but also to defend him against a rising number of critics who contend that he and/or the characters he admires fail to exhibit a mature, positive commitment to experience whatever its imperfections. In particular, I wish to emphasize how James’s morality does not entail blind, neurotic adherence to a fixed code, but instead shows close ties to reality and acknowledgment of the prerogatives of other people, even if they do interfere with one’s own.

I believe that if my insights into the particular novels that I have selected possess any cogency, they can be applied to the works that I have omitted. Leslie Farber observes that “literature—in whose view the human condition is inevitably a drama of conflict—has always been interested in man as a creature with some capacity, even if only potential, for independent personal volition: the one human capacity above all others that gives both interest and meaning to the literary records of conflicts between man and man, man and the world, or man within himself” (29-30). In this dissertation studying the role of will in the fiction of Henry James and the moral evaluations he makes with respect to “independent personal volition,” I think that I precisely communicate the “interest” and “meaning” of his literary contributions.

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