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GOTHIC INFLUENCES IN HENRY JAMES'S

MAJOR FICTION
presented by

Paul Rockwood Smyth

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GOTHIC INFLUENCES IN HENRY JAMES'S MAJOR FICTION
by

Paul Rockwood Smyth

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1980

ABSTRACT
GOTHIC INFLUENCES IN HENRY JAMES'S MAJOR FICTION
by

Paul Rockwood Smyth

Henry James unquestionably knew the major works of the
Gothic tradition well, and the influence of that tradition
is apparent in fiction from every stage of his career.
Although critics have thoroughly examined the Gothic elements
of some of his most memorable tales—-"The Turn of the Screw"
and "The Jolly Corner," for example--little has been done
with the obvious Gothicism of some of his major novels.
James is most often regarded as an elite practitioner of
the realistic novel, and to regard him in this way is quite
naturally to obscure his relation to a tradition of popular
fiction which was often highly sensational and unrealistic.

In the novels studied here, The American, The Portrait

 

 

f a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl, both

 

 

 

the character types and the thematic imagery are deeply
rooted in the traditions of Gothic fiction. Furthermore,
James's celebrated "international" theme may be seen as a
late variation of the standard Gothic plot formula. James's
heroes and heroines, like those of earlier Gothic fiction,
embody the sentimental virtues; they believe in the freedom
and sanctity of the individual. And like earlier Gothic
heroes and heroines, James's cnaracters confront a world

fundamentally hostile to such a belief. Yet it is in James's

deepest and most characteristic-themes-~the past, the inter-
penetration of art and life, the problem of evi1--that his
relation to the Gothic can be most convincingly established.
In order to understand this last point it is necessary
to realize that if some of the earliest Gothic novels were
sensational to the point of absurdity, they contained,
nevertheless, a vision of terror and evil which was far more
serious. As the tradition progressed from Walpole's The
Castle of Otranto, through the works of Radcliffe and Lewis,

to Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, terror and evil became

 

associated less with exotic settings and villains and more
with "home" and "civilized" personalities. James's use of
the Gothic as he progressed from an early novel like The

American to his last masterpiece, The Golden Bowl, follows

 

precisely this pattern of development. As a result, James
is best seen not as a realistic novelist who borrowed Gothic
techniques and images for effect, but as a novelist whose
work is very much continuous with that of Radcliffe, Lewis,
and Bronte.

Chapter one of the dissertation is an attempt to
define the essential generic characteristics of the Gothic
as it was developed by its greatest practitioners. It is
an attempt to define those aspects of the Gothic which
endured and which constituted a living tradition which a
writer like James could use and modify. Chapter two, then,
uses the evidence of James's biography and his numerous

critical writings to establish the fact that he was by

inclination and training an artist with a profound sympathy
for the Gothic's essential statement and form. Taken
together, these initial chapters establish a context for

the next four chapters, devoted to readings of The American,

 

The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and The

 

 

Golden Bowl respectively. A close reading of these texts

 

shows how James moved, over a period of nearly thirty years,

from the relatively crude Gothic effects of The American

 

to the incomparable vision of civilized evil which is The

Golden Bowl.

 

CDCopyright by
PAUL ROCKWOOD SMYTH
1980

For my grandmother, Gertrude Rockwood Smyth

iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Professors Sam Baskett, Richard
Benvenuto and William Johnsen for the time spent reading the
manuscript and for the many helpful suggestions they Offered
for its improvement. To Professor Howard Anderson I owe a
particular debt of gratitude for his encouragement and aid
over the life of the project. Special thanks are due as
well to my wife, Maureen, without whose support and under-

standing this undertaking would not have been possible.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. The Gothic Novel: Statement and Form . . . . .

II. Henry James and the Gothic Novel. . . . . . . .

III. The American: Early Experiments in the Gothic.

 

IV. The Portrait g£_a Lady: Isabel Archer in

 

the House of Terror . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

V. The Wings of the Dove: The Terror of Civilized

 

EVil. O O O O O O O O I O O O O O O O O O O O 0

VI. The Golden Bowl: The Gothic Text of Life . . .

 

VII 0 conCIuSion. O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 0

VIII. Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

.49

.86

125

169

202

245

252

THE GOTHIC NOVEL: STATEMENT AND FORM

Ghost stories and stories of supernatural terror held a
particular interest for Henry James, both as a reader and as
a writer, throughout his career. His critical writings pro-
vide ample evidence that he read the works of Ann Radcliffe,
the Bronte sisters, E.T.A. Hoffman, Poe, and, of course,
Hawthorne with interest and attention. Then there is the
evidence provided by his own stories, from early experiments
like "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes" (1868) to later
masterpieces of horror like "The Turn of the Screw" (1898)
and "The Jolly Corner" (1908). On the whole, the "Gothicism"
of the tales has been thoroughly and interestingly explored.1
The novels, however, are quite another matter. And in view
of James's longstanding interest in this vein of fiction, it
is interesting to discover how little has been done with the
'Gothicism of his major and most characteristic novels.

To be sure, the best critics have long been aware that
James was something more than a realistic chronicler of

upper-class manners. F.O. Matthiessen, for example, makes

the following observation regarding The Wings of the Dove:

 

 

But the more one scrutinizes the technique
of this novel, the more one perceives that,
despite James's past-masterly command over
the details of realistic presentation, he
is evoking essentially the mood of a fairy
tale.2

Another eminent critic, Joseph Warren Beach, notes that
James's novels have some of the primary audience appeal of
the old romances:

He stimulates our imagination like a drug.

Our own experience is colored by this

medium in which we are plunged so deep.

For a long time after reading James, we

find ourselves living in this romantic

world . . . we are like the young ladies

who used to read the romances of Mrs.

Radcliffe or Mlle. de Scrudery, or the

young men who still read "The Talisman,"

"The Last of the Mohican," and "The Count

of Monte Cristo."3
Despite such acute observations, James's use of romance has
most often been seen as an interesting but minor aspect of
his fictional technique. Furthermore, most of those studies
which have noted that James was in part a romancer have
neglected altogether the romance form with which he was most
familiar--namely the Gothic.

This is not to suggest, however, that the Gothic in-
fluences in James's novels have gone wholly unnoticed. For
in addition to numerous passing references too inconsequen-
tial to warrant special mention, there are a number of
studies which have much to offer the student who would know
how and where James's novels are indebted to the Gothic

tradition. Marius Bewley's study of characterization in

The Bostonians and Patricia Merivale's study of narrative

 

devices in The Sacred Fount are interesting demonstrations

 

of James's debt to the Gothic in works that are otherwise

very dissimilar.4 More directly related to the approach

being developed here are studies done by William Veeder and

Elsa Nettles which show how The Portrait Qfi‘i Lady is in-
5

 

debted to well known Gothic works.
Among the longer works, Leslie Fiedler's well known

book, Love and Death in_the American Novel is an obvious

 

 

starting point for any discussion of James and the Gothic.
‘Fiedler argues that the American literary tradition, in
which he places James, found in the Gothic the prototype for
its own characteristically dark mode of expression. Unfor-
tunately, however, this work is only valuable in the most
general sense as a guide to the Gothicism of James's major
novels. Though brilliantly suggestive in parts, Fiedler's
analysis of the Gothic is not, finally, adequate for dis-
cussing a writer of James's complexity; and his subsequent
reading of James is not only superficial, but contains
important errors of fact as well.6
Darlene Harbour Unrue's dissertation, "Henry James and
Gothic Romance" is useful as a species of Gothic concordance
to James's writings, but is short in interpretation. Unrue
simply does not concern herself to any great extent with
what the various Gothic themes and techniques mean, and does
little, therefore, to show how they might be related to the
important questions which James raises.7 Martha Banta's
work on James and the Gothic, published first in the Kale
Review and subsequently revised in her book, Henry James and

the Occult, is able but by no means exhaustive. She is, to

 

my knowledge, the only critic to see that an understanding

of the Gothic is of crucial importance in reading the novels
of the major phase. However, her approach is weakened some-
what by the fact that run: understanding of James's use of
the Gothic is not so much based on his obvious knowledge of
the genre as it is based on his interest in the "occultism
that forms much of the intellectual and emotional background

8 As a result, Banta

for the late nineteenth century."
focuses too exclusively on the "haunted" individual--Isabel
Archer or Merton Densher, for instance--while largely
ignoring the larger social and cultural implications which
the Gothic inevitably entails. James, too be sure, was
influenced to a degree by the occultism of which Banta
speaks. But his interest in the "deeper psychology" un—
doubtedly came from the tradition of Gothic fiction as well.
And it is in the fictional tradition, not in occultism, that
we find strong parallels with his moral beliefs and his
attitudes toward such things as culture and art.
Historically, there are a number of good reasons why
the Gothicism of the major novels has not received the
attention it seems to deserve. Chief among them, certainly,
is James's role in the evolution of the novel. Implicitly
in his fiction and explicitly in his critical prose James
insisted upon the validity and importance of the novelist's
art. He was among those most responsible for elevating the
English novel from its popular beginnings to a fully con-
scious, elite art form. And it is, therefore, not surpris-

ing that a generation of critics trained to view James as

the quintessential elite novelist would be blind to any
relationship between his novels and the earlier Gothic
novels, many of which were overtly popular.

A second but perhaps equally important reason for this
critical oversight may be recognized in the advent of
literary realism and the resulting tendency to view pre-
sentations of everyday life as morally and artistically
superior to the highly imaginative and fantastic productions
of romance. Indeed an inclination to look upon the develop-
ment of the novel as a fortuitous evolution in the direction
of literary realism would act to obscure the fact that one
of the great masters of the genre had nearly as much in
common with Ann Radcliffe as he did with Balzac, Jane
Austen or George Eliot.

It is, of course, fundamentally unreasonable to assume
that the interest in the genre which his tales and critical
comments suggest would not have carried over into the novels
at all. But more than this, the influence of Gothic fiction
is readily apparent on even the most superficial level of
James's work. There are striking similarities between the
great Gothic novels and some of his greatest works-~Thg

American, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and

 

 

 

The Golden Bowl, for example. In James, as in, say, Ann

 

Radcliffe, much of the interest and fascination of the plot
is derived from a central confrontation between a sentimen-
tal hero or heroine and an evil world which his or her

values are inadequate to comprehend. Indeed James's

characteristic and highly celebrated "European" theme can be
looked upon as a late variation on the standard Gothic for-
mula. Only in this instance Europe stands in the same
relation to America as Italy had stood in relation to England
in the early Gothic works--a correspondence which is per—
fectly fitting and appropriate since the idea of the new-
world democracy is a political expression of the same values
that gave rise to the heroes and heroines of Gothic fiction.
Thus it is that figures like Emily St. Aubert, Valancourt,
and Montoni stand behind and inform our apprehension of
characters like Christopher Newman, Isabel Archer, Milly
Theale, Maggie Verver, Gilbert Osmond, and Prince Amerigo.

Furthermore, what is true of character and plot is
equally true of James's thematic imagery. Although James
is consciously metaphorical in a way his predecessors were
not, he relies, nevertheless, on a vast constellation of
images which are part of the typical Gothic machinery.
Ghosts are talked about with arresting regularity; there
are references to ancestral castles and unmentionable sins
buried deep in a dark and bloody past, and behind all of
this stands that supreme figure of malicious authoritari-
anism--the medieval church.

On even the most superficial level, then, James's debt
to the early Gothic romancers is evident enough. But his
kinship with them runs much deeper than this. For what
becomes increasingly clear when we read and reread novels

like The American, The Portrait Q: a Lady, The Wings Of a

 

 

 

Dove, and The Golden Bowl is that the world of the Gothic

 

novels is James's world and his typical concerns are the
same as those which have characterized Gothic fiction from
the beginning. Surely no novelist not commonly associated
with the Gothic tradition has ever written so penetratingly
of the infinite danger that can lie beneath what appears
familiar and safe. In his novels, James has not displaced
the Gothic elements; he has, rather, used his greater
artistic skill and more comprehensive intelligence to expand
the insight into human nature which they always contained.
Upon reflection, what had been a vague sense of identity
between James and the Gothic novelists rapidly becomes a
conviction of a consanguinity far more profound. And it

is in James's richest themes--the uses of the past, the
interpretation of art and life, and the relation of both

of these to the problem of evil--that we feel this kinship
most acutely.

At this point it seems safe to suggest that if the
habit of looking upon James as an elite practitioner of
the realistic novel has obscured his relation to the
Gothic, there has been a corresponding failure to take the
Gothic seriously. As Frederick Garber puts it:

Our understanding of Gothic fiction
has too often depended on a view that
this mode is merely an extension of
"sensibility," a grim silliness which

grew to become the dark underbelly of
the later eighteenth century.9

Professor Garber's essay makes clear that the typical Gothic
paraphernalia are really the least interesting aspect of
that genre. Much more important is the vision of life

which emerges. And in the characteristic Gothic tendency

to portray the terror of an isolated consciousness contem-
plating the ruins of a failed civilization we find a distinct.
anticipation of the modern consciousness. As a modern
writer, James is best seen not as an outsider who could
employ various elements of the Gothic tradition as they
happened to suit his fancy, but as a writer whose work is
very much continuous with that of Ann Radcliffe, M.G. Lewis
and the Brontes. And while he does make increasingly subtle
and sophisticated use of the Gothic, his is not the radical
departure that one might at first suspect. His development
of the Gothic was anticipated by other writers in the tra-
dition. Nor, finally, does the tradition end with him; it
comes down to us from him through writers as diverse as
William Faulkner and John Fowles.

What has been presented thus far is only the barest
outline of an argument. Before, however, the Gothicism of
James's major novels can be studied in any complete way, it
is first necessary to try to develop some clear sense of
what the Gothic tradition was and is, as well as to under-
stand why it has been so powerfully attractive to the
literary imagination from the late eighteenth century to
the present. This is not the easiest of tasks since the

Gothic is a contradictory mode, designed in part to expose

the limitations and frustrations of rational thought. Then,
too, the Gothic constitutes a tradition sufficiently broad
to make any generalizations about it false to some degree.
Although Gothic novels exhibit certain "formulaic" patterns
which can be recognized, only the poorest of them appear to
have been written by formula alone. And it is absolutely
characteristic of the Gothic that these formulaic patterns
do not remain in any stable relation to one another, but
combine and recombine in ways which are both fascinating

and startling.

Despite this real complexity, it is still possible to
identify distinctive features. In doing this, it will be
necessary to use several of the better known Gothic novels
as paradigms or examples. James's early readings in the
Gothic is a subject which will be dealt with more thoroughly’
in the second chapter; at this point, therefore, it is
enough to say that he evidently knew the works of the major
Gothic novelists--Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis, and the
Brontes--well. What should be emphasized here is that it
is not important to establish the extent to which James was
influenced by any single Gothic novel. It is, rather
important to develop a sense of the "Gothic ethos"--that
way of perceiving the world which was characteristically
Gothic and which constituted a tradition which James was
able to make use of his most important novels.

The first and most obvious characteristic of Gothic

fiction is its ability to portray and make the reader

10

experience a world which his conventional religious and
social views have not conditioned him to expect. Central

to the Gothic plot is an engagement with those things on
heaven and earth which are not found in anybody's philosophy.
Naturally, different critics have found different ways of
describing this engagement. Gary Thompson describes it as

an encounter with the "nameless other."10 S.L. Varnardo,
borrowing terminology from Rudolph Otto, sees the "numinous"
or "man's underlying sense of fear, wonder and delight when
he is confronted with the divine" as being basic to the

"11 Finally, Frederick Garber remarks

Gothic experience.
that the "central form of the Gothic is a confrontation,
led to and symbolized by the meeting of modes" in which
various attitudes and ways of valuating experience meet in
"pure, spontaneous surprise." As Garber goes on to point
out, this meeting is not purposeful or meaningful in any
easily recognizable sense, but seems, rather, to have "its
point primarily in the fact of its presence."12

All of these descriptions contain something of the
truth. Insofar as it is the most inclusive, Garber's is
probably the most useful description of the tradition taken
in its entirety. Yet in the end, the difference in the
terminology used is less important than the fact that all
of these critics see the Gothic as being intimately involved
with realms of experience which are remarkably foreign to

life as it is commonly perceived and experienced. In the

specific historical context in which it developed, the

11

Gothic may be seen as primarily concerned with the dark and
irrational aspects of life which the Augustans sensed but
often chose not to explore. Yet as Devendra Varma notes,
the early Gothic experiments contained the germ of something
far more profound than might initially be expected. For if
Gothic novelists chose to dwell on or flirt with the horrible,
it was at least partially because they felt that this dark
other world was potentially enriching as well. To quote
Varma:

Life became secure for the classical man;

beautiful and joyous, but lacking the

energy of fear, well devised but shallow,

having no splendor nor depths of mystery.
This is no more false than generalizations of this sort ever
are, and it senses something truly important. For if a
departure from what is safe and familiar is terrifying, it
can also be enriching to the extent that it represents an
escape from the confinements and restrictions of habit and
received opinion. Surely one of the chief reasons that the
Gothic was so immediately popular and has continued to be
so to this day is that it embodied this paradox. In
different ways and in different voices it insisted that
there is an underlying affinity or identity between what is
horrible and what is exalted. It insisted that the greatest
of the mysteries surrounding Good and Evil is that while
they are real they are often difficult to distinguish, and

are, finally, related.

12

The visible symbol cfif this occurs in The Castle 9:

 

Otranto where the horrors of Manfred's ancestral castle are
connected to the church, the place of sanctity, by means of
a hidden underground passageway. Lewis produces much the
same effect in The Mgnk_where a network of underground
catacombs, dungeons, and passageways evokes the image of a
bottomless pit yawning beneath the places of worship and
meditation immediately above. These images are, however,
just emblematic of the Gothic tendency to explore the
startling contexts in which good and evil can occur. Heaven
implies Hell. Sin can be educative. Religious exaltation
can lead to intolerance and cruelty born out of superstition.
Evil can be energetic and attractive. Order can be more
dangerous than disorder. What is most civilized can be
least humane. All of these are statements which Gothic
writers make at various times and in various ways. In a
tradition which comes down to us in literature from Spenser
through Milton, the Gothic insists that a knowledge of true
goodness implies a knowledge of its opposite, and insists,
further, that one of the chief sources of evil is any attempt:
to deny the reality of its existence.

As readers of Gothic fiction, we participate in this
dark paradoxical world largely through the experience of
character. Of preeminent importance here is a fact that
seems obvious enough but is often overlooked--namely that
Gothic fiction depends for its emotional effect upon mimetic

characterization. There are many important differences

13

between the Gothic and the realistic traditions, but they
are similar to the extent that the characters of both are

supposed to be recognizably like ourselves. Among modern

 

critics, Francis Russell Hart is the clearest on this point:

It is not normal in the world of Blithesdale

or the Easter Rising for human personality

abruptly to assume typological or sacra-

mental force, any more than it is "natural"

for characters in Gothic novels to find

themselves thrust into the world of

"romance." The shock is theirs. The

mystery is the experience which they, in

their humanity as characters, must cope

with. To do so, they must exist for the

reader basically as mimetic characters,

characters to be understood in terms of

psychological probability and process.14
Gothic characters are, certainly, akin to characters of
traditional romance in certain important respects. This is
particularly true in that Gothic characters, like the
characters of traditional romance, do embody social values.
The innocent heroines and untried heroes are the images of
an established social order and code of conduct, while the
villains and villainesses who oppose them represent every-
thing that it is in the nature of those social values to
exclude. Yet, if these characters are partially types,
they are types with interesting inner lives. And it is
the complexity of these inner lives and the resulting con-
flict between realistic psychology and social value which
is the source of much of the Gothic's primary appeal. For

the reader, part of the interest lies in the portrayalcfifan

isolated consciousness dealing with dangers of the utmost

l4

gravity; but to the extent that the reader and the character
have common social values, much of the reader's uneasiness
stems from an emerging awareness that his own values are on
trial as well.

Yet as Professor Hart himself notes, there is nothing
particularly remarkable or original about his insight since
it merely points to what Horace Walpole had in mind when he
gave the Gothic its essential generic qualities in the

"Preface" to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto.

 

After distinguishing between ancient romance in which "all
was imagination and improbability" and modern romance in
which "nature has cramped imagination," Walpole unveils his
desire to create a new romance form which will synthesize

the admirable attributes of the other two:

The author of the following pages thought
it possible to reconcile the two kinds.
Desirous of leaving the powers of fancy

to expatiate through the boundless realms
of invention, and thence of creating more
interesting situations, he wished to con-
duct the mortal agents of his drama accord-
ing to the rules of probability; in short,
to make them speak, think, and act, as it
might be supposed mere men and women would
do in extraordinary positions. He had
observed that in all inspired writings, the
personages under the dispensation of
miracles, and witnesses to the most stupen-
dous phenomena, never lose sight of their
human character.15

The significance of this passage should not be overlooked,
for it contains a formula for bringing into close proximity

a mind whose strengths, weaknesses, and conceptual habits

15

are disturbingly like our own, and contain phenomena which
lie wholly outside that mind's powers of comprehension.

After such a provocative preface, The Castle 9f Otranto

 

itself is a distinct disappointment. Its greatest weakness
is probably the fact that, as a novel, it never really
develops beyond the embryonic stage. Neither the super-
natural elements nor the characters who are forced to endure
their presence are drawn with any great skill or imagination.
And at the very instant when the most marvelous events are
being enacted center stage, we feel that they are being con-
trolled by a purposeful force hidden in the wings. There is
no question of the characters changing, developing, or,
indeed, even reacting in the presence of the supernatural,
except in the most rudimentary and predictable fashion. For
the most part these characters remain unwitting performers
in a drama, the conclusion of which has been predetermined;
and the purpose of the narrative is not so much to explore
the confrontation between finite intelligences and infinite
power and danger as it is to demonstrate the proof of the
proposition that divine providence works in mysterious ways.
Walpole's own work did not, then, do justice to the
vitality of his ideas. But as John Berryman observes in
his "Preface" to the Grove Press edition of $22.!2251 the
realization of what might be done is the next best thing to
actually doing it.16 In giving the Gothic its essential
generic characteristics, Walpole succeeded in unveiling vast

potentialities of imaginative experience and feeling. And

16

in the handscfifmore gifted artists such as Radcliffe, Lewis,
Maturin, Shelley, and the Brontes, his plot formula became
a means of exploring the psychology of terror to the point
where it became necessary to modify traditional assumptions
about human nature and the institutions of culture.

The writers mentioned here were all concerned with the
confrontation between the "civilized" mind and a dangerous
world of extraordinary occurrences. It seems, however, that
prolonged exposure to this confrontation gave rise to
startling changes in the mode of its presentation. More
specifically, as the Gothic tradition matured, its chief
practitioners became increasingly concerned with the origin
of these supernatural occurrences. Here it is both useful
and appropriate to introduce some of Samuel Holt Monk's ideas

into the discussion. In his masterly work, The Sublime,

 

Monk demonstrates how the concept of the sublime was modified
during the eighteenth century. Whereas Longinus's interest
in the sublime was rhetorical, the eighteenth century became
increasingly concerned with its aesthetic and psychological
implications. Longinus was interested in the techniques a
speaker or writer could use to elevate the consciousness of
his audience and hold it in a suspended state of intense
emotion. The eighteenth century, by contrast, was most
interested in the mind's complex interaction with the object
of its perception. As Monk puts it, in reference to the
eighteenth century, "the sublime is not a quality residing

in an object, but a state of mind awakened by an object."17

17

That Monk's insight has important parallels with develop-
ments in the Gothic is immediately obvious. For in the hands
of writers like Radcliffe, Lewis, Maturin, Shelley, and the
Brontes, the typical Gothic machinery--the castles, vaults,
portentious storms, etc.--ceased to be important as a
rhetorical device, and instead became important for what it
could tell us about the human spirit which created these
images and was attracted to them. Over the course of time,
the writers of the Gothic tradition came to see that the
mysteries of the supernatural, particularly supernatural
evil, were no more mysterious than the self. And perhaps
most important, they came increasingly to see that civilized
characters in civilized settings were as prone to these
experiences as were exotic creatures in Apennine stronghOlds.
Frederick Garber provides us with an admirable description

of this process:

Though the locals of malevolence had
rarely been entirely outside (we have
seen its uneasy multiplicity of place
already in Walpole) it was moving,
under Mrs. Radcliffe's relentless
prodding, more fully within than ever.
An exactly parallel shift of habitation
was occurring at much the same time
though with slower pace, as evil's

home became less the cherished property
of exotica such as Montoni and more a
product of the home garden. Maturin,
one step away, made his evil Irish. In
Northanger Abbey Jane Austen turned the
chauvinistic paraphernalia of early
English Gothic quite around, and Emily
Bronte finished the job. The fair-skinned
Protestant jingoism of her earlier pre-
decessors found its final belittling
when Emily Bronte gave her seasoned

 

18

version of dark malevolence a female

counterpart from pure English stock.

Gothic fiction was permanently inter-

nationalized with "I gm Heathcliff."

With those two parallel tendencies

toward a movement from outside to with-

in, Gothicism found its fullest statement

and its clearest vision of the geography

of evil, though it was never without the

ambivalence that unsettled the mode from

the beginning. Hawthorne and Dostoyevsky

moved on from this point. At its end

stood Auschwitz, which has not yet found

its interpreter.
The exotic trappings of the early Gothic were, from the
first, highly evocative poetic images, hinting at very
deep-seated human truths. Yet as long as these trappings
existed in a world which was remote from ours in time and
space their threat was muted. They could titillate the
reader without wholly unsettling him; they could hint
obliquely at different modes of reality without imposing
upon him the necessity of changed perception. However, the
greatest artists of the Gothic school, not all at once but
with a consistency of development which is remarkable, con-
tinually conspired to show that this dark other world was
inseparable from the human personality.

To say that these writers became increasingly aware of
the banality of evil is to put the matter in its most
abstract form. In reality, of course, evil generally makes
its appearance in certain concrete situations and attitudes.
Here again, in the way in which evil is presented and com-

prehended, the writers in the Gothic tradition exhibit a

remarkable consistency. Like most novelists with roots in

19

the sentimental tradition, Gothic novelists believed in the
sanctity of the human spirit and the ideal dignity of man.
Although R.F. Brissenden is speaking specifically about
sentimental heroes and heroines, his comments apply with
equal force to their Gothic cousins:

What distinguished the sentimental heroes

and heroines was not only their highly

developed awareness of their own process

of discrimination, but also their belief

in the sanctity and authority of their

private judgments.19
What encouraged self expression, what affirmed the dignity
and worth of individual feeling was good for both the Gothic
and the Sentimental writer. Conversely, that which stifled
or controlled free expression and that which threatened the
authority of private judgments was evil. If, however,
Gothic and Sentimental writers started with similar values,
the presentation of those values in their works is markedly
different. Sentimental writers glorified fine feelings and
showed how they could become the basis of human understand-
ing. The Gothic writers, by contrast, provide a virtual
anatomy of the ways the self can be controlled and manipu-
lated by forces outside the self. And whereas the
Sentimental writers saw feeling as a basis for communication,
the Gothic writers were only too aware that feelings could
just as naturally be a source of terror in the form of
hatred, jealously, and fear.

When, therefore, Gothic heroes and heroines like Emily

and Valancourt in The Mysteries gf_Udolpho or Raymond and

 

20

Agnes in Th§_Mgnk encounter evil, it is inevitably in the
form of some powerful force which controls, manipulates, and
otherwise uses them--a force, in short, which violates the
sanctity and authority of their private judgments. Further-
more, there is a specific context in which this encounter
with evil almost always occurs within the Gothic. As Howard
Anderson explains, "in the Gothic novels, sexual passion is

20 And indeed this characteristic

the locus of danger."
melange of sex, violence, and danger goes a long way toward
explaining the Gothic's immediate and continuing popularity.
It would, however, be a mistake not to see that love
and the social and religious institution of marriage quite
naturally involve an element of risk and danger to a person
who takes his individual integrity seriously. On the one
hand, marriage and its traditional association with sexual
initiation signals a coming of age and the assumption of a
certain role in the established social order. On even the
most innocent level this involves a certain tension between
personal inclination and social custom, between the
remembered freedoms of childhood and the newfound respon-
sibilities of the adult. Nor is there anything particularly
sinister about this so long as one assumes that the existing
social order is healthy and just, even if not perfect. The
Gothic novelists, however, were keenly aware of the extent
to which society is dominated by competition for status,
wealth, and political power. Here they discerned an immense

potential for evil in as much as there is an almost

21

inevitable conflict between private judgment and discrimina-
tion and their expression in love, and a world in which
marriage is seen as an act with social, political and
economic consequences. Etrmithis perspective, it is very
easy to see how love can be thrown into close relation with
all those things that most threaten its free expression.
And it is easy to see as well the peril which a person in-
sisting on the free expression of love is exposed to if
this love conflicts with the forces of competition and greed.
Yet if sexual passion can arouse powerful external
difficulties in the form of a conflict between the self and
society, the difficulties it can arouse on an interior
psychological plane should be equally apparent. Indeed,
the external conflict parallels a ritual of confrontation
which takes place internally. For with the arrival of adult
feelings any simple sense of the distinction between good'
and evil must disappear forever. What is understood as
evil or dangerous on a purely rational level may be strangely
exhilarating and attractive to the paradoxical understanding
of the heart. Thus, the most important "meeting of modes"
in the Gothic may well be the internal confrontation between
structured cultural codes and the dark energies of passion
which are at once the energies of chaos and freedom. And it
is between the poles of a rigid, deadening conformity to
convention and the madness of complete freedom of passion

that the perilous dialectic of growth takes place.

22

The prototype for this typically Gothic mixture of
sexual passion, social and familial pressure, and terror
is, of course, Richardson's Clarissa--a novel which, it is
worth adding, has many largely unexplored resemblances to
the nature work of Henry James. Clarissa is in many ways
the wellspring of the Gothic. It made possible the Gothic
flourishing toward the end of the eighteenth century, and
in it we can examine certain typically Gothic preoccupations
in full relief. On the simplest level, Clarissa is the
story of a young girl of intelligence, delicacy, and virtue
who is brought up under seemingly ideal circumstances, the
darling of her parents and all those who surround her. When,
however, the virtues she has been praised for and encouraged
to develop cause her to reject the man her parents have
chosen as her husband, the chapel of her drawing room retreat
rapidly becomes a hell of confinement and parental tyranny.
In the end she is forced into running off with Lovelace, a
man who both repels and deeply attracts her. After numerous
attempts at seduction, Lovelace drugs and rapes Clarissa
with the result that she dies after a long renunciatory
decline--a creature too good for this evil world.

This is the fairy tale--the story of innocence des-
troyed. Yet, as many commentators from Dr. Johnson on have
noted, this is a simplistic reading. There is no doubt that
the familial situation in which Clarissa finds herself is
both terrifying and horrible, as is the social world in

which this kind of behavior prospers. This awareness should

23

not, however, obscure the fact that, for Clarissa, the
source of much of the terror is internal. If her upbringing
has not prepared her for the world, it has not prepared her
for certain aspects of herself either. To quote Ian Watt

in one of the finer sentences written on the subject:

. . . there is also more than a hint
that what Clarissa cannot face is not
so much what Lovelace has done or what
the world may think about it, but the
idea that she herself is not wholly
blameless.21

What Clarissa cannot face is the fact that while her in-

telligence and moral discrimination tell her that Lovelace
is evil anddangerous, there is another side of her which
is powerfully and fatally attracted to him. Yet, as Watt
goes on to point out, Lovelace's failure to "recognize the
gentler elements in his personality" is the "exact comple-

ment of that which causes Clarissa's virtual suicide":

. . . both their fates show the havoc
brought about by two codes which doom
their holders to a psychological
attitude which makes human love
impossible, since they set an impene-
trable barrier between the flesh and
the spirit. Clarissa dies rather than
recognize the flesh; Lovelace makes it
impossible for her to love him because
he, too, makes an equally absolute,
though opposite division: if he wishes
'to prove her to be either angel or
woman', Clarissa has no alternative but
to make the choice she does, reject her
physical womanhood, and prove, in
Lovelace's words, that 'her frost is
frost indeed'. At the same time for
him also the only possibility for
salvation lies in the rejection of his

24

own illusion of himself which, like

Clarissa's, is ultimately a projection

of a false sexual ideology. 'If I

give up my contrivances', he writes

in a moment of heart-searching, 'I

shall be but a common man.’ But, of

course, he is, like Clarissa, so deeply

attached to his own preconceptions of

himself that he cannot change; the

deadlock is complete, and, as he con-

fesses, 'what to do with her, or without

her, I know not.‘22
There is no final doubt as to where evil lies in this parti-
cular instance. Clarissa's code entails only her right to
her own feelings and to her own judgment—~particularly in
the area of marriage. Lovelace's code, on the other hand,
requires that he use "contrivances"--requires that he use
and manipulate other people. For him, self expression means
nothing less than the domination of others. What makes
Lovelace's evil nature particularly horrifying is the fact
that he is human and possessed of real human virtues. He
is intelligent, attractive, energetic, and brave--points on
which he contrasts favorably with many of those around him,
notably Clarissa's brother, James Harlowe. Yet all of
these virtues are perverted because the vision by which he
lives prevents him from extending toward others the liberties
and privileges which he reserves for himself. There is,
however, an even deeper sense in which Clarissa suggests
that all codes of conduct are potentially a source of evil
to the extent that inhibit growth, learning, and self

expression. Thus, although Clarissa does not use people

as Lovelace does, her lack of self awareness is inseparably

25

connected to the ensuing catastrophe. What we call virtues
can have evil consequences when their possessor acts in
ignorance.

The effect of this, moreover, is to underscore yet
again the disturbing proximity of good and evil--to under-
score how subtle the difference between them is and how
much discrimination is needed to distinguish between them.

Clarissa and Lovelace are wedded in that their fates are

 

less the result of their respective natures than of the
deadly chemistry which slowly and inexorably develops

between them. To quote Watt:

Clarissa and Lovelace are as completely,
and as fatally dependent on each other

as Tristan and Isolde or Romeo and Juliet;
but in keeping with the novel's subjective
mode of vision, the ultimate barriers that
prevent the union of Richardson's star-
crossed lovers are subjective and in part
unconscious; the stars operate on the
individual through varied psychological
forces, forces which are eventually, no
doubt, public and social, since the
differences between the protagonists
represent larger conflicts of attitude

and ethic in their society, but which are
nevertheless so completely internalized
that the conflict expresses itself as a
struggle between personalities and even
between different parts of the same
personality.23

Quite clearly the immense power of a novel like Clarissa
stems from the fact that it reverberates on so many levels
of cultural and psychic life. It suggests with subtle in-

tensity that there are tensions between culture and the

individual psyche as well as between various aspects of

26

that psyche which can be ignored only at great peril. Yet
whether it is more proper to see the deadly dance in which
Clarissa and Lovelace join as having its origins in the
internalization of social and cultural values, as Watt
suggests, or whether it is the reflection of a far more
profound rhythm of freedom and compulsion in human nature,
remains an open question and perhaps unanswerable.

With the exception of Wuthering Heights, none of the

 

Gothic novels ever achieve the power, artistry, or intensity
of insight of Richardson's Clarissa. But it is worth dis-
cussing this great novel in such detail precisely because
Gothic fiction, at its best, partakes of many of its
characteristic virtues. It took a good while for the Gothic
writers to see how personal relationships could be a source
of infinite danger even in a familiar setting; they were,
however, continually pressing toward that vision. And, like
Clarissa, Gothic novels saw sexual passion, the mythic
encounter between a man and a woman, as the experience which
most clearly revealed how good and evil are fatally inter-
twined and how each has its ultimate source in culture and
in human nature.

What remains to be done, then, is to find a way of
describing the nature and source of evil in a way which is
sufficiently general to be of use in the maximum number of
cases, yet sufficiently specific so as not to obscure the
fact that the Gothic is a genre or type of literary experi-

ence. Here it is useful to examine the way in which the

 

27

Gothic employs two immense literary themes which can be
distinguished but never wholly separated--namely, the uses
of the past and the uses of art-~to examine the still
larger issue of cultural value. In Gothic fiction, no
character is ever in so much danger as when he or she mis-
understands the powerful realities which these two terms
suggest. And it is when showing the dangers implicit in
the past, particularly in its unacknowledged relation to
the present, and the dangers of art, particularly literary
art imperfectly comprehended, that the Gothic arrives at
some of its most unsettling visions.

Much of the typical Gothic machinery--the castles, the
moats, the gloomy Italian settings--is suggestive of the
dark and bloody past of medieval Europe. Yet in many of
the best Gothic novels, this antiquarian past is the past
revealed in its most superficial and picturesque aspect;
the most important past, as all of these novels show, is a
living force exerting pressure on the present. Thus, in
many of the best Gothic novels, the past with all of its
evils is figured in the image of the present social world—-
a world which was established before the main characters
were born and which continues to shape and control them in
ways they can only dimly imagine. It is important to note
here how closely and unmistakably evil is associated with
the socially conventional throughout the Gothic tradition.
Indeed social success seems to imply the worst kind of

anti-social behavior. Different novelists, of course, have

28

different methods of expressing this. Mrs. Radliffe, for
example, has a more or less sociological view of evil in
that, as Garber observes, her villains and villainesses are
motivated by traditionally recognizable vices such as
ambition and greed.24 Thus it is Emily's status-conscious
aunt who marries the evil Montoni and initiates the action

in The Mysteries of Udolpho. Similarly, in its sequel,

 

The Italian, it is Vivaldi's socially prominent and ambitious

 

mother whose social schemes serve to unlease Schedoni's
innate depravity.

If Radcliffe tends toward a sociological presentation
of evil, Lewis, in The Mgnk, is decidedly poetic in hiS'
presentation of it. Mrs. Radcliffe's characters have
humanly comprehensible aims and humanly comprehensible
strategies for accomplishing them. Lewis, by contrast,
uses the devices of poetry to suggest that there is a deep
affinity between the forces of evil and the forces of
culture and the past. Perhaps the most forceful of the
images which suggest this affinity is the figure of the
"Bleeding Nun"--the vengeful spirit of one of Raymond de
las Cisternas's dead ancestors--who rudely upsets his
elopement with the heroine of the piece, his beloved Agnes.
What the intrusion of this figure suggests in a powerful
but indirect way is that, in eloping, Raymond and Agnes
are playing too lightly with the fearful collective forces
of society and the past. It is only when these forces

have been recognized that they can be expelled, exorcised

29

even, and only then can life and love flourish. Again, much
the same impression is conveyed by Lewis's vision of the
geography of Madrid, the city founded upon the abyss. For
beneath the visible symbols of tradition and cultural con-
tinuity, beneath the court, the monastery, and the convent,
is the place of confinement and death. And the effect of
all of this is to reinforce the impression that evil is not
very far away; it may, in fact, be in the immediate vicinity,
intimately attached to the most revered social institutions.
On the deepest level of all, however, the evil visita-
tions of the past may be recognized in the moral and
spiritual inheritance which a parent leaves a child. For
clearly the response of the child to the world and the very
habits that are necessary to comprehend it come partly from
the culture at large, but more importantly from the child's
parents. It is not overstating the case to suggest that
Gothic novels are virtually obsessed with parent-child
relationships, with education, and with the way both relate
to the subject of comprehension, learning, and their effect
on behavior. Although various Gothic novels work these
themes out in various and interesting ways, they are alike
to the extent that all examine the fact that spiritual and
cultural values ill-prepare a child for the darker side of
reality, and, paradoxically, help to create it. The Gothic
writers, like so many writers in the Romantic tradition,
are aware that "the child is father of the man" and that

much of the evil in the world, the personal and

30

institutional failings, have their source in failures of
early education. To study education in the Gothic, moreover,
is to study one of the major methods that genre used to
transform itself from a novel of adventure and incident to
one of character; for nowhere else in the Gothic can we study
the process by means of which the locale of evil moved from
the outside to within in such detail.

Early educational experiences are not of much concern

in Walpole's The Castle of Otranto--a novel in which there

 

is very little character development. In The Mysteries of

 

Udolpho, however, the interest in education is firmly estab-
lished and readily apparent. M. St. Aubert's often-quoted
deathbed lecture to Emily on the dangers of sensibility is

a ready example of this:

'Above all my dear Emily,’ said he, 'do
not indulge in the pride of fine feeling,
the romantic error of amiable minds.
Those who really possess sensibility,
ought early to be taught, that it is a
dangerous quality, which is continually
extracting the excess of misery, or
delight from every surrounding circum-
stance. And, since, in our passage
through this world, painful circumstances
occur more frequently than pleasing ones,
and since our sense of evil is, I fear,
more acute than our sense, of good, we
become the victims of our feelings unless
we can in some degree command them.25

A similar message is repeated on a number of occasions
throughout the novel. For instance, Laurentini di Udolpho

urges "Remember . . . that the passions are the seeds of

vices as well as virtues, from which either may spring."26

31

In words like these we can see the Gothic's characteristic
tension when confronted with the doubleness of life. It is
absolutely characteristic of the Radcliffean mode to want a
world imaginatively rich enough to be satisfying, yet ordered
enough to be safe. On the other hand, she feels that nothing
can be hOped of an insensitive heart, while at the same time
there is a corresponding wariness toward feeling and passion.
Thus Radcliffe exhibits a distinctly "romantic" insistence
on the importance of feeling and the inner workings of the
mind, but at the same time certain conservative attitudes
prevent her from exploring these matters in full detail.

The purpose of Emily's education is to teach her to
achieve "rational Happiness"--a state in which reason and
the passions exist in a comfortable stasis, a state where
the passions are admitted but not indulged, and where the
innocent expectations of youth are tempered by an engagement
with the world. That supernatural terror is potentially a
part of this world is hinted at a number of times in the
book, but always such terror is associated with Emily's
overwrought imagination.

This is, however, a distinct departure from the way in
which the supernatural was portrayed by Walpole in The
Castle eh Otranto. Whereas Walpole had envisioned the
supernatural as having its roots in the governing principle
of the universe, Mrs. Radcliffe associates it with specific
states of consciousness and mental unrest. Yet if the

supernatural is portrayed as human and psychological, it is

32

also the sort of thing which a strong, well fortified mind
can readily dismiss. Radcliffe does not explore the terror
of such feelings beyond the point where they are recognizable
as something to be avoided. The dark history of Laurentini
does suggest where an indulgence in feeling eeth_lead. Yet
Emily is never forced to acknowledge that Laurentini's fate
is potentially her own. Mrs. Radcliffe knew where madness

lay and chose not to explore it. Thus, The Mysteries 9:

 

Udolpho is, finally, less an examination of the roots of
terror than a demonstration of how, through sound education,
terror could be held at bay and a satisfactory life sustained
in successive generations.

Within the Gothic tradition, the work of M.G. Lewis
is as much a departure fromthe work of Radcliffe as hers was
from that of Horace Walpole. For if Radcliffe was concerned
with the way in which education could help temper and
strengthen the mind in times of adversity, her successor,
Lewis, was interested in the way in which education could
be responsible for the ensuing terror. Sensibility, which
Mrs. Radcliffe had seen as the "romantic error of amiable

minds," becomes, in The Monk a source of potential corrup-

 

tion--a powerful but malleable force which could be modified
by the circumstances of early childhood. Indeed, one of the
most remarkable passages in 322.5225 occurs when Lewis
reveals Ambrosio to be a man of feeling perverted by the
circumstances of an unnatural childhood. It is long but

well worth quoting in full:

33

It was by no means his nature to be
timid: But his education had impressed
his mind with fear so strongly, that
apprehension was now part of his
character. Had his youth been passed

in the world, he would have shown him—
self possessed of many brilliant and
manly qualities. He was naturally
enterprising, firm and fearless: He

had a warriors heart, and he might have
shown with splendor at the head of an
army. There was no want of generosity

in his nature: The wretched never

failed to find in him a compassionate
Auditor: His abilities were quick and
shining, and his judgment vast, solid,
and decisive. With such qualifications
he would have been an ornament to his
country: Thatlmapossessed them, he had
given proofs in his earliest infancy,
with his Parents had beheld his dawning
virtues with the fondest delight and
admiration. Unfortunately, while yet a
child he was deprived of those parents.
He fell into the power Of a relation,
whose only wish about him was never to
hear of him more; For that purpose He
gave him in charge to his Friend, the
former Superior of the Capuchins. The
Abbot, a very Monk, used all his endeavours
to persuade the boy, that happiness
existed not without the walls of the
convent. He succeeded fully. To

deserve admittance into the order of

St. Francis was Ambrosio's highest ambition.
His instructors carefully repressed those
virtues whose grandeur and disinterested-
ness were ill suited to the Cloister.
Instead of universal benevolence He
adopted a selfish partiality for his own
particular establishment. He was taught
to consider compassion for the errors of
Others a crime of blackest dye: the noble
frankness of his temper was exchanged for
servile humility; and in order to break
his natural spirit, the Monks terrified
his young mind, by placing before him all
the horrors with which superstition could
furnish them.27

34

This passage emphasizes yet again how subtle the distinction
between good and evil is in the Gothic novel. In the figure
of Ambrosio we find nottflmrremote and osbcure malevolence of
a Manfred or a Montoni, but an evil which is humanly recog-
nizable. That Ambrosio Te evil is never in doubt; but like
Richardson's Lovelace before him, he is also a human being
with impressive gifts--gifts that more conventionally good
characters often lack. Had he been brought up under
different circumstances, his character might well have been
labeled "noble."

What should be emphasized here is that the nature of
the Gothic was greatly altered by Lewis's efforts in The
Mehh. Later novels in the tradition could never rest com-
fortably with easy assumptions abouttflmnlocale of evil. In

The Mysteries 9T Udolpho Radcliffe exhibits undeniable gifts

 

as a storyteller. Her moral universe, however, contains
little of this troubling mixture of good and evil. The
"good" characters have all the genteel virtues of the senti-
mental hero and heroine, including an instinctive awareness
of and sympathy for the feelings of others, a taste for art
and poetry, and an attachment to natural landscapes. Since,
moreover, Emily and Valancourt possess these virtues in
abundance, we feel only the proper amount Of Suspense
during their misadventures in Paris and at Udolpho. Evil

in The Mysteries 9: Udolpho is embodied in the shadowy

 

figure of Montoni-~who hovers menacingly for a time only to

disappear conveniently when his hour is rung. By contrast,

35

evil in EEE.EQEE is powerfully realized in the figure of
Ambrosio, and in the history of the Gothic novel the publica-
tion of this novel marks the point at which the mystery of
evil became inextricably related to the mystery of the self.
The effects of this change are immediately obvious in

Mrs. Radcliffe's next novel, The Italian. There, the "good"

 

characters are pale and insubstantial, while Schedoni, the
figure of evil, has great intelligence and vitality. Ellena
Rosalba, the heroine of the piece is uninteresting, much as
Valancourt is uninteresting. Vivaldi, the hero, is somewhat
more spirited, but Radcliffe, preoccupied with Schedoni,
fails to invest him with the energy and life she had pre-
viously given Emily. As Frederick Garber observes: "she
seems willy-nilly to compare the hero and villain in The

28 Though Radcliffe

Italian, much to Schedoni's favor."
never dwells excessively on Schedoni's virtues, she does
portray him as a mixed figure in the tradition of Lovelace
and Ambrosio. He has a certain clarity of thought, a
certain self-perspective, which sets him apart from Vivaldi

whose responses are blandly typical.

After the publication of The Italian, the problem of

 

evil and its relation to character, cultural values, and
early education becomes increasingly problematic. Good and
evil, heroes and heroines, villains and villainesses, while
real and ultimately distinguishable, become less distinct
and have recognizable affinities. In Mary Shelley's

Frankenstein, for example, the evil "monster" contrasts

 

36

favorably at times with his creator. When the monster does
turn vicious his reasons for doing so are psychologically
believable. And the reader who would understand this
strange, powerful, novel must try to develop a sense of how
the idyllic upbringing of the hero, the very conventionality
of his childhood in all its beauty and innocence, is inti-
mately related to the danger and destructiveness that ensue.
Quite clearly Frankenstein's conventionality, itself the
product of his early education, has hardened into ideology.
Instead of giving meaning, value, and coherence to his
experience, the cultural values which he embraces unneces-
sarily restrict his perception of it. The revulsion which
leads him to reject his creation is the result of a
culturally induced selectivity of vision which blinds
Frankenstein to vast areas of experience. He rejects the
monster because his education has taught him to equate
beauty with a thin and passionless virtue. The monster,
with his wild and ungainly energy therefore became worthy
of contempt. But as the undertones of the novel powerfully
suggest, in rejecting all that does not correspond to his
conventional sense of beauty, he is rejecting part of him—
self as well. The result is predictably disasterous.

In Emily Bronte'sWuthering Heights, to use one final

 

example, these themes are more richly and complexly explored.
Here the Gothic becomes unmistakably great art, and in the
Gothic tradition Wuthering Heights is as much a watershed

as is Clarissa, The Castle eT Otranto, The Mysteries eT

 

 

37

Udolpho, or The Monk. For while much of the danger in the
earlier novels was the result of a general failure to recog-
nize the fact that "civilized" people could have evil and

destructive impulses, Wuthering Heights embodies a subtle

 

shift in emphasis wherein the problem is less that of dis-
covering that this is so than it is that of deciding what
to do about it.

The world of Wutherinngeights is manichean. Wuthering

 

Heights and Thrushcross Grange represent the two poles of
human nature, the romantic and the classical-~with the
former being the residence of natural energy and passion,
and the latter that of an ordered civility which has been
acquired at the expense of these qualities. Yet as the
lives of the various characters show, these qualities are
really and eternally mixed.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the working out of
the lives of the two Catherines--identified here by their
maiden names as Catherine Earnshaw and Catherine Linton.
When Catherine Earnshaw says "I am Heathcliff" she identi-
fies herself with the dark forces which her male counterpart
represents. That this is so is not a hidden fact or an
alarming suspicion, but something to be acknowledged and
and confronted. Yet even given this, Catherine Earnshaw is
like her female ancestors in Gothic fiction in that she
cannot reconcile the passionate and instinctual side of
herself which she sees and acknowledges with the social

values which have been imposed upon her and which she has

38

internalized. The careless freedom of her early life leads
Catherine to experience all the beauty and wonder of the
world by the time she reaches her fourteenth year. And

the tragedy of her brief existence stems from an early
education which prevents her from realizing that the very
forces which imbue childhood with its wild and careless joy
are themselves subject to radical transformation as the
individual matures. For Catherine Earnshaw, there is no
gradual maturing, no process of growth wherein the freedoms
of the child become the basis of a rich adulthood. Instead
there is an almost baffling reversal of roles wherein the
"wild, hatless little savage" becomes in an instant the
"dignified person, with brown ringlets falling from the
cover of a feathered beaver."

As was the case in The_Mehh, a bifurcation process
sets in as Catherine matures, and does not suspend its
operations until a lifecxfsocial importance and a life of
passion are revealed to be mutually exclusive. The problem
is that, in adult life, the lighthearted schemes of child-
hood can and he become the basis for the kind of devilish
destruction which Heathcliff's desire for revenge typifies;
and if human beings are to live together on any kind of
civilized basis, they must, in maturity, embrace values
founded on an awareness of man's capacity for evil.
Catherine Earnshaw's fatal innocence on this point leaves
a gap in her life which is never bridged. She has a

marriage without passion and a passion which is socially

39

unacceptable. When she dies giving birth to her first child,
we are reminded of how far she is from discovering values
which embody the full range of her nature.

If Wuthering Heights had been solely the story of

 

Catherine Earnshaw, it would have enriched but not departed
from the central themes of previous Gothic novels. Insofar,
however, as it is the story of Catherine Linton as well as

Catherine Earnshaw, it is a distinct and important develop-

ment. In his book, The Disappearance e: God, J. Hillis

 

Miller observes that the young Catherine's life follows a
pattern of development which is in many important respects
the exact opposite of that witnessed in the life of her

mother.29

Whereas the early education of Catherine Earnshaw
crippled her in her attempts to reconcile the disparate
areas of her experience, that of Catherine Linton allows
her to live a life both passionate and socially acceptable,
in which personal desire and social restriction strike
something approaching a harmonious balance. For the elder
Catherine, adulthood meant the end of freedom and the
restrictions of a stale conventionality. For the younger
Catherine, by contrast, the future is a time of desire
fulfilled. From her perspective, childhood is not an age
of ideal freedom; it is, rather, a time when the child's
desire to participate in the world is thwarted by parental
protection and authority.

Nor is it proper to look upon Catherine Linton's

maturity as the mere acceptance of the conventional. If

40

anything, Catherine Earnshaw is the more slavishly conven-
tional--an interpretation suggested by the fact that she
feels it would "degrade" her to marry Heathcliff even though,
as she says, "he is more myself than I am." Catherine Linton,
on the other hand, embraces values which are not rigid but
flexible, humane, and consistent with her full awareness of
the possibilities of human evil. She accepts Hareton
Earnshaw, the chief victim and heir of Heathcliff's misan-
thropy, and, in so doing, evokes the realization that the
process of civilization begins if it does not end with an
awareness of man's capacity to do evil. Here is no renunci-
ation of or retreat fromthe world in the fashion of

Clarissa, Emily and Valancourt, and Raymond and Agnes.

Here, rather, is the evil in human nature confronted, trans-
cended and transformed through love.

The nature of the past is, then, richly and complexly
explored in Gothic fiction; the same thing is true, however,
for the nature of art. And art, like the past, is revealed
as having an immense potential for both good and evil. As
Darlene Unrue has shown, the fact that the Gothic novelists
were aware of art as a living force is made clear by one of
the most characteristic of the Gothic techniques--that of
introducing portraits and statutes which either take on or

30 Art may be good or

seem to take on lives of their own.
bad, but it is never static. In defense of his method in

The Romantic AgoQY; Mario Praz argues that the "Education

 

of sensibility" in this period "came about through works

41

31 Since this is so, the issue of an individual's

of art."
ability to develop a proper understanding of and response
to art takes on vital importance.

Art is functioning properly when it is recognized as a
mode of vision with the potential to change lives; it can
stimulate a heightened awareness. Yet, correspondingly, it
can become the source of great evil when it is improperly
understood--when, that is, it ceases to be seen as a commen-
tary on life and is instead equated with life itself. For
art so considered restricts vision rather than enhancing it,
petrifies passion rather than liberating it. There is,
moreover, a vast grey area where art and cultural values
merge; cultural values are, in the broadest sense of the
term, artistic in that both are hypothetical orderings of
experiences defined as much by what they exclude as by what
they include--they imply, in short, a selective vision of
life not an inclusive one. If Gothic villains and
villainesses are typically refined, aristocratic types,
closely associated with the socially conventional, one of
the chief constituents of their refinement is an appreciation
for things of beauty--a reminder that both art and culture
can be at odds with individual expression. Yet the real sin
of villains such as Montoni, Ambrosio, Frankenstein, and
Lockwood lies deeper still. For them, the artistic vision
is not just a code of personal conduct, but a way of dealing
with other people. Other people exist for them merely as

characters in their own limited imaginative fictions.

42

The confusion of art and life is, then, the source of
much villainy within the Gothic tradition; but when this
confusion takes place within the minds of the sympathetic
characters, we have what amounts to a dangerous innocence.
Everywhere within the Gothic, characters who feel that they
are in possession of cultural and aesthetic ideals which
are completely sufficient are a menace to themselves and
others. In the dangerous and morally ambiguous world of
the Gothic novel, innocence is not a virtue. To survive
in this world, a character needs all the intelligence and
self awareness that he or she can possibly possess. Above
all, this includes an awareness of art's capacity to both
inform and delude.

Where, moreover we see this theme being most con-
spicuously and interestingly worked out within the novels
is in their treatment of literary art. For just as an
entire tradition of Gothic heroes and heroines had to learn
that the past is a living forCe, so, too, did they have to
learn that art, and most particularly literary art, contains
vital human truths. Art cannot be equivalent to life, but
it does contain a vision of life which can be ignored only
at great peril. Thus it is that within the Gothic tradition:
even the wildest of imaginative fictions have an eerie habit
of coming true or of bearing some other direct relation to
the present action. Emily St. Aubert thrills to the story
of Laurentini's violent passion only to discover that it is

intimately related to her own past and the conditions of

43

her life. In The Italian, it is the sight of a real assassin

 

seeking refuge in a church which inspires the host to re-
surrect the story of Schedoni's bloody intrigues. Raymond
and Agnes, the enlighted protagonists of the major subplot
in Lewis's fie Mehlg, amuse themselves with the legend of the
"Bleeding Nun"-—on1y to have that phantom carry Raymond off
when Agnes tries to elope in her disguise.

As might be expected in a novelistic form where art
constitutes a major theme, these considerations ultimately
become self reflexive. For whatever is true of art in
general must certainly be true of the novel, and if Gothic
characters had to learn the power of art, there is a strong
implication that we, as readers, must do likewise. The
failingscfifthe most grossly popular Gothic fictions stem
from the fact that they invite detachment rather than dis-
courage it. They are too persistently "escape reading"--
designed, that is, to provide a thrill without demanding any
serious engagement with the issues being raised. But the
jump from popular fiction to good and even great fiction is
not always very far, and the best novels in the Gothic
tradition exhibit a variety of strategies, all tending to
subvert the notion that a literary work is an object which
can readily be put down and forgotten. As Robert Hume puts
it: the "distinctive feature of the early Gothic novel is

32 And,

an attempt to involve the reader in a new way."
indeed, one of the most fascinating and least discussed

characteristics of Gothic novels is that they tend to be

44

novels about reading novels; they explore the ways in which
even the wildest fictions tell us something about life and
about ourselves.

Different novels, of course, accomplish this in differ-
ent ways. For the acute reader, the regularity with which
fiction comes to life in the Gothic tradition might suggest
that the fiction he is reading at any particular moment has

similar potential. As early as The Italian, but most fully

 

in later works like Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights,

 

 

frame narratives are used to form a bridge between the

fictional world of the novel and a world which is more or
less recognizable as the world of the reading public. In
the most extraordinary example of this technique, Melmoth

the Wanderer, Maturin uses a wilderness of narrative mirrors

 

to chart the devil's progress through worlds of space and
oceans of time until he opens the door and walks into the
room at the novel's conclusion--an event which seems per—
fectly natural as it occurs.

The most compelling technique which the Gothic
novelists used to establish the relation between the "real"
and the "fictional" world is, however, the restricted point
of view. Sometimes this is accomplished through the use of
a frame narrative where we become aware that the narrator's
view of things is flawed and incomplete. At other times an
impersonal third person narration is used in order to ensure:
that we see no more and know no more than the characters

themselves. In both cases the reader is in the position

45

of trying to see reality as it is filtered through the con-
sciousness of limited intelligence and imagination. Part
of this, certainly, is the novelist trying to be interesting.
And it does heighten the interest and suspense to be so
intimately involved with a character's terror. But there
is a more important philosophical issue involved here as
well, for in using the restricted point of view the Gothic
quite clearly anticipated one of the chief characteristics
of modern thought--the idea that there are as many "reali-
ties" as there are people to receive impressions. And the
terror of the Gothic world is essentially the terror of

the modern world, a world where social, political, and
religious institutions have become sources of the worst
disorder, and where man is everywhere betrayed by his own

inner life, his own limited mental habits.

NOTES FOR CHAPTER I

lVirginia Woolf's classic study "Henry James's Ghost

Stories," in Granite and Rainbow (New York: Harcourt, Brace
& World, 1921) has been reprinted on a number of occasions.
Other excellent studies include: Earl R. Miner, "Henry
James's Metaphysical Romances," Nineteenth-Century Fiction,
9 (June, 1954), 1-21; Pamela Jacobs Shelden, "Jamesian
Gothicism: The Haunted Castle of the Mind." Studies Th_Ehe_
Literary Imagination,’7(Spring, 1974), 121-34. There have,
of course, been a number of studies of the individual tales.

2F.O. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Phase
(London: Oxford University Press, 1944), p. 59.

3Joseph-Warren Beach, The Method 9T Henry James (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1918), p. 130.

 

 

 

4Marius Bewley, "James's Debt to Hawthorne (I): The
Blithedale Romance and The Bostoniahe," Scrutiny, 16 (Sept.,
l949),l78-195. Patricia Merivale, "The Esthetics of Per—
version: Gothic Artifice in Henry James and Witold
Gombrowicz," PMLA, 93 (1978), 992-1001.

5William Veeder, Henry James-~The Lessons eT the Master:
Popular Fiction and Personal St 1e in the Nineteenth Centur
(Chicago: The University of C icagO—PEEES, I975), pp. I20-
121. Elsa Nettles, James & Conrad (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1977), pp. IOI-IOV. Veeder finds parallels
with M.G. Lewis's play, The Castle S ectre, Nettles with Rada-
cliffe's The Mysteries eT_Udolpho ans Le Fanu's Uncle Silas.

6Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death Th the American Novel.
(New York: Dell Publishing, 1966). For example, Fiedler 7‘—
refers (p. 303) to Osmond as a "European" when he is, of
course, an American with European ideas--a distinction which.
matters a great deal from the point of View of James's
development. Similarly, he refers (p. 302) to Madame Merle
as a "counter-virgin" with "the traditional thick, dark hair'
and dark eyes." In reality, James characterization here
anticipates Lawrence. It is Isabel, the passionate heroine
who is dark, and the unfeeling Madame Merle who is light.

 

 

7Dar1ene Harbour Unrue, "Henry James and the Gothic
Romance," Dissertation Abstracts International, 32 (Ohio
State: 1971).

46

47

8Martha Banta, "The House of Seven Ushers and How They
Grew: A Look at Jamesian Gothicism," Yale Review, 57
(October, 1967), 56-65. Martha Banta, Henry James and the
Occult: The Great Extension (Bloomington: University 5?—
Indiana Press, 1972). The quotation is from Henry James and
the Occult, p. 6.

9Frederick Garber, "Meaning and Mode in Gothic Fiction,"
in Studies Ln Eighteenth- Century,Cu1ture: Proceedings of the
Amer1can Society for Eighteenth- Century Studies, 3, Racism“
Ln the Eighteenth Century, ed. Harold E. Pagliaro (Cleveland:
Case Western Reserve Press, 1973): P. 155.

10Gary R. Thompson, "Introduction: Romanticism and the
Gothic Tradition," in The Gothic Imagination: Essays in
Dark Romanticism, ed. Gary R. Thompson (Pullman, Wash.:
Washington State University Press, 1974), p. iii.

118. L. Varnardo, "The Numinous in Gothic Literature,"
in The Gothic Imagination: Essa s in Dark Romanticism, ed.
Gary R. Thompson (Pullman, Was .: WESBington State Univer—
sity Press, 1974), p. 12.

12

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Garber, pp. 157—58.

13Devendra Varma, The Gothic Flame (London: Barker,
1957), P. 15.

14Francis Russell Hart, "The Experience of Character
in the English Gothic Novel," in Experience in the Novel:
Selected Papers from the English Institute, 53. Roy Harvey
Pearce (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), p. 91.

15Horace Walpole, Preface to the second edition of
The Castle of Otranto (1765; rpt. London: Oxford University'
Press, 1969TT pp. 7-8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge says much
the same thing about the supernatural elements in the Lyrical
Ballads: "The incidents and agents were to be, in part at
least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to
consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic:
truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such
situations, supposing them real." Biographia Literaria,
1817; rpt. J. Shawcross, ed., 2 vols. (London: Oxford
University Press, 1965), II, pp. 5-6.

16John Berryman, Introd., The Monk: h_Romance by M.G.
Lewis (New York: The Grove Press, 1959), p. 16.

17Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime: of Critical
Theories Ln Eighteenth-Century England Tl935,- rpt. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973), p. x.

18

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Garber, p. 169.

48
19R.F. Brissenden, Virtue Th Distress: Studies Th the
Novel eT Sentiment from Richardson he Sade (London:
Macm111an, 1974), p. 24.

20Howard Anderson, Introd., The Monk: h Romance, by
M.G. Lewis (London: Oxford Univer51ty Press, 1973), p. x.

21Ian Watt, The Rise eT the Novel: Studies Th Defoe,
Richardson, and Fielding (1957; rpt. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1971), p. 233.

22

 

 

 

 

Watt, p. 237.

23Watt, p. 238.

24Frederick Garber, Introd., The Italian, RE the
Confessional e: the Black Penitents: 5 Romance, by Ann
Radcliffe (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. xii.

25Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries eh Udolpho: h Romance
(1794; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp.
79-80.

26

 

 

 

 

Radcliffe, p. 647.
27Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk: h_Romance (1795;
rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 236-37.

28Garber, Introd., The Italian, p. xiii.

 

29J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance e: God: Five
Nineteeth-Century Writers (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1963), p. 206.

30

 

 

Unrue, "Henry James and Gothic Romance," p. 168.

31Mario Praz, Preface to the first edition of The
Romantic Agony (1930; rpt. London: Oxford University
Press, 1978), Angus Davidson, trans., p. xxi.

32Robert D. Hume, "Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revalu-
ation of the English Gothic Novel," PMLA, 84 (1969), 284.

HENRY JAMES AND THE GOTHIC NOVEL

James's relation to these broader Gothic tendencies is
readily provable, although some of the proofs are admittedly
indirect. It would be convenient if we had more direct
evidence of James's early reading habits, but, unfortunately,
as Leon Edel points out, none exists.1 It would be conven-
ient as well if the Lamb House library contained a particu-

larly compelling historical document, a copy of The Mysteries

 

eT Udolpho replete with James's marginalia, for instance.
Unfortunately, if any such document ever existed it is no
longer available. The library was partially destroyed by
a German bomb in August of 1940, with the resulting loss of
a number of volumes. Those books which survived the bombing
were further dispersed following the death of James's nephew;
Henry, in 1948.2
This lack of hard historical evidence should not,
however, prove unduly disconcerting. Given the extreme
popularity of Gothic fiction during the mid-nineteeth
century, it is reasonable to assume that a literate,
sophisticated, young man with an interest in fiction would
have come across it in numerous variations. Furthermore,
as James himself remarks "the historian wants more documents

than he can really use,"3 and we are not, after all, without

evidence. We can make a shrewd estimate as to the extent

49

50

and nature of James's early readings from the references he
makes in the numerous reviews he wrote as a young man. A
number of commentators who have written on this aspect of
James have found in his early reviews evidence of an enduring’
and profoundly influential interest in Gothic fiction. Take,

for example, the following remarks by Leon Edel:

He knew the world of goblins and demons
and haunted houses, and he knew, too,
the history of witchcraft in America.
Certain critics have emphasized his
saturation with Hawthorne's fantasies
and allegories, his admiration for such
tales as Rappaccini's Daughter and Young
goodman Brown which he con§idered
"little masterpieces." But if he had
read Hawthorne closely he had also read
Poe; at eighteen or nineteen he had
translated Merimee's tale of terror,

La Venus ee 1'Isle, and was acquainted
With the works of Balzac, including
the French master's tales of the
supernatural; and from his earliest

days he had known the ghost stories

of Charles Dickens. He knew Wilkie
Collins and he considered Sheridan Le
Fanu "ideal reading in a country house
for the hours after midnight." He was

a devoted reader of Blackwood's magazine
and in its pages found some of the finest
tales of terror of the time, by writers
now long forgotten. He invokes in The
Ghostly Rental the name of the German
romance writer E.T.A. Hoffman, author

of Phantasiestucke and Elixre des Teufels,
whose tales inspired Offénbach's opera
Les Contes d'Hoffman. He had read the
Gothic romances. . .4

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These observations were restated and extended a few years
later by F.W. Dupee:
To James in his extreme youth Balzac

could be no more than a rather remote
ideal. And to be influenced by

51

Hawthorne meant to imitate his very
subjects and tone, as in "A Romance

of Certain Old Clothes," which begins,
"Towards the middle of the eighteenth
century there lived in the Province of
Massachusetts a widowed gentlewoman,"
etc. For the rest, he could at least
reach back as far as Hawthorne, as well
as Poe, to the Gothic Romance and so to
a common folklore stock of wonder and
terror. This he did, and one group

of his early tales is peopled with
ghosts, alter-egos, and vampires in
human form. Not very remarkable stories,
they do nevertheless sound some of his
characteristic themes; and he was to
return to the Gothic note in the more
sophisticated wonder tales of his maturity.
Something, too, of the popular impulse
survived even in the more realistic of
his later novels, where the sudden wind-
falls of fortune, the initiations, pro-
hibitions, and transformations are often
reminiscent of the fairy tale.5

William Veeder's excellent study of James's literary refer-
ences demonstrates that the author specifically knew the

work of Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis, and the Brontes.6

And James himself paid Clarissa Harlowe the supreme compli-
7

 

ment of calling it "deeply interesting."
James, then, was deeply immersed in Gothic fiction as
it appeared in various ways in various places. Yet his
relation to this genre may also be approached through
reference to the details of his early upbringing. The
members of the James family were, by all accounts, re-
markable, and disposed to take their inner lives seriously.
The key figure here is, of course, Henry James, Sr., the
novelist's father, most particularly as he was involved in

metaphysical speculation. Within the James family circle,

52

the life of the spirit was a constant topic of conversation.
What is more, this interest extended to the spiritual
reality of both good and evil. As C. Hartley Grattan
remarks apropos of Henry James, Sr.:

One of James's most characteristic

notions was that without a profound

idea of the reality of evil, one

could not become a religious thinker.

His own definition of the meaning

and source of evil came to be radically

different from that of the Calvinists,

but he retained his belief in that

fundamental constituent of human nature

to the end.8
It was, moreover, precisely this emphasis on the reality of
evil which distinguished the views of the elder James from
the pallid optimism that characterized transcendentalism
at its worst, and which impressed itself so vividly on the
mind of his second son.

The virtue of this sort of early education is debatable.
Although William and Henry James were eventually to enjoy
brilliant careers, they were plagued at times by nervous
ill health. The careers of the three younger Jamess, Garth
Wilkinson, Robertson, and Alice were tragic to virtually
the same degree as those of the elder brothers were renowneél.
As F.O. Matthiessen observes: "The question naturally
arises, as we watch the unfolding record of his children's
extraordinary education, of how much danger was latent in
an atmosphere of such excessive mental and emotional stimu-

9

lation." One cannot help but remember at junctures like

this M. St. Aubert's lectures to his daughter on the dangers

53

of sensibility. In any event, that there was danger lurking
around and about the James family hearth is made abundantly
clear by the fact that both Henry James, Sr. and William
James were the victims of horrid "supernatural" visitations
which left them devastated for a period of months and
ultimately led to profound dangers in their lives. The
written descriptions which these men provide of their
experiences are vivid and arresting, and would, in fact,
have every appearance of having come from a Gothic novel
were they to be read out of context. Henry James, Sr.'s
visitation occurred in 1844 and is described as follows

in his Literary Remains:

 

One day, however, towards the
close of May, having eaten a com-
fortable dinner, I remained sitting
at the table after the family had
dispersed, idly gazing at the embers
in the grate, thinking of nothing,
and feeling only the exhilaration
incident to good digestion, when
suddenly--in a lightning flash as
it were--'fear came upon me, and
trembling which made all my bones
shake.‘ To all appearance it was a
perfectly insane and abject terror,
without ostensible cause, and only
to be accounted for, to my perplexed
imagination, by some damned shape
squatting invisible to me within
the precincts of the room, and
raying out from his fetid personality
influences fatal to life. The thing
had not lasted ten seconds before I
felt myself a wreck, that is, reduced
from a state of firm, vigorous, joyful
manhood to one of almost helpless
infancy. The only self-control I was
capable of exerting was to keep my seat.
I felt the greatest desire to run in-
continently to the foot of the stairs
and shout for help to my wife--to run

54

to the roadside even, and appeal to
the public to protect me; but by an
immense effort I controlled these
frenzied impulses, and determined

not to budge from my chair until I
had recovered my lost self-possession.
This purpose I held for a good long
hour, as I reckoned time, beat upon
meanwhile by an ever-growing tempest
of doubt, anxiety and despair.

William James's experience, which occurred in 1869, is

described as follows in The Varieties 9: Religious Experiencxe:

 

 

I went one evening into a dressing-room

in the twilight to procure some article
that was there; when suddenly there

fell upon me without warning, just as

if it came out of the darkness, a horrible
fear of my own existence. Simultaneously
there arose in my mind the image of an
epileptic patient whom I had seen in the
asylum, a black-haired youth with green-
ish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to
sit all day on one of the benches, or
rather shelves against the wall, with

his knees drawn up against his chin, and
the coarse grey undershirt, which was his
only garment, drawn over them inclosing
his entire figure. He sat there like a
sort of Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy,
moving nothing but his black eyes and
looking positively non-human. This image
and my fear entered into a species of com-
bination with each other. That shape am I,
I felt potentially. Nothing that I po§§e§s
can defend me against that fate, if the
hour should strike for me as it struck

for him. There was such a horror of him,
and such a perception of my own merely
momentary discrepancy from him, that it
was if something hitherto solid within my
breast gave entirely, and I became a mass
of quivering fear.l

 

Even given the fact that William James probably had his
father's passage in mind when he described his own experi-

ence, the coincidence is remarkable. And much of what we

55

would label "Gothic" in these passages stems, no doubt, front
their suggestion that danger can be nearby even in a familiar'
and safe setting. Henry James, Jr. never experienced the
sort of paralyzing fear to which these passages atteSt. Yet
in the famed Galerie d'Apollon vision of his youth, a vision

which he was to refer to in h_Sma11 Boy and Others as "the

 

most appalling yet most admirable nightmare of my life," we

find another version of the old Gothic terror:

The climax of this extraordinary experience--
which stands alone for me as a dream-adven-
ture founded in the deepest, quickest,
clearest act of cogitation and comparison,
act indeed of life saving energy, as well
as in unutterable fear--was the sudden
pursuit, throughanlopen door, along a huge
high saloon, of a just dimly—descried figure
that retreated in terror before my rush and
dash. . . out of the roomflthad a moment
before been desperately, and all the more
abjectly, defending by the push of my
shoulder against hard pressure on lock

and bar from the other side. The lucidity,
not to say the sublimity, of the crisis

had consisted of the great thought that I,
in my appalled state, was probably still
more appalling than the awful agent, creature
or presence, whatever he was, whom I had
guessed, in the suddenest wild start from
sleep, the sleep within my sleep, to be
making for my place of rest. The triumph
of my impulse, perceived in a flash as I
acted on it by myself at a bound, forcing
the door outward, was the grand thing, but
the great point of the whole was the wonder
of my final recognition. Routed, dismayed,
the tables turned upon him by my so sur-
passing him for straight aggression and
dire intention, my visitant was already but
a diminished spot in the long perspective,
the tremendous glorious hall, as I say,
over the far-gleaming floor of which,
cleared for the occasion of its great line
of priceless vitrines down the middle, he
sped for hTe life, while a great storm of

56

thunder and lightning played through
the deep embrasures of high windows at
the right. The lightning that revealed
the retreat revealed also the wondrous
place. . . the Galerie d'Apollon of my
childhood. . . . 12

It is impossible to do strict justice to the resonance of
this passage. As Leon Edel suggests, the French pronunci-
ation of "Apollon" is similar to the pronunciation of
"Napoleon", and the Greek god of poetry is thereby associated!

13 Yet both of

with the secular glory of the second Empire.
these words suggest "Apollyon," the "angel of the bottomless

pit" (Rev. 9:11) who reappears in Bunyan's The Pilgrim's

 

Progress, a work James knew well, as one of the chief
architects of Vanity Fair. And when, finally, all three of
these words are associated with the repeated variations on
the word "appall," the glories of the palace of art become
ambiguous indeed. Are the accumulated treasures of history
monuments to man's glory or to his vanity? And what of the
triumph of the appalled over the "awful agent, creature or
presence" a triumph over a tradition of Protestant distrust
of art--the ghost which had haunted the Gothic novelists in
their treatment of Europe? Or is it on the other hand a
triumph over conscience and thus an infernal compromise witli
the architect of Vanity Fair?

James never resolves such questions, and the theme of
the "appalled man turning out to be more appalling than the
monster who confronts him" is, as Joseph Ward shows, one

14

which haunted him to the end of his career. It is most

57

conspicuous in "The Jolly Corner," but it is also clearly
evident in "The Turn of the Screw" and in James's greatest

novel, The Golden Bowl. Our point here, however, is that

 

the remarkable coincidence of the father and his two sons
having had such visitations raises them to the status of
family heirlooms. As his father had done in theology, and
his brother had done in psychology, Henry James tried to
show through his art that experiences so vivid could be no
less "real" than those of everyday existence. He had, as
Graham Greene notes, a "sense of evil religious in its in-

15 And it is impossible to participate fully in

tensity."
James's fictional world without a sense of how close to the
surface this primitive terror was at all times. To quote
F.O. Matthiessen:

. . .he kept throughout his life the

sense of the abyss always lurking

beneath the fragile surface. He

expressed this kind of evil again

and again, through a long series of

characters. This is what Maggie

Verver had called 'the horror of the

thing hideously behind, behind so much

trusted, so much pretended, nobleness,

cleverness, tenderness.‘

As an artist, James portrayed his sense of the abyss
imaginatively rather than rationally; these artistic
portrayals will be dealt with. Here it should be emphasizeri
that if James was an artist he was also a critic, and in
his critical prose, most notably but not exclusively in

the "Prefaces" to the New York edition, we find a rich

investigation of many of these same matters. James's

58

status as a critic has been the subject of some debate in
the past, but most now would probably agree with Rene
Wellek's assessment:

James to my mind is by far the best

American critic of the nineteenth

century who. . . is brimful of ideas

and critical concepts and has a well

defined theory and point of view which

allow him to characterize sensitively

and persuasively a wide range of artists.17

Of particular interest is the fact that many of the "ideas
and critical concepts" which are so characteristically
Jamesian have strong affinities to and are at least partialljr
derived from the Gothic.

One of the first questions to be addressed in this
regard is James's relation to the tradition of fictional
realism. Calling James a realist seems to involve no
immediate difficulties. He did, after all, remark that
"the only reason for the existence of the novel is that
it does attempt to represent life"18--a point which is
amplified somewhat later on in the same essay when he
states that the "air of reality. . . seems to me to be the
supreme virtue of the nove1--the merit on which all its
other merits. . . helplessly and submissively depend."19
This seems straightforward enough, but it is easy to be
misled, particularly if one thinks that an "air of reality"
is to be achieved by representing life in the manner of

William Dean Howells, for example. James, himself, seems

to recognize this danger:

59

It goes without saying that you will
not write a good novel unless you
possess the sense of reality; but it
will be difficult to give you a recipe
for calling that sense into being.
Humanity is immense, and reality has
myriad forms: the most one can affirm
is that some of the flowers of fiction
have the odor of it, and others have
not; as for telling you in advance how
your nosegay should be composed, that
is another affair. It is equally ex-
cellent and inconclusive to say that
one must write from experience; to our
supposititious aspirant such a declara-
tion might savor of mockery. What kind
of experience is intended, and where
does it begin and end? Experience is
never limited, and it is never complete:
it is an immense sensibility, a kind of
huge spider-web of the finest silken
threads suspended in the consciousness,
and catching every air-borne particle
in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere
of the mind.20

And in what is perhaps the most remarkable comment in this
long essay, James goes on to note that "The moral conscious—
ness of a child is as much a part of life as the islands of
the Spanish main. . . ."21
James, then, was a realist to the extent that he took
heeT human experience to be the proper subject of the
novelist. But it is abundantly clear as well that his
sense of the term "realism" is quite different from the
sense in which it is commonly understood. Indeed the remark};
which have been quoted here may be profitably compared with
those of two well-known philosophers who were roughly his
contemporaries. The first passage is from the work of the

novelist's brother, William James, the second from that of

Alfred North Whitehead:

60

My thesis is that if we start with the
supposition that there is only one pri-
mal stuff or material in the world, a
stuff of which everything is composed,
and if we call that stuff "pure experi-
ence," then knowing can easily be
explained as a particular sort of
relation towards one another into

which portions of pure experience may
enter. The relation itself is a part
of pure experience; one of its "terms"
becomes the subject or bearer of the
knowledge, the knower, the other becomes
the object known.22

For natural philosophy everything per-

ceived is in nature. We may not pick

and choose. For us the red glow of the

sunset should be as much part of the

nature as are the molecules and electric

waves by which men of science would ex-

plain the phenomenon. It is for natural

philosophy to analyze how these various

elements of nature are connected.23
By juxtaposing these comments, I do not mean to imply a
closer relationship between the Jameses and Whitehead
than actually existed, nor, certainly, do I mean to imply
that Henry James was strongly influenced by readings in
the philosophy current at the time. Still, the similari-
ties between his notion of the "real" and those expressed
by his brother and Whitehead are striking. And taking
note of this similarity allows us to place James in that
community of modern artists and thinkers who saw reality
as infinitely rich, various, and complex--a reality composed
of both the natural world and the world of the spirit.
Martha Banta, using some concepts worked out by Auerbach

in Mimesis, provides a vivid description of this Jamesian

world in its spiritual depth:

61

To the Hebrews, God's influence acted

like the sense of the human psyche to

James; each power 'reaches so deeply

into the everyday that the two realms

of the sublime and the everyday are

not only actually unseparated but basic-

ally unseparable.'24

What we see in James, then, is a rare coalescence of

forces. He was not only familiar with tales of supernatural
horror, but he was, by virtue of his own temperament and
early education, disposed to take them seriously--disposed,
that is, to see them as poetic representations of that other
world which is subtly interfused with ordinary life. In

the critical writings, we can see this as early as 1865 in

a review of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Aurora Floyd:

 

She has been preceded in the same path by
Mr. Wilkie Collins whose "Woman in White,"
with its diaries and letters and its
general ponderosity, was a kind of nine-
teenth century version of "Clarissa
Harlowe." To Mr. Collins belongs the
credit of having introduced into fiction
those most mysterious of mysteries, the
mysteries which are at our own doors.
This innovation gave a new impetus to

the literature of horrors. It was fatal
to the authority of Mrs. Radcliffe and
her everlasting castle in the Apennines.
What are the Apennines to us, or we to
the Apennines? Instead of the terror

of "Udolpho," we were treated to the
terrors of the cheerful countryhouse

and the busy London lodgings. And there
is no doubt that these were infinitely
the more terrible. Mrs. Radcliffe's
mysteries were romances pure and simple;
while those of Mr. Wilkie Collins were
stern reality. The supernatural, which
Mrs. Radcliffe constantly implies,

though she generally saves her conscience,
at the eleventh hour, by explaining it
away, requires a powerful imagination

62

in order to be as exciting as the natural,
as Mr. Collins and Miss Braddon, without
any imagination at all know how to manage
it. A good ghost-story, to be half as
terrible as a good murder-story, must be
connected at a hundred points with the
common objects of life. The best ghost-
story probably ever written--a tale pub-
lished some years ago in Blackwood's
Magazine--was constructed with an admir—
able understanding of this principle.

Half of its force was derived from its 25
prosaic, commonplace, day light accessories.

 

In passages such as these, James gives evidence not only of
his extensive reading of the Gothic, but also of his unusual
responsiveness to it. He was, indeed, one of the earliest
and most acute critics of that genre. Nowhere is this
clearer than in his awareness that the literature of terror
had ceased being remote and exotic and had become a part of
what was familiar and ordinary. Of particular interest,
too, is his suggestion that the only difference between

the real and the romantic is that the former is more common
and familiar--an idea he would examine in much greater depth
at a later date.

It is not, however, until we come to the critical
"Prefaces" that these typically Gothic concerns are treated
with the fullness of his mature understanding. As always,
James is interested in the past, the dead, and the super-
natural, but always as they impinge upon our daylight
sensibilities. In the "Preface" to The Aspern Papers, for
example, he discusses how the theme of the past can be used

by the novelist to achieve intensity and effect:

63

I delight in a palpable, imaginable
visitible past--in the nearer distances
and the clearer mysteries, the marks

and signs of a world we may reach over

to as by making a long arm we grasp an
object at the other end of our own table.
The table is the one, the common expanse,
and where we lean, so stretching, we find
it firm and continuous. That, to my
imagination, is the past fragrant of all,
or of almost all, the poetry of the thing
outlived and lost and gone, and yet in
which the precious element of closeness,
telling so of connexions but tasting so
of differences, remains appreciable.

With more moves back the element of the
appreciable shrinks--just as the charm

of looking over a garden-wall into another
garden breaks down when successions of
walls appear. The other gardens, those
still beyond, may be there, but even by
use of our longest ladder we are baffled
and bewildered--the view is mainly a

view of barriers. The one partition
makes the place we have wondered about
other, both richly and recognizably so;
but who shall pretend to impute an effect
of composition to the twenty? We are
divided of course between liking to feel
the past strange and liking to feel it
familiar.26

What makes this particular past eerie and haunting is pre-
cisely the fact that it is not remote or exotic, but rather
an aspect of each individual's experience. The mystery and
fear it evokes is precisely the fear of mutability, the
fear of changing and the passage of time.

The central document in this discussion is, however,

the "Preface" to The American, most particularly the

 

passages where James deals with the differences between
the real and the romantic, the novel and the romance. I
am aware of the importance Richard Chase places upon this

preface, and of his admirable discussion of it in

64

27

The American Novel and its Tradition. But I am willing to

 

risk going over familiar ground if it serves to heighten our
awareness of the extent to which James recognized the subtle
penetration of the marvelous into everyday life, as well as
the extent to which he believed it was the duty of the
novelist to represent experience in its extremes.

For our purposes, the crucial aspect of this "Preface"
is James's suggestion that many of the elements which he
had previously seen as central to a good ghost story he now
sees as central to the novel. James's attitude toward
romance is ambivalent here as it is in much of his critical
writing. On the one hand, he seems to feel that indulgence
in romance forms is a species of aesthetic mistake, while
on the other hand he recognizes that romances contain
matter of enormous interest. This confusion can, I think,
be alleviated somewhat if we remember that James is dis-
tinguishing between romance as it had commonly been used,
and romance as it might be used by a skilled writer. Thus,
for him, the historical treatment of romance was not so
much wrong as it was guilty of partial insight--it failed
to recognize that the marvelous events with which it was so
much occupied were also the stuff of life properly compre-
hended. Historically, romance tended to be "a matter in—
dispensably of boats, or of caravans, or of tigers, or of
'historical characters', or of ghosts, or of forgers, or
of detectives, or of beautiful wicked women, or of pistols

28

and knives." Yet for James, the dangers of the romance

65

world differ from the dangers of ordinary life in degree
but not in kind, and from the moral or spiritual point of
view they are all more or less the same:

There are immense and flagrant dangers

that are but sordid and squalid ones,

as we feel, tainting with their

quality and the very defiances they

provoke; while there are common and

covert ones, that '1ook like nothing'

and that can be but inwardly and

occultly dealt with, which involves

the sharpest hazards to life and

honour and the highest instant deci-

sions and intrepidities of action.

It is an arbitrary stamp that keeps

these latter prosaic and makes the

former heroic.2
The romantic world with all of its dangers is always a
potential intruder into our world of experience, and life
takes on its greatest interest when the "real" ("the things
we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later") and the
"romantic" ("things that. . . we never can directly know;
the things that can reach us only through the beautiful
circuit and subterfuge of our thought and desire") collide.30
There are truths that we can know directly, and there are
truths that we can only know by indirection--that is,
metaphorically and symbolically through the Offices of the
imagination. Yet both of these "truths" are part of the
current of our experience and therefore "real" in the most
proper sense of the term.

Such a vision of experience clearly has broad implica-

tions for the novelist. For if he is to be faithful to

the emotional experience of life, he must, "by the law of

66

31

some rich passion in him for extremes," find a place in

his work for the romantic as well as the real. And fiction,
like life, achieves its highest interest and intensity when

the two worlds are simultaneously present:

The only general attribute of projected
romance that I can see, the only one

that fits all its cases, is the fact of
the kind of experience with which it
deals--experience liberated, so to speak;
experience disengaged, disembroiled, dis-
encumbered, exempt from the conditions
that we usually know to attach to it and,
if we wish so to put the matter, drag
upon it, and operating in a medium which
relieves it, in a particular interest, of
the inconvenience of a related, a measur-
able state, a state subject to all our
vulgar communities. The greatest intensity
may so be arrived at evidently--when the
sacrifice of community, of the "related"
sides of situations, has not been too rash.
It must to this end not flagrantly betray
itself; we must even be kept if possible,
for our illusion, from suspecting any
sacrifice at all.32

If at this point we hear echoes of Walpole's "Preface" to

the second edition of The Castle 9: Otranto, it is by design

 

not accident--it being precisely my point that James came
to mine a rich fictional vein, the possibilities of which
Walpole could only dimly imagine a century and a half
earlier. To fully participate in the terror which heroes
and heroines like Christopher Newman, Isabel Archer, Milly
Theale, and Maggie Verver feel when the "real" world of
habit and convention becomes the ehhe£_world of romance is

to participate in the true Gothic terror.

67

Yet as we witness these innocent characters confronting
the world of romance, we are aware of what Professor Garber
has described as "two parallel tendencies toward a movement
from outside to within." In a line of development which
follows closely developments within the Gothic tradition,
James came to see that the world of romance needn't inevitably'
appear in exotic settings. It is important to remember here
that the "Prefaces" to the New York edition are a retrospec-
tive commentary on his own work. They were composed after
the great novels of the major phase, and as a result, what
he sees as important in them is closely related to his own
late practice. The mature James may have been keenly aware
of the dangers that could lurk in a civilized setting, but
in his novels this is a perspective which gradually develops.

In The American, the earliest of the novels we will be

 

discussing here, the action takes place in Paris at the very
center of fabled French immorality. Similarly, much of the

important action in The Portrait eT e Lady and The Wings eT

 

 

the Dove takes place in Italy--a land which the English
literary mind had associated with dark unmentionable deeds
since at least the Renaissance. By the time we get to The

Golden Bowl, however, very little of importance takes place

 

on the continent. Rather, this last and perhaps the greatest
of James's novels shows how very much at home evil is in the
great country houses of "civilized" England.

Equally important is James's developing awareness of

how evil might lurk in a civilized personality as well as

68

in a civilized setting. Here again the developmental

sequence beginning with The American is instructive. In

 

The American, as in an early Gothic novel like The Mysteries

 

 

eT_Udolpho there is relatively little confusion as to where

good and evil reside. But in The Portrait e: e Lady, and

 

increasingly in The Wings eh the Dove and The Golden Bowl,

 

 

 

this issue becomes problematic. Madame Merle and Gilbert

Osmond in The Portrait eT'e Lady retain many of the stock

 

characteristics of the traditional Gothic tale, and their

inner lives are not examined in great depth. In The Wings

 

e: the Dove and The Golden Bowl, however, characters like

 

Kate Croy and Merton Densher, Charlotte Stant and Prince
Amerigo are not only seen as civilized but evil to the
degree that they are so. In these novels James is as much
interested intfluainner lives and responses of his "evil"
characters as he is in those of his heroes and heroines.
As a result, evil takes on a human face and becomes inextri-
cably associated with the mystery of the human personality.
We should not leave this subject without noting that
while characters like the Bellegardes, Madame Merle,
Osmond, Kate Croy and Charlotte Stant are, finally, evil,
James heroes and heroines have in them the capacity to do
evil as well. In Christopher Newman and Isabel Archer these
tendencies are admittedly latent, though not wholly absent;
in Milly Theale they are somewhat more pronounced, and in
Maggie Verver they are surprisingly close to the surface.

The result is an unsettling suspicion that the capacity to

69

do evil is universal. Here we can see that James fulfills
the Gothic propensity for seeing good and evil as realities,
but realities which are exceptionally difficult to distin-
guish, and for seeing the world as a theatre in which these
forces collide in a baffling series of encounters. James
gives a powerful description of this vision in the "Preface"

to What Maisie Knew:

 

No themes are so human as those that reflect
for us, out of the confusion of life, the
close connexion of bliss and bale, of the
things that help with the things that hurt,
so dangling before us for ever that bright
hard medal of so strange an alloy, one face
of which is somebody's right and ease and
the other somebody's pain and wrong. To
live with all intensity and perplexity and
felicity in its terribly mixed little world
would thus be the part of my interesting
small mortal; bringing people together who
would be at least more correctly separate;
keeping people separate who would be at
least more correctly together; flourishing,
to a degree, at the cost of many conventions
and proprieties, even decencies, really
keeping the torch of virtue alive in an

air tending infinitely to smother it; really
in short making confusion worse confounded
by drawing some stray fragrance of an ideal
across the scent of selfishness, by sowing
on barren strands, through the mere fact

of presence, the seed of the moral life.33

Although the sentiments expressed here are distinctly
modern--compare, for example, the lines from T.S. Eliot's
"Gerontion":

Neither fear nor courage saves us.

Unnatural vices Are fathered by our

heroism. Virtues Are forced upon
us by our impudent crimes.3

70

--we should not overlook the fact that the literature of
terror was one of the chief means by which this vision of
a "terribly mixed little world" was pushed into full con-
sciousness in the twentieth century.

One place where we see immediate evidence of the
strength of this vision for James is in the Jamesian style
itself--that irreducible combination of prose and poetry,
realistic detail and metaphor which is so characteristic
of the late work. Indeed it would seem that the conflicting
demands of realism and romance could not be fully satisfied
by conventional prose, and that James therefore turned to
the techniques of poetry to convey a sense of life fully
comprehended. To a critic like Austin Warren, this late
style is one of James's chief virtues:

The distinctive masterly achievement of

Henry James in his maturity is a series

of "metaphysical" movels in which, work-

ing as a poet, not a philosopher, he

incarnates the interrelations between

the conscious and the unconscious.35
James felt that there was more on heaven and earth than
could be conveyed by the logic of traditional prose. Yet
unique though this style may appear to be, it has recog-
nizable affinities with the styles of earlier Gothic
writers. Mrs. Radcliffe and M.G. Lewis, to use just the
most obvious examples, litter their prose with poetry--
either their own or that of others; and while their use

of poetry strikes as being clumsier and more intrusive

than James's, their intent is much the same. John Berryman

71

has spoken provocatively of the "poetry" of the Gothic
novel as it comes down to us through the works of Radcliffe,
Lewis, and Emily Bronte;36 and it is probably safe to
suggest that James required a richly allusive style for
similar reasons.

James's relation to the Gothic is, however, even more
convincingly established by his conception of evil. As is
to be expected in a writer firmly rooted in the sentimental
tradition, James placed a supreme value on individual
feeling, discrimination, and judgment. The eternal sanctity
of the human spirit was an ethic deeply ingrained within
him-—it was central to his father's religious beliefs, and
it was certainly at the heart of the works of a writer like
Hawthorne. It followed from this, moreoever, that whatever
interfered with, manipulated, or in any way devalued human
feeling was evil. As Walter Wright puts it:

As a novelist he was concerned with

creative expression as the highest

activity of the human mind and with

the absolute sacredness of the human

soul. Whatever prevented creativity

or the development of sensibility,

be it cynicism or whatever, he con-

sidered tragic. Whatever violated

the sacred freedom of another soul--

it inalienable right to self-respect 3

and self expression--was supremely evil. 7
Almost anything said here would apply with equal force to
the great works of the Gothic tradition. And when characters

like Christopher Newman, Isabel Archer, Milly Theale and

Maggie Verver encounter evil, they, like Emily and Valancourt

72

or Raymond and Agnes before them, encounter it in the
form of some malevolent force which seeks to control or
manipulate them.

Equally compelling in this respect is the seemingly
exact parallel in the way these forces are portrayed by
James and the Gothic novelists. James is different from
his predecessors to the extent that his novels never in-
volve imprisonment, murder, or the kind of charnel house
scene of which a writer like Lewis was so fond. He was,
however, taken by the suggestive power of the past.
Medieval, Catholic, Europe is alluded to often in these
novels. Yet in James, as in the Gothic novelists, this
antiquarian past is the past in its most superficial
aspect. For him, as for them, the past was most important
as a living force exerting a subtle pressure on the present.
Thus, here as well as in the earlier novels, the past and
all of its evils is figured in the image of the present
social world and a series of conventional characters,
typified by Gilbert Osmond who describes himself at one
point as "convention itself." Figures like Urbain de
Bellegarde, Madame Merle, Osmond, Kate Croy, Prince
Amerigo, and Charlotte Stant may be very different in
certain respects, but they are alike in that they all
represent culture in its most monolithic and threatening
form. For these characters, as for a host of Gothic
villains and villainesses, other people do not exist as

free and independent beings worthy of dignity and respect;

73

others are, rather, creatures to be used as pride, ambition,
greed, or aesthetic sense might dictate.

There is, then, danger in social institutions and in
other people, yet James also recognizes the extent to which
the most damnable constraints on individual self-expression
and growth are internal. Here, also, the locus Of all danger
is sexual passion. Like the great Gothic novels, James's
most characteristic novels, and certainly the novels of the
major phase, have at their center a sexual intrigue. And
it is as a result of this sexual intrigue that a hero like
Christopher Newman, and heroines like Isabel, Milly and
Maggie learn how they have been betrayed by their own
values, their own culturally and aesthetically induced
attitudes toward others and toward their own feelings. It
is around this basic encounter between a man and a woman
that these myriad conflicts and dangers coalesce.

None of this is to say, though, that there is no
development of this theme in James's work. For him, none
of the constraints are physical--they are, rather, social,
conventional, and psychological. But given this, there
is a definite development in his work which we can easily
apprehend if we try to imaginatively grasp the distance

which has been travelled between The American and The

 

Golden Bowl. In the former, Christopher Newman is presented

 

as a more or less innocent victim. An element of pride
and egoism does motivate his actions, but on the whole he

is the victim of the narrow class snobbery of the Bellegardes.,

74

Maggie Verver, by contrast, is victimized by forces which

are far more subtle, though no less powerful. In a sense,

certainly, she is victimized by the passive scheming of her

husband, Prince Amerigo, and the active scheming of her

friend, Charlotte Stant. Yet there is a larger sense in

which her own best values, her own desires to do what is

right for everybody, are the source of the difficulty.
James, like the Gothic novelists, becomes involved

in a curious double process wherein sentimental values

are simultaneously criticized and affirmed; and perhaps

what is ultimately at stake here is the status of true

culture. When cultural values operate as received opinion--

as stale custom--they cannot prOperly be said to operate

at all. True culture, rather, survives in the shared

insights of civilized life which can be passed on and

which can be reinterpreted by each generation in light

of its own experience. Thus, in the present instance,

there is nothing HERBS with the values Maggie brings to

the problem of her life; it is just that these values

have not been adopted with a full awareness of their limita-

tions. They have not, in short, been adopted with an

awareness of the terribly mixed nature of life, of the

horrible ease with which evil can be the result of the

best of motives acted upon in ignorance.

The Golden Bowl, therefore, occupies the same place

 

in the James canon as Wuthering Heights occupies in the

 

earlier Gothic tradition. For in both, evil is something

75

which must be gone through if society is to be redeemed.

 

And we note in this respect that there is no gesture of

renunciation in The Golden Bowl as there had been in The

 

American, The Wings eTIflmaDove, and The Portrait eh e Lady;

 

 

 

rather evil has been met on its own ground and overcome.
And this is not achieved through a willful and rigid appli-
cation of some system of belief or aesthetic vision, but
through the mediating offices of imagination, sympathy, love,
and, above all self awareness. Society is, after all, but
a collection of individuals, and can only be regenerated to
the extent that the individuals that compose it are. This,
it will be readily seen, is a powerful answer to collecti—
vism, for it is always necessary for the individual to set
his own house in order--a process which begins with the
often painful necessity of striking a just balance between
personal inclination and social restraint, a process which
involves placing oneself in some relation to time or
history where, to use terms familiar to Freud and Eliot

as well as James, the child meets the adult in some
approximation of whole humanity. It is only when this
occurs that the individual is free to affirm fully the
freedom and dignity of others.

Considerations of this sort lead us, moreover, into a
final and intensely interesting area of James's relation to
the Gothic--namely his development of what has commonly
been called the restricted point of view. In an account

of literary history which I find to be essentially correct,

76

Darlene Harbour Unrue traces the development of this tech-

nique from the early epistolary novels like Clarissa Harlowe

 

to the Gothic, and from thence to James's major fiction via

the "ghostly tales."38

Indeed there is plenty of evidence
in the "Prefaces" to suggest that this is the case. In the

"Preface" to The Princess Casmassima, James describes the

 

literary virtues of the restricted point of view:

. . .the figures in any picture, the
agents in any drama, are interesting
only in proportion as they feel their
respective situations; since the con-
sciousness, on their part, of the
complication exhibited forms for us
their link of connexion.

Comments such as these echo provocatively some of his better
known comments on the literature of the supernatural. Thus
a similar note is struck in the "Preface" to "The Altar of
the Dead" where James is discussing the technique of his

Gothic masterpiece, "The Jolly Corner":

The extraordinary is most extraordinary
in that it happens to you and me, and
it's of value (of value for others) but
so far as visibly brought home to us.
At any rate, odd though it; may sound to
pretend that one feels on safer ground
in tracing such an adventure as that of
the hero of "The Jolly Corner" than in
pursuing a bright career among pirates
or detectives, I allow that composition
to pass as the measure or limit, on my
part, of any achievable comfort in the
"adventure story"; and this is not
because I may "render"--well, what my
poor gentleman attempted and suffered
in the New York house--better than I
may render detectives or pirates or
other splendid desperadoes, though even

77

here too there would be something to
say; but because the spirit engaged
with the forces Of violence interests
me most when I can think of it as
engaged most deeply, most finely and
most "subtly" (precious terml). For
then it is that, as with the longest
and firmest prongs of consciousness, I
grasp and hold the throbbing subject;
there it is above all that I find the
steady light of the picture.40

Surely something similar must have been in James's mind when
he disparages attempts to prove the existence of ghosts
scientifically:

Recorded and attested 'ghosts' are

. . . as little expressive, as

little dramatic . . . as is consis-

tent with their taking the trouble

. . . to appear at all.41
Or again in the "Preface" to "The Altar of the Dead" where
he discusses the artistic merits of the ghost story:

I am prepared with the confession that

the "ghost-story," as we for convenience

call it, has ever been for me the most

possible form of the fairy-tale. It

enjoys, to my eyes, this honour by being

so much the neatest--neat with that

neatness without which representation,

and therewith beauty drops.42
James never states directly that his use of the restricted
point of view has its origins in the literature of the
ghostly, but in charting his progress we ourselves can see
that, like the best of the early Gothic writers, he dis-

covered that the techniques of terror could be most pro-

fitably used in the development of a novel of character.

78

And what he got from the literature of the supernatural was
his sense of the essential interest of an isolated conscious-
ness confronting the terror of experience.

Part of James's attraction, certainly, stems from his
fidelity to the novelist's unceasing obligation to hold the
attention of his audience. And it is interesting to watch
a series of Jamesian heroes and heroines struggle through
a labyrinth of unstable social forms with only their own
limited sensibility to guide them. Part of it also is
James receptiveness to the distinctly modern notion that
reality is relative, and his attempt to portray it as such.
For him there was no static world to be contemplated by
disembodied intelligences; rather, as he says in "The Art
of the Novel," "Humanity is immense, and reality has myriad
forms." Reality is, in other words, the aggregate of what
men perceive given the limitations of their own knowledge,
circumstance, and mental disposition. Yet in the final
analysis, James's use of impersonal forms of narration is
fraught with moral implications as well. Although they
are ungenerous to James's use of impersonal narration on
aesthetic grounds, Scholes and Kellogg recognize the fact
that there is a serious issue involved here. As they put it:

We have suggested that James's avoidance
of the multifarious aspect of omniscience
was in some sense idiosyncratic, an ele-
vation of his personal preferences and
limitations into a principle of art.

But his suspicion of the monistic and
authoritative aspect of omniscience is

another affair altogether. A cogent
justification for James's reaction to

79

this aspect of omniscience can be made

though not without leaving the realm

of esthetics, a de arture he would

doubtless deplore. 3
While accurate in the main, some of this seems intolerably
glib, for the aesthetic and moral realms are never really
distinct in James, and what is at stake here, finally, is
the moral status of art. James, like the Gothic novelists,
was aware that art is a powerful aspect of culture, a
living force with immense potential for both good and evil.
And as Darlene Unrue shows, James was fond of the typically
Gothic technique of bringing works of art to life throughout
his career:

Henry James was aware of the imaginative

possibilities of the "living" portrait

or statue, and as his fiction is full of

allusions to the works of painters and

sculptors, one can expect him to draw

upon the "living" portrait for dramatic

effect. His works are full of allusions

to the phenomenon.44
What this technique suggests with varying degrees of subtlety
is that art is one of the animated forces of our world. And
what is true of the plastic arts is also true of literary
art. It is not possible to dramatize this quite as
effectively since characters do not step out of novels
quite as readily as they step out of paintings. Literary
art can, however, be seen as a living force in the psychology

of James's characters. Isabel Archer, to use one obvious

example, is immensely influenced by her early readings, and

80

her failure to perceive the truth which this "fictional"
material contains is the source of much of the danger she
encounters.

And if the status of art is of importance within the
novels, it also has vast implications for the relation
between the author and the reader. Here James's rejection
of narrative omniscience may be seen as a fulfillment of
what Robert Hume describes as the Gothic attempt to involve
the reader in a new way. Although he was writing with
explicit reference to James's ghostly tales, Earl Miner
makes an observation which is equally valid in reference
to the major fiction:

James saw little intrinsic value or use

in the ghosts themselves, but their

effect upon one or more of the characters

through whom the reader might participate

in the horror was of prime artistic concern.

The importance of the dramatic conscious-

ness technique, which was essentially the

reader's vicarious consciousness, cannot

be overemphasized.45
Since James used art to discuss art, anything which he saw
as true of art in general would be true as well for the
particular art form he employed. For him, as for the
earlier Gothic novelists, the danger of art comes when it
obscures vision rather than enhances it--when, in short,
it is a sterile object rather than a living force. Con-
sequently he, like these earlier novelists, worked out

elaborate strategies to prevent his novels from becoming

useless artifacts on a junk heap of dead culture. Admittedly,

81

these strategies did not develop overnight. The American,

 

for instance, is narrated from a traditional omniscient

point of view. In The Portrait eh e Lady, we can see

 

glimmerings of James's late technique, particularly in the
long passages where Isabel's thoughts and feelings are so

vividly portrayed. In The Wings eT the Dove and The Golden

 

 

291T, of course, these glimmerings become a strong clear
light. And James has, in these novels, so perfected his
technique with a restricted point of View that we come very
close to having no more information than the characters
themselves; we confront the dangers of the Jamesian world
vicariously through characters whose limitations we share.
As a result we feel with a particular intensity that the
dangers of James's world are the dangers of our own.
Eminent critics have complained of this, complained,

46 but it seems that

that is, of James's moral obscurity;
in so doing they reveal only a partial grasp of James's
fictional world. What they don't in particular recognize
is how profoundly anti-authoritarian James is, and how
deeply he felt that our best moral values could be threaten-
ing. In "Manners, Morals, and the Novel," Lionel Trilling
makes some observations which, while intended to apply to
novels in general, provide a powerful justification for
James's technique:

. . .we must be aware of the dangers

which lie in our most generous wishes.

Some paradox of our nature leads us,

when we once have made our fellow men
the objects of our enlightened interest,

82

to go on to make them the objects of
our pity, then our wisdom, ultimately
of our coercion. It is to prevent
this corruption, the most ironic and
tragic that man knows, that we stand
in need of the moral realism which is
the product of the free play of the
moral imagination.

For our time the most effective
agent of the moral imagination has been
the novel of the last two hundred years.
It was never, either aesthetically or
morally, a perfect form and its faults
and failures can be quickly enumerated.
But its greatness and its practical use-
fulness lay in its unremitting work of
involving the reader himself in the
moral life, inviting him to put his own
motives under examination, suggesting
that reality is not as his conventional
education has led him to see it.47

James is morally difficult not because his views were hazy,
but because he realized how difficult it is to act morally
given the Gothic text of life; and he realized, further,
how moral views unaided by imagination and self awareness
could become dangerous. Interestingly enough, there has
been increased interest in both James and the Gothic
writers since the end of World War II. Perhaps after the
events of this century their vision of the geography of
evil does not seem so hysterical or exotic. In their own
way they sensed how culture, art, or political theory could

harden into ideology and thereby become inhuman.

NOTES FOR CHAPTER II

1Leon Edel, The Untried Years, 1843-1870 (Philadelphia:
J.B. Lippincott, 1953), p. 133.

2H. Montgomery Hyde, Henr James eh Home (New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), p. 294.

3Henry James, The Art Lf the Novel: Critical Prefaces,
Intro. R.P. Blackmur, (1934; _rpt. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1950), p. 161. James dictated these
prefaces between 1906 and 1908.

 

 

 

4Leon Edel, Introduction to The Ghostly Tales eT Henry
James (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press,
1948), p. x.

5F.W. Dupee, Henry James (New York: William Sloane
Associates, 1951), pp. 56-57.

6William Veeder, Henry James--The Lessons of the Master:
Popular Fiction and Personal Style Th the NinetEEth Century
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), PP. 120, 148,
et passim.

7Henry James, Review of Zola' s Nana as quoted in Leon
Edel ed. Henr James, The Future of the Novel: Essa s on
the Art L Fiction (New York: Vintage BOOKS, l9 , p.—90.

8C. Hartley Grattan, The Three Jameses: A Fm mily Lf
Minds (1932; rpt. New York: New York University Press,
W, p. 450

9F. O. Matthiessen, The James Family, Including Selec-
tions From the Writings of Henry James, Senior, William,
Henry, & Alice James (New York: Alfred KnOpf, 1948), p. 72.

10Henry James, Sr., Society and the Redeemed Form Lf
Man, and the Earnest Lf God's Omnipotence in Human Nature:
Affirmed in Letters to a Friend (Boston: Houghton, Osgood
&Co., 1879). Rpt. 1n Giles Gunn ed. Henry James, Sr.:
h Selection of his Writin 5 (Chicago: American Library
Association,—I974), pp. 55-56.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

83

84

11William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

(1902); rpt. in The Writ1ngs of William James, ed. John J.
McDermott (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 6.

12Henry James, A Small Bo oy and Others (New York: Charles;
Scribner' 3 Sons, 1913), pp. 347- 49.

13

 

 

 

 

 

Edel. The Untried Years, p. 71.

 

14Joseph A. Ward, The Imagination of Disaster: Evil in

the Fiction of Henry James (Lincoln: Univers1ty of Nebraska.
Press, 1961), p. 159.

15Graham Greene, "Henry James," in Derek Verschoyle ed.
The English Novelists: A_Survey Lf the Novel Ly Twenty
Contemporary Novelists (New York: _Harcourt, Brace and Co.,
1936), p. 231.

16F.O. Matthiessen, Henry James, The Major Phase
(London: Oxford University Press, 1944), p. 143.

l7Rene Wellek, "Henry James's Literary Theory and
Criticism," American Literature, 30 (1958), 293.

18Henry James, "The Art of Fiction," (1884); rpt. in
The Future gfi the Novel, p. 5.

19

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

James, "The Art of Fiction," p. 14.

20James, "The Art of Fiction," p. 12.

21James, "The Art of Fiction," p. 23.

22William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912;
rpt. in Essays in Radical Emp1ricism/A Pluralistic Universe,
Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1967), p. 4.

 

 

 

 

23Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept Lf Nature (1919;
rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19 64), . 29.
24

Martha Banta, Henry James and the Occult: The Great
Extension (Bloomington: The University of Indiana Press,
1972), p. 75.

25Henry James, "Miss Braddon," The Nation, 1 (November
1865), 593. Regrettably, the title of the "best" ghost
story ever written is not available to us.

26

 

 

 

Henry James, The Art 9: the Novel, p. 164.

 

27Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), pp. 21-28.

85

28

Henry James, The Art the Novel, p. 32.

 

29

Henry James, The Art the Novel, pp. 32—33.

 

30

Henry James, The Art the Novel, pp. 31-32.

 

g
9;
9_f_
31 of

Henry James, The Art the Novel, p. 31.

 

32Henry James, The Art of the Novel, p. 33.

 

33Henry James, The Art of the Novel, p. 143.

 

34T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950
(New York: Harcourt Brace & World, I971), p. 22.

35Austin Warren, "Myth and Dialectic in the Later Noveljs
of Henry James," Kenyon Review, 5 (1943), 568.

36John Berryman, Preface to The Monk by M.G. Lewis
(New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 27.

37Walter F. Wright, The Madness g£.Art: A Study of
Henry James (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962,
p. 92.

38Darlene Harbour Unrue, "Henry James and Gothic
Romance," Dissertation Abstracts International, 32 (Ohio
State: 1971), pp. 184-86.

39

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Henry James, The Art of the Novel, p. 62.

 

40Henry James, The Art of the Novel, p. 257.

 

41Henry James, The Art of the Novel, p. 174.

 

42Henry James, The Art of the Novel, p. 254.

 

43Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of

Narrative (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pT—274.

44Darlene Harbour Unrue, "Henry James and Gothic
Romance," p. 172.

45Earl Roy Miner, "Henry James's Metaphysical Romances,"
Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 9 (1954), 18.

46See for example: Yvor Winters, Maule's Curse: Seven
Studies in the History of American Obscurantism (Norfolk:
Conn.: New Directions, 1938); Marius Bewley, 17Appearance
and Reality in Henry James," Scrutiny, 17 (1950), 90-114;
and Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1961)?

47Lionel Trilling, "Manners, Morals, and the Novel,"
The Liberal Imagination (New York: Doubleday, 1957), p. 215.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE AMERICAN: EARLY EXPERIMENTS IN THE GOTHIC

 

The four novels selected for study here--The American,

 

The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and The

 

 

Golden Bowl--are not the only James novels which have a

 

strong affinity with the Gothic. On the contrary, it is
possible to find Gothic themes, images, and techniques in
works from every period of James's career. His first full

length novel, Roderick Hudson, and the first great novel

 

of the major phase, The Ambassadors, are for example, tales

 

of passion set amidst the accumulated treacheries of the

old world.1

The very situation they embody is, therefore,
a recognizable variation oftflmaoldest of Gothic plots.

Yet The American, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the

 

 

 

Dove, and The Golden Bowl are the novels in which all of

 

the characteristics of Gothic are most recognizably present.
It is in these novels that his Gothic vision is the most
sustained, and it is to them we must turn to find his most
enduring contribution to the literature of terror.

These four novels are, first of all, quintessential
examples of the international novel which Oscar Cargill
describes as:

. . .one in which a character, usually
guided in his actions by the mores of
one environment, is set down in another,

where he must employ all his individual

86

87

resources to meet successive situations,
and where he must intelligently accommodate
himself to new mores, or in one way or
another to be destroyed. It is the
novelist's equivalent of providing a
special medium in a laboratory for

studying the behavior of an organism,

only here it is a device for the revela-
tion of character.2

Each of the novels has the aura of a fairy tale about it.
Each is a story about people who are rich and "free" and
the interest is derived from a concern about what the

characters will do with their wealth and freedom. Again,

this is a variation on the basic Gothic tendency, exhibited

in works from Clarissa to Wuthering Heights, to seek insight

 

into the human personality by creating extreme conditions.
R.F. Brissenden wrote the following about Clarissa but it

is equally applicable to the novels being dealt with here:

The social, economic, legal and familial
sub-structure of the situation with
which the book deals is firmly and
meticulously established; and on this
foundation Richardson is able to develop
a narrative which is both a novel of
ideas and something like a programmed
experiment. The situation which he has
built up enables him to test to destruc-
tion certain notions--such as man's
innate humanity--which are basic to
sentimental morality.

There are, of course, variations in individual technique.
In Clarissa, for example, the social "world" is far more
powerfully and accurately realized than it ever is in

James--at least in a sociological context. James, by

contrast, was interested in the social world only to the

88

extent that it provided the conditions of freedom and culture
in which the deeper, internalized, tensions and contradic-
tions of freedom and culture could be effectively explored.
Yet they are alike in that both seek to examine the adequacy
of sentimental values in a world which is fundamentally
hostile to them.

It is precisely this, moreover, which binds these four
novels together. Their very status as "international"
novels, as James developed that mode, is indicative of
their Gothic roots, and provides, therefore, a convenient
means of assessing James's relationship to the Gothic as
it evolved over a period of some thirty years. Yet before
this assessment can begin in earnest there is one pre-
liminary difficulty which must be addressed-—namely the
status of the New York edition. Since the works in this
edition are those which James most prized, and since they
have been revised in accordance with his mature artistic
standards, it is normal in James scholarship to use this
edition wherever possible. When, however, the subject is
James's artistic development, more care is indicated. The

Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were written just a

 

few years before James began work on the New York edition,

and were, consequently, but slightly revised. The American

 

and The Portrait 2£.E Lady were, however, substantially

 

revised, and it is necessary, therefore, not to ascribe
qualities to the "earlier" James which the "later" James

added.

89

There has been some critical debate about the importance:
and quality of James's revisions. Fortunately for our
purposes, James's revisions have had very little to do with
the Gothic elements of his texts. Although James never
produced what we might call a truly "naive" Gothic novel,

his earlier works, The American in particular and to a

 

lesser extent The Portrait of a Lady, are recognizably less

 

sophisticated in their treatment of Gothic themes than works

like The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl—~even in

 

 

revision. Furthermore, the revised version of The Portrait

 

gf’a Lady is notably more sophisticated in its use of Gothic

techniques than the revised version of The American. To be

 

sure, characters like Christopher Newman and Isabel Archer
are more self aware, more inward, in the New York edition
than they were in the earlier versions--reflecting the
later James's interest in character as opposed to incident
and social satire. And, of course, there are attempts to
clear up the inevitable absurdities of serial publication.
What is most remarkable, however, is that so much of impor-
tance remained unchanged. James may have been a passionate
reviser, but he was equally interested in the creative
process, and proves to be a remarkably detached and acute
observer of his own earlier work. Royal Gettman puts it
this way:

It is wrong, then, to assume that James

the Reviser mercilessly manhandled the

works of James the First. As a matter

of fact he regarded his novels as indepen-
dent creations, as having an existence

90

of their own. He respected them just

as a scrupulous biographer or historian

respects actual people and historical

events.4
Now James's sense of good and evil did not change in sub-
stance from the early novels to the late ones. But his
sense of the subtlety and complexity of the problem most
assuredly did change. And the differences in imagery,
setting, characterization, and narrative technique which
James developed to accommodate this expanded vision remain

observable in the novels of the New York edition.

As Elsa Nettles observes, The American is the closest

 

James ever gets in his novels to naive Gothic fiction:

Of all James's novels, The American, with
its duel, its dark family secret, its
ancient castle and convent, and its hero
strong in the 'general easy magnificence
of his manhood' is most indebted to the
plots and motifs of Gothic romance.

 

James's own remarks on the subject confirm this opinion.

In the "Preface" to The American, he remarks "I had been
6

 

plotting arch Romance without knowing it." In another
instance he describes his novel in terms which would apply

equally well to The Mysteries of Udolpho:

 

I recall that I was seated in an American
'horse-car' when I found myself, of a
sudden, considering with enthusiasm, as
the theme of a 'story', the situation,

in another country and an aristocratic
society, of some robust but insidiously
beguiled and betrayed, some cruelly
wronged, compatriot: the point being

in especial that he should suffer at the

91

hands of persons pretending to represent
the highest possible civilization and to
be of an order in every way superior to
his own. What would he 'do' in that pre-
dicament, how would he right himself, or
how, failing a remedy, would he conduct
himself under his wrong? . . . this would
be the question involved.7

Interestingly enough, moreover, this typically Gothic theme
was one which he could adopt with the greatest ease and
which freed him to write with the greatest confidence in
his artistic powers:

I seem to recall no other like connexion

in which the case was met, to my measure,

by so fond a complacency, in which my

subject can have appeared to take care

of itself.
This passage is important because, as we shall see later,
it is not unique. James is always the most confident in his
artistic powers, the most filled with a sense of his own
accomplished artistry, when he is immersed in themes which
are recognizably Gothic.

It is probably just, from the outset, to state that

The American is not nearly so important a novel as those

 

with which it is here being compared. Although the "revisedi'
Newman of the New York edition is more realistically

rendered than the character that appeared in the original,

he is still perilously close to being a cartoon figure.

And if this is true of the hero, it is even more true of

Claire de Cintre, the heroine, and the villains, Urbain

92

and Madame d'Bellegarde. Each of these is a "stock"
character whose inner life is scarcely revealed at all.

Still, in the James canon, this is an important novel.
For everything that is important in the novels of the
major phase is present here in a nascent form. We clearly
see James's interest in the past, in art, in culture, and
in the relation of all of these to the problem of human
perception and the still greater problem of good and evil.
And we can appreciate James's later development all the
more fully when we realize that he has not altered his
basic concerns so much as he has approached them with
greater subtlety, intensity and penetration.

The plot of this novel is simple and melodramatic,
and the hero will seem familiar enough to anyone well
versed in the conventions of Gothic fiction, although
he is distinctly American. Indeed, like his Gothic for-
bearers, Newman is very much the innocent representative
of his native culture caught up in an environment that is
inalterably hostile to it. James is at great pains to
establish this image of Newman in the very first pages of
the novel:

His physiognomy would have sufficiently
indicated that he was a shrewd and
capable person, and in truth he had
often sat up all night over a bristling
bundle of accounts and heard the cock
crow without a yawn. But Raphael and
Titian and Rubens were a new kind of
arithmetic, and they made him for the

first time in his life wonder at his
vagueness.

93

An observer with anything of an
eye for local color would have had no
difficulty in referring this candid
connoisseur to the scene of his origin,
and indeed such an observer might have
made an ironic point of the ideal com-
pleteness with which he filled out the
mold of his race. The gentleman on

the divan was the superlative American.9

As Ellen Leyburn observes, the plot of The American lends

 

itself to a curious, not always successful, blend of

10 At times the humor is casual,

comedy and melodrama.
even off hand, as when James remarks of Newman: "If he
was a muscular Christian it was quite without doctrine"
(p. 2). On another occasion we are told that Newman "was
also greatly struck with the beautiful Gothic tower of
the Hotel de Ville and wondered if they might n't 'get up'
something like it in San Francisco" (p. 86). At other
times, as in the following exchange, the humor is somewhat
less tasteful:
"'Ah, you're taking a holiday'," rejoined M. de
Bellegarde. "'Loafing.‘ Yes, I've heard that

expression."

"Mr. Newman's a distinguished American," Madame
de Bellegarde observed.

"My brother's a great ethnologist," said Valentin.
"An ethnologist?"--and Newman groped for gaiety.
"You collect negroes skulls and that sort of
thing?" (p. 189)

Yet for all this apparent comedy, the most important part

of the novel from the perspective of James's development

is the "melodramatic" quality as Leyburn calls it--or the

94

"Gothic" quality to use the terms we have developed here.
It was this darker, more terrifying, quality which his
original audience responded to and which formed the basis
of the popular adaptation of this novel for the theatre.
And to perceive the Gothicism of the novel, the scenes it
entails and the images it evokes, is to be in touch with
James's essential moral geography.

If Newman's unfamiliarity with the conventions of
European aristocratic life could occasion humor, it is
also the basis for drawing broad moral distinction. Thus,
in one particularly important passage we learn that:

. . .the common traditions with regard

to women were with him fresh personal

impressions. He had never read a page

of a printed Romance. (p. 39).
He is natural, untutered, and his attitudes and responses
are free of the influences of art and convention. He is
immensely wealthy in an unspecified way, and therefore
"tolerably free" (p. 79)--free that is to "let up for
aWhile,ix>forget the whole question, to look about .—. .
to see the world, to have a good time . . . to marry a wife"
(p. 24). Naturally, in order to suit the conditions of
Newman's wealth and freedom, this wife must be a "pure
pearl," "a shining statue crowning some high monument.
She must be as good as she is beautiful and as clever as
she is good" (PP. 48-49). This is so, moreover, because
he is in Europe to "get the best out of it . . . to see

all the great things and do what all the best people do"

95

(p. 29). He wants to have "the biggest kind of entertain-
ment a man can get. People, places, art, nature, everything"
(p. 33). He is, as Mrs. Tristram notes in a phrase evoking
Whitman:

the great Western Barbarian, stepping

forth in his innocence and might,

gazing a while at this poor corrupt

old world and then swooping down on it (p. 45).
The extent of Newman's "swooping" is made amply clear by
his own humorous description of it:

Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Germany,

Italy-—I've taken the whole list as

the bare backed rider takes paper hoops

at the circus, and I'm not even yet out

of breath. I carry about six volumes

of Ruskin in my trunk. I've seen some

grand old things (p. 103).
Newman evidently enjoys Europe, and, in fact, contemplates
a journey still further east to "Damascus and Bagdad,

11 Yet in a moment of

Trebizond, Samarcand, Bokhara.
intuition that foreshadows passages in the later James,
Newman comes to realize that the treats of all the world,
the wonders, the delights, the dangers and the adventures
are not so much to be found in the exotic east as they

are to be found in Paris, with its culture, its art, and
its history. Even more particularly, he senses that they
are to be found in the "handsome tall lady" whose acquain-
tance he had made in Mrs. Tristram's drawing-room.

The relationship which develops between Newman and

Claire de Cintre is itself the purest stuff of romance.

96

Both are, in their respective ways "types"--representatives,
that is, of radically different cultural attitudes. Newman,
as we have seen is an American, an orphan who has worked
since he was a child, and who has subsequently survived the
Civil War and the financial wars of an expanding New World.
Claire, by contrast, is distinctly the product of the

Old World:

She gave him, the charming woman, the
sense of an elaborate education, of her
having passed through mysterious cere-
monies and processes of culture in her
youth, of having been fashioned and
made flexible to certain deep social
needs. All this, as I have noted, made
her seem rare and precious--a very
expensive article--and one which a man
with an ambition to have everything
about him of the best would taste of
triumph in possessing. Yet looking

at the matter with an eye to private
felicity he asked himself, where, in

so exquisite a compound nature and art
showed their dividing line. Where did
the special intention separate from the
habit of good manners? Where did fine
urbanity and fine sincerity begin? (p. 166)

And if it is this "grace born of art" which mystifies and
enthralls him, she, for her part, is attracted by his very
naturalness. The following is James's genteel version of

"Othello" beguiling "Desdamona.":

He told Madame de Cintre stories, some-
times not brief, from his own repertory:
he was full of reference to his own great
country, over the greatness of which it
seldom occurred to him that everyone might
n't, on occasion offered, more or less
insatiably yearn; and he explained to her,
in so discoursing, the play of a hundred

97

of its institutions and the ingenuity
of almost all its arrangements. Judging
by the sequel, judging even by the manner

in which she suffered his good faith to

lay an apparent spell upon her attitude,

she was mildly--oh mildly and inscrutably!

--begui1ed (pp. 243-44).
That his strangeness is the source of her attraction to him
is made clear when she tells him:

Your being so different, which at first

seemed a difficulty, a danger, began

one day to seem to me a great pleasure (p. 272).
Like so many characters in the history of literature,
Newman and Claire are attracted to each other because of
their differences, but because of these very differences
they are ultimately fated to part. And it is in observing
the internal and external contraints which make their
marriage finally impossible that the reader becomes to
come to grips with James's deepest sense of evil. Claire
is never fully develoepd as a character, and it is, there-
fore, difficult to chart this process through her experience.
In Newman's consciousness, however, we can witness without
obstruction the encounter with evil. We witness him as he
discovers the barbarity which resides behind the facade of
art and civility. We witness him transformed from someone
who believes he cannot be hurt unless he is killed by "some
violent means" (p. 303), to someone who has learned to his
cost that the most devastating pain is spiritual.

Perhaps the earliest warning to Newman, the earliest

intimation that all is not as it appears or as it should be,

98

occurs when he wanders into the Fauborg St. Germain and
discovers that this quarter, guarding as it does the most
refined European culture, has more the air of a prison

than of a palace of art:

He walked across the Seine late in the
summer afternoon and made his way through
those grey and silent streets of the
Fauborg St. Germain whose houses present
to the outer world a face as impassive
and as suggestive of the concentration
of privacy within as the blank walls of
Eastern seraglios. Newman thought it a
perverse, verily a "mean" way for rich
peOple to live; his ideal of grandeur
was a splendid facade, diffusing its
brilliancy outward too, irradiating
hospitality. The house to which he had
been directed had a dark, dusty, painted
portal . . . it answered to Newman's
conception of a convent (pp. 59-60).

And it is this encounter which makes Newman alive to the
dangers and treacheries which can exist behind so much
pretended brilliance. Indeed, the reference to the "convent"
and to "Eastern seraglios" can only serve to create the
impression that this fashionable quarter of Paris is a
place where people are kept, and where individual freedom,
growth and expression are stifled by a grim institutional
conformity. This impression, moreover, is reinforced when
Lizzie Tristram explains the European ethic wherein a
legally independent woman like Claire de Cintre can be
made to suffer at the hands of her mother and her relations:
You may never say nay to your mother,

whatever she requires of you. She
may be the most abominable woman in

99

the world and make your life a purgatory;
but after all she's ma mere, and you've
no right to judge heFT You've simply to
obey (p. 109).

Newman's response is to equate the world of the Bellegardes
with the world of the popular melodramatic plays, or, to
trace the source further back, to the Gothic novels:

"It's like something in a regular old

play," said Newman. "That dark old

house over there looks as if wicked

things had been done in it and might

be done again."

"They have a still darker old house in

the country, she tells me, and there,

during the summer, this scheme must have

been hatched" (p. 111).
Particularly interesting is Newman's protest against this

state of affairs. It is the first, but by no means the

last, time that he echoes the key speech in The Italian

 

where Vivaldi expresses his horror of the Inquisition.
It is the speech of the sentimental idealist contemplating

the reality of coercion and suffering:

Newman, silent a while, seemed lost in
meditation. "Is it possible," he asked
at last "that they can do that sort of
thing here? that helpless women are
thumbscrewed--sentimental1y, socially,

I mean--into marrying men they object to."

"Helpless women, all over the world, have
a hard time of it," said Mrs. Tristram.
There's plenty of the thumb-screw for
them everywhere."

"A great deal of that kind of thing goes
on in New York," said Tristram (p. 111).

100

Just how much of this sentimental "torture" could go on in
"civilized" Anglo-Saxon settings was something that James

was to demonstrate in far greater detail in his later novels.
At this point, however, it is enough to establish that James,
like the earlier Gothic novelists, saw sexual passion as a
source of danger. And as always it is the social expression
of that passion in marriage which seems to invite the forces
of darkness to stalk about.

Thus it is that Newman's real introduction to evil
begins after he openly declares his passion for Claire and
asks for her hand in marriage. As the innocent pilgrim,
the moral adventurer, he is, of course, unaware of the
dangers, the sin, the evil, the corruption, that surrounds
him; but for the reader of earlier Gothic novels the moral

topography of The American is only too apparent. That there

 

is danger and treachery in the vicinity is made abundantly
clear in this speech by Valentin, laden as it is with

Gothic imagery and the hint of powerful but obscure evil:

"I told you, you remember, that we're
very strange people," his visitor
pursued. "Well I give you warning
again. We're fit for a museum or a
Balzac novel. My mother's strange,

my brother's strange, and I verily
believe that I'm stranger than either.
You'll even find my sister a little
strange. Old trees have crooked branches,
old houses have queer cracks, old races
have odd secrets. Remember that we're
eight hundred years old" (p. 162).

Presiding over this strange race is old Madame de Bellegardea,

aided by her eldest son, the Marquis. And both are to home

101

in this closed world where the manner gesture governs free
movement, where the polished aphorism governs free expressicul,
where the acquired attitude governs spontaneity. And in this
sense, they contrast not only with Newman, but with Valentin.
and Claire--characters who do feel and for whom, at times,

the weight of convention is burdensome. The following
passage, contrasting Madame de Bellegarde and her daughter

is particularly revealing:

Madame de Cintre's face had, to Newman's
eye, range of expression as delightfully
vast as the wind-streaked, cloud-flecked
distance on a Western prairie; but her
mother's white, intense, respectable
countenance, with its formal gaze and

its circumscribed smile, figured a docu-
ment signed and sealed, a thing of parch-
ment, ink, and ruled lines. "She's a
woman of conventions and proprieties,"

he said to himself as he considered her;
"her world's the world of things immutably
decreed"'(p.'183).

Urbain, the Marquis of Bellegarde, is, to Newman's view
remarkably similar:

He was "distinguished" to the tips of

his polished nails, and there was not

a movement of his fine perpendicular

person that was not noble and majestic.

Newman had never yet been confronted with

such an incaranation of the maintained

attitude (p. 188).
And it is from meeting these two and taking in the measure
of his distance from them, that Newman begins to understand

the intensity of the forces with which he will have to

contend. Furthermore, Newman finds these forces, embodied

102

in the "civilized" figure of Urbain, disconcerting,

even threatening:

It was useless to shut his eyes to the
fact that the Marquis was as disagreeable
to him as some queer, rare, possibly
dangerous biped, perturbingly akin to
humanity, in one of the cages of a "show."
He had never been a man of strong personal
aversions; his nerves had not been at the
mercy of the mystical qualities of his
neighbors. But here was a figure in res-
pect to which he was irresistibly in
opposition; a figure of forms and phrases
and postures;a:figure of possible im-
pertinences and treacheries (p. 219).

Again, in an exchange with Mrs. Tristram, Newman's thoughts

turn to murder:

"Well she's a bad, bold woman. She's a
wicked old sinner."

"What then has been her sin?"

He thought a little. "I shouldn't wonder
if she had done someone to death--all of
course from a fine sense of duty. . . ."

"And what has he done?"

"I can't quite make out, but it's some-
thing very nice of its kind--I mean of

a kind elegantly sneaking and fasticiously
base; not redeemed as in his mother's

case by a fine little rage of passion

at some part of the business. If he

has never committed murder he has at

least turned his back and looked the

other way while someone else was com-
mitting it" (pp. 246-47).

Of course these remarks turn out to be a precise descriptiorl
of what actually happened. Madame de Bellegarde and the

young Marquis were guilty, if not legally then spiritually,

103

of having murdered the old Marquis in order to ensure
Claire's marriage to M. de Cintre. And the melodramatic
plays which turned Newman's mind to thoughts of murder

prove to be an accurate interpretation of life in these
circles. Yet while this "murder" is an excess, it is not
entirely a piece of foolishness. For what James is suggest—
ing is that social codes which deny the sentimental virtues
can be the moral equivalent of murder.

From the standpoint of James's artistic development,
however, it is important to note that the real terror of
the novel has very little whatever to do with the murder.
It stems, rather, from the vision of the evil residing
behind cultivated appearances which is so characteristic
of the later novels. The terror is particularly evident
in the scene where it is finally revealed that Newman's
much-desired marriage is off. James's rendering of it has
the hauntingly evocative power of an old family portrait:

In the middle of the room stood Madame
de Cintre; her face was flushed and
marked and she was dressed for travel-
ling. Behind her, before the fireplace,
stood Urbain de Bellegarde and looked
at his finger-nails; near the Marquis
sat his mother, buried in an arm chair
with her eyes immediately fixing them-
selves upon the invader, as he felt
them pronounce him. He knew himself,
as he entered, in the presence of some-
thing evil; he was as startled and as
pained as he would have been by a

threatening cry in the stillness of
the night. (p. 362).

104

On the surface, Madame de Bellegarde and the Marquis have
merely forbidden a marriage--used "authority" as Madame de
Bellegarde puts it. Yet there is something sinister in
this power she has over her children; she and the Marquis
elicit, in Claire particularly, but also in the other
surrounding characters a sort of nameless dread. And it
is a dread which is expressed in an eerie dream-like manner
throughout the novel. Valentin, for example, is susceptible
to the terrors of the familial past:

"You're not afraid it may be rather a

mistake for such an infuriated modern

to marry--well such an old-fashioned

rococo product; a daughter, as one

may say, of the Crusaders, almost of

the Patriarch?"?

Newman, who had been moving about

as they talked stOpped before his

visitor. "Does that mean you're

worried for her?"

Valentin met his eyes. "I'm

worried for everything" (p. 303).
In another instance, Mrs. Bread urges Newman to make haste
with his marriage because she is "afraid of everyone"
(p. 274). Even the young Marquise is not immune to these
terrors, for as she tells Newman:

"I'm afraid of my husband; he's soft,

smooth, irreproachable, everything

you know; but I'm afriad of him" (p. 342).
All of these expressions of fear partake of the true Gothic

uneasiness--the half-conscious suspicion that the institu-

tions of culture imply their own contradictions, that

105

"civilization" can imply the most uncivilized behavior. In
this novel, however, it is left for Claire de Bellegarde to
give fullest expression to this vision. "I'm afraid of my
mother" (p. 367), she tells Newman in an echo of what others

have previously said. Somewhat later she elaborates:

". . . I've things to reckon with that
you don't know. I mean I've feelings.
I muSt do as they force me--I must, I

must. They'd haunt me otherwise," she
cried, with vehemence; "they'd give me
no rest and would kill me" (p. 415).

Here we get a glimpse of the true nature of James's ghosts.
After a few turns in the conversation she is even more

explicit:

"There's a curse upon the house; I
don't know what--I don't know why--
don't ask me. We must all bear it

. . . Why do such dreadful things
happen to us--why is my brother Valentin
killed, like a beast, in the beauty

of his youth and his gaiety and his
brightness and all that we know and
love him for? Why are there things

I can't ask about--that I'm afraid

for my life to know? Why are there
places I can't look at, sounds I can't
hear?" (p. 416).

That there may have been a real crime committed seems almost:
irrelevant after passages such as this. For rarely do we
get, even in the classic Gothic novels, a more vivid image
of the past feasting on the present. Since they are charac-
ters of feeling, Valentin and Claire, like Ambrosio before

them, are crippled by their past. Their creative and ex-

pressive faculties are thwarted and what is left them is

106

not a fulfilled life but picturesque modes of dying and
renunciation. Valentin expresses this predicament very

clearly:

"When I was twenty I looked round me

and saw a world with everything ticketed
'don't touch' . . . . The only thing

I could do was to go and fight for the
Pope. That I did, punctiliously, and
and received an apostolic flesh wound

at Castelfidardo" (pp. 135-36).

Valentin dies in a duel over a "sad trifler"; his sister
chooses what is for Newman a death in life, a choice which

he finds unutterably monstrous:

But still he hardly understood. "You're
going to be a nun," he went on; "in a
cell--for life-~with a gown and a black veil?"

"A nun--a blest Carmelite nun,"
said Madame de Cintre. "For life with
God's leave and mercy.“

The image rose there, at her words,
too dark and horrible for belief, and
affected him as if she had told him she
was going to mutilate her beautiful face
or drink some potion that would make her
mad (p. 418).

In a moment of more detached meditation, he comes to realize
that her behavior is really all of a piece, that family
custom reinforced by religious custom, creates a world

where individual freedom is severely circumscribed:

How had she meant that the force driving
her was, as a thing apart from the con-
ventual question, a "religion"? It was

a religion simply of the family laws, the
religion of which her implacable mother
was the priestess. Twist the thing about
as her generosity would, the one certain
fact was that they had been able to
determine her act (p. 423).

107

And how was this possible? Mrs. Bread is perfectly explicit:
"They worked on her sentiments . . . they knew that was the
way. She's a delicate creature. They made her feel wicked.
She was only too good" (p. 438). Here, as everywhere in the:
Gothic, we sense the terrible paradox of sentimental virtuess.
For while they are the source of all that is good and human,
they are also a liability. Thus it is that the final source
of enslavement is internal and psychological--it is the
ability of the heartless to prey upon those that feel and
thereby control them. And Newman's reaction to this glitter-1
ing world which "hardens one's heart" but "quickens one's
wit" typifies the reaction of the Puritan consciousness to
old, Catholic Europe:

The Marquis gave a hiss that fairly evoked

for our friend some vision of a hunched

back, an erect tail and a pair of shining

evil eyes (p. 489).
Here is one of those moments in literary history where we
know exactly where we are. Through Newman's vision, James
takes us back to writers like Bunyan, Milton, and Spenser
and to the Book of Revelation. In this tradition, James
looked upon life as a moral adventure in which evil was
apt to be insolent, strong, and seductively attractive;
and like them he saw the glittering attractions of "the
world" as a threat to moral virtue. The tone here, more—
over, is extremely important; for in the coercion of one
person by another James saw not only pain and suffering but

"supernatural" evil as it is operative in human affairs.

108

This, then, is the naive Gothic aspect of The American—-

 

the image of the innocent sentimentalist suffering at the
hands of sinister old world villains. It is by no means,
however, the whole story. James does provide us here with
a feeling for his ultimate values--of his preference, that
is, for freedom, spontaneity, and creativeness over the twin.
bondages of conformity and imitation. His moral geography,
however, is not entirely stable, and any attempt to treat
the novel as a simple moral dichotomy wherein Newman is good
and the Bellegardes evil is not adequate. Newman is the
sentimental hero, and he does change and grow, but this is
not the same thing as saying he is an entirely innocent
victim. He is an innocent, but this very innocence coupled
with pride contributes greatly to his own suffering. And
when that pride is injured, he becomes unsettlingly malicious.
We see instances of Newman's pride very early on in the
novel. He is proud of his abilities and used to success, 0
and he is by no means adverse to having the world acknowledge:
his preeminence. Therefore he naturally resents the
Bellegarde's pretensions to superiority, and cannot help but
delight in discomforting them in small ways. When, for
example, he begins to sense the "forces" which the

Bellegardes represent, we learn:

He wished to make some answering manifes-
tation, to stretch himself out at his

own length, to sound a note at the
uttermost end of his scale. It must be
added that if this—impulse was neither
vicious nor malicious, it was yet by no

109

means unattended by the play in him of

his occasional disposition to ironic

adventure. He hated the idea of shock-

ing people, he respected the liability

to be shocked. But there were impres-

sions that threw him back, after all,

on his own measure of proportion (p. 191).
This desire to express his own power, this desire, as we are:
told "to makes the heads of the house of Bellegarde simply
feel that weight of his hand" (p. 282) manifests itself in
various ways. The following attempt to belittle Lord
Deepmere is a good case in point:

"He is real Paddyl"--and Newman nodded in

the direction of the visitor.

His companion took it coldly. "His mother

was the daughter of Lord Finucane; he has

great Irish estates" (p. 267).
In as much as he must be wondering what choice racial
epithets Newman would employ for French aristocrats, Urbain
can hardly be comforted by this. Nor is this the only
instance when Newman appears oblivious to distinction.
At the party which the Bellgardes give in his honor he is
forced to admit that he cannot remember those to whom he
has been introduced, and tries to justify himself on the
grounds that "all Chinamen--even great Mandarins!--1ook
very much the same to Occidentals" (p. 318).

After we learn of Newman's fondness for "ironic adven-

ture," it is difficult indeed to attribute all of these

false steps to innocence. But still, if all Newman had

been guilty of was a failure of discrimination, or at worst.

110

of a few mild insults, his marriage might well have taken
place. What the Bellegardes ultimately cannot accept is
the publicity their relation to Newman will incur; and
their uneasiness on this point is something Newman deliber—
ately exacerbates. One of the most conspicuous instances
of this occurs when Newman produces the congratulatory
telegrams he has received for the express purpose of annoy—
ing the Bellegardes:

he received . . . no less than eight

electrical outpourings, all concisely

humorous, which he put into his

pocketbook and, the next time he

encountered Madame de Bellegarde, drew

forth and displayed to her. This, it

must be confessed was a slightly

malicious stroke; the reader will judge

in what degree the offense was venial.

He knew she would dislike his barabaric

trophies, but he was himself possessed

of a certain hardness of triumph (p. 281).
Surely it is this last sentiment or something very like it
which causes Newman to lead Madame de Bellegarde about in
trigmph at the engagement ball--an act which has, for him,
the disastrous consequence of making them feel the utter
impossibility of an alliance with him. They could have
borne a number of things, but they could not bear to be
triumphed over before their friends.

What should be emphasized, however, is that what appears;

here as natural, perhaps even healthy self esteem, later

becomes, under the pressure of betrayal and disappointment,

malevolence. Indeed there is more than a hint that, while

111

Newman does acutely feel the disappointment of lost love,
his strongest emotion is a desire to avenge himself upon
those who have made a fool of him. This darker side of
Newman's nature is fully revealed for the first time in

his final conversation with the dying Valentin:

"A secret!" Newman repeated. The idea
of letting Valentin, on his deathbed,
confide to him any matter sacredly in-
timate, shocked him, for the moment, and
made him draw back. It seemed an illicit
way of arriving at information and even
had a vague analogy with listening at a
keyhole. Then suddenly the thought of
reducing Madame de Bellegarde and her
son to the forms of submission became
attractive, and, as to lose in any case
no last breath of the spirit for which
he had felt such a kindness, he brought
his head nearer (p. 401).

Among the critics who have written about this novel, Joel
Porte most clearly sees the full significance of Newman's

conscious decision to partake of evil:

Well might all nature (at least American
nature) groan at the end of this scene,
as it does in Paradise Lost when Adam
falls, for the scene represents James's
version of a truly Miltonic calamity--
Newman's conscious accession to what

he feels to be evil.11

 

The reference to Milton, and by extension to the Puritan
tradition, is particularly felicitous because that tradi-
tion is used extensively by James to lay the moral founda-
tion of the book. In fact, uses Milton to indicate in

what light we are to view Newman's desire for vengeance.

112

Both of the following passages serve to characterize Newman's;

state of mind, and both echo very strongly Paradise Lost:

 

"I want to bring them down--down,

down, down! I want to turn the tables

on them--I want to mortify them as

they mortified me. They took me up

into a high place and made me stand

there for all the world to see me, and

then they stole behind me and pushed

me into this bottomless pit where I

lie howling and gnashing my teeth!"(p. 442).
After Mrs. Bread has related the elements of the Bellegarde's;
guilty history to Newman, thus arming his vengeance, we are

told the following:
They had begun to descend the hill, and
she said nothing till they reached the
foot. He moved beside her as on air,
his hands in his pockets, his head thrown
back while he gazed at the stars: he
seemed to himself to be riding his ven-
geance along the Milky Way (pp. 461-62).
Here the symbolic correspondence is complete. For if
Newman is, as Porte suggests, Adam, he is also, like
Madame de Bellegarde and her son, Satan. His behavior,
like theirs, is infernal.

Yet while Newman's desire for vengeance is evil, it
is important to understand the weakness in his perception
which helped bring this evil about. And here, as in the
earlier Gothic, much of the mischief results from Newman's
ignorance of the mysteries of art. Indeed, as Porte notes

"James's comprehensive vision" of the novel is that "of his

hero's adventure as a journey into the depths and

113

complexities of art . . . ."12 And what this means, among

other things, is that European culture must be taken
seriously, for it is a valid and complex of mode of seeing
which it is perilous to ignore:

What Newman must learn is that for the

Bellegardes there is no such dividing

line: nature and art are one. He has

entered "a strange corner of the world,"

where art is not merely an amusement,

a leisure-time diversion, but a complex

representation of reality. . . .13
In the early pages of the novel, Newman's innocence before
the mysteries of art is comical: we are told that he pre-
ferred the copy to the original of Murillo's "moon-borne
Madonna." Even here, however, there is a dangerous, or
at any rate an unsettling, aspect of Newman's attitude.
For the habitual reader of Gothic fiction a passage like
the following is hardly reassuring:

The world, to his vision, was a great

bazaar where one might stroll about

and purchase handsome things (p. 87).
Newman collects handsome things without any feeling for
their inner meaning, integrity, and value. He sees only
their surface value, oblivious to the realities they
represent. And to the extent that this is true he pre-
figures, in a paradoxical way, such figures as Gilbert

Osmond and Adam Verver, both of whom cause a great deal

of suffering through the perversion of art.

114

Our sense of the dangerous innocence of Newman's atti-
tude is only enhanced by his dealings with Benjamin Babcock,
the minister from Dorchester, Massachusetts. Although
Babcock is something of a pedant and a nuisance, he has
"an intimate sense of the true beautiful in life," and
accuses Newman of "a want of moral reaction" in the presence
of Europe's artistic mysteries. In a subsequent letter,

his criticism is even more acute:

You appear to care only for the pleasure
of the hour, and you give yourself up to
it with a violence which I confess I am
not able to emulate. I consider that I
must arrive at some conclusion and fix
my convictions on certain points. Art
and Life seem to me intensely serious
things, and in our travels in Europe we
should especially remember the rightful,
indeed the solemn message of Art. You
seem to think that if a thing amuses you
for the moment this is all you need ask
of it (p. 97).

Despite Babcock's obvious absurdity, and despite the fact
that he appears to have gotten himself in a hopeless muddle,
his remarks hit home, and Newman is left feeling "rebuked
and humiliated" and reflecting

that there are mighty mysteries; that

possibly he himself was indeed almost

unmentionably "appalling," and that

his manner of considering the treasures

of art and the privileges of life lacked

the last, or perhaps even the first

refinement (p. 99).

In any event, Newman's response to the letter is curious

and rich in meaning:

115

He wrote no answer at all, but a day

or two after he found in a curiosity-

shop a grotesque little statuette in

ivory, of the sixteenth century, which

he sent off to Babcock without commentary.

It represented a gaunt, ascetic-looking

monk in a tattered gown and cowl,

kneeling with clasped hands and pulling

a portentously long face. It was a

wonderfully delicate piece of carving,

and in a moment, through one of the

rents of his gown, you espied a fat

capon hung round the monk's waist (p. 99).
How much of this is gentle teasing as opposed to malicious
satire is, perhaps, an open question. It does, however,
capture the peculiar nature of Newman's innocence. For as
Porte observes, it is indicative of a sterotypic attitude
toward European culture wherein that culture is seen as
"essentially familiar and accommodating, and reducible to

14 How strange and treacherous that world could

a joke."
be is something he can only discover in time.

The effect of Newman's flawed vision is everywhere
apparent in his relationship with the Bellegardes. He
is quick enough to recognize the sterile artifice by
which Madame and Urbain de Bellegarde live--a near per-
fect example of art pasturing on emotion. Yet he is, at
the same time, oblivious to the positive aspects of art
as they are expressed at various times and in various
ways by Claire and Valentin. Urban de Bellegarde, in
particular, approaches art, even the world of acknowledged
masters, with the preformed prejudices of his class. He

speaks, that is, about the "good taste of Sansovino,"

and has the following to say about Mozart:

116

But we all know what Mozart is; our

impressions don't date from this

evening. Mozart is youth, freshness,

brilliancy, facility--facility per-

haps a little too unbroken (p. 339).
Claire and Valentin, by contrast, understand art to be a
living force, a mode of vision and expression which can
illuminate and dramatize deeper truths. In their relation-
ship with Newman, they use art to try to educate him to the
dark and intransigent human problems which confront him.

We see, moreover, that here, as in the older tradition
of Gothic fiction, this theme is most fully worked out in
the instance of literary art. For someone who is not fond
of reading, Newman seems awfully aware of literary modes of
expression. In fact, Newman so often sees a parallel
between his experience with the Bellegardes and his literary
experience that Joel Porte is led to remark that "his adven-
ture with Claire figures as an introductory course in strange:

literature."15

Yet Newman always trivializes his insight by
refusing to consider whether the parallels which he perceives
might allow him to unearth some deeper meaning. That he
might really be a participant in these fictions, that his
involvement might involve something more than amusement,

are thoughts which simply do not occur to him. In the
passages quoted above, for instance, Newman figures himself
in the image of Milton's Satan without considering the
possible light that sheds on his conduct.

Perhaps the most dramatic examples of Newman's limita-

tions of moral intelligence occur when he fails to

117

understand the rich allusions and parables which Claire and
Valentin employ to caution his ardor. The previously men-
tioned allusion to Balzac ought, perhaps, to have amply
warned Newman. Valentin becomes even more explicit when
he tells Newman that he and Claire are "such a brother and
sister as haven't been known since Orestes and Electra"
(p. l49)--allusion laden with undertones of patricide and
familial guilt which begins to suggest the dimensions of
the burden these sympathetic characters bear.
On another occasion Claire uses the story of Florabella--

a heroine who "had suffered terribly" but ended by marrying
a young prince "who carried her off to live with him in the
Land of the Pink Sky"--as a none too subtle attempt to draw
Newman's attention to their own situation. And it is hard
to imagine any way she could maketflmapoint of the parable
clearer. For after explaining to Newman that the story of
Florabella is "great nonsense" but of "much more value than
most of what we say in society," she goes on to give voice
to her own weakness and forboding:

"I've very little courage; I'm not a

heroine . . . I could never have gone

through the sufferings of the beauti-

ful Florabella . . . not even for her

prospective rewards" (pp. 217-18).
Taken together, these suggestive uses of literary art evoke
the image of a brother and sister bound together by some
obscure ancestral guilt. But more than this, it creates

the image of a world where the past intensely matters, where

118

the past continues to live on in the fear and guilt of the
present generation; and because the past has this internal
dimension it is not something that can be easily overcome
or dismissed. Yet Newman, proud of his self-sufficiency,
and deaf to the appeals of art, persists in his quest and
is at least partially blamable for the ensuing disaster.

The vision of life which emerges at the novel's end is,
then, quite far removed from the naive Gothic. At its con-
clusion, we no longer feel that good and evil are so easily
separable, or that one culture is clearly superior to
another; we feel, rather, that it is all a matter of propor-
tion. That the supreme evil in the novel resides in the
heartlessness and narrow class prejudice of the Bellegardes
is undeniably true; but Newman's egoism and failure of moral
intelligence do contribute. If he is better than they, it
is largely because his sins are the result of ignorance and
passion rather than knowledge and cold hearted calculation.
Immediately before taking the veil, Claire expresses this
deeply pessimistic vision of life, a vision in which evil
can spring full blown from even the best of motives:

"Of course I'm hard in effect,"
she pitifully reasoned; "though if
ever a creature was innocent, in
intention--! Whenever we give pain
we're hard. And we must give pain;
that's the world-~the hateful miser-
able world . . J'(p. 417).

While James is essentially in sympathy with this vision,

or at the very least is capable of taking it seriously, he

119

does not approve of her renunciation of the world. For him,
Claire's as well as Valentin's sacrifice is sterile. Yet
his is not the simple minded anti-Catholicism of the earlier
Gothic. James is undeniably Puritan in his solutions, in
his insistence that evil must be confronted and lived
through; his is, however, willing to grant Catholicism the
dignity of a vision deeply felt. To quote Porte:

For Claire, Roman Catholicism, like art,

is a mysterious dramatization of human

experience which she takes seriously.16
There is a real sense in which both Puritanism and Catholi-
cism are revealed as having the defects of their qualities.
Thus, the very symbolic imagination which alerts Claire to
the dimensions of evil in human affairs, indissolubly weds
her to the past and thereby paralyzes her. Similarly, the
very energy and will which gives Newman his magnificent
capacity for action is spawned in part by a moral obtuse-
ness which renders his actions dangerous. Presumably, for
James, the ideal lay somewhere in between, in a marriage
of New World and Old World Culture in which life might be
lived fully and intelligently through the offices of a rich
symbolic imagination. For only in art does the past become
usable, and only through art can we hope to avoid the
terrible trauma of repeating history.

Putting these speculations aside for the moment, it is

clear that the two cultures remain apart at the novel's end.

James sees at that point no possibility of moral action,

120

only the possibility of moral knowledge characterized by a
vision of life which, struck by the vehemence of Newman's
desire for revenge, Mrs. Bread articulates very well when
she says "Mercy on us, . . . how malicious we all are to be
sure" (p. 441). This vision, moreover, explains the change
in the ending which James made for the New York edition. III
the original version, Newman, after hearing that the
Bellegardes had gambled on his good nature and won, "instincr—
tively" glances to the fire to see if the little paper, the
instrument of his revenge, has been consumed. In the New
York edition, by contrast, Newman has given up all taste for'
revenge, and it is Mrs. Tristram who laments the destruction
of the evidence. Some critics, most notably, William
Stafford, have expressed a preference for the original ver-
sion on the grounds that is more consistent with Newman's

17 While there is more than a little

earlier malevolence.
justification for this View, it is readily apparent why
James made the change. Quite simply, the mature James saw
that any scene which depended upon the reality of the murder-
for its veracity could hardly be satisfactory. He saw,
looking back over his past works, that his vision of a
terribly mixed, morally ambiguous world had always been

with him; and it was that that he chose to emphasize. That
vision most clearly prefigured his later development.

As a final cautionary note, it should be emphasized

that while The American does prefigure the great themes of

 

the later novels it is still noticeably an immature work.

121

One thing which is immediately obvious in this respect, is

that James has not, in The American, developed the kinds

 

of techniques for emboding these themes which are present
in the later novels. There are, for instance, ironic
authorial intrusions of the sort James would never have
tolerated in the later work; these serve to invite detach-
ment ontfluapart of the reader, and thereby undermine the
moral seriousness of the work. Likewise, Newman's engage-
ment with evil is never fully internalized, nor are the
failings in his character which bring it about. We see the
effect of evil in his outer demonstrations, but rarely, if
at all, the subtle interpentration of the moral and the
psychological which is so characteristic of the later
James. And what is true of the hero is even truer of the
villains, who, despite their portentous glances and vaguely
sinister utterances, do not give evil a human face.

Finally, there is the setting, Paris, the notorious
center of immorality; and it is on this point that we see
James engaging in the eldest dodge of the Gothic novelist--
that of placing the action in Catholic Europe so that the
unsettling visions which emerge can be comfortably ignored.
Yet here we can see James beginning to become restive with
the convention, and in a stroke which is one of the first,
but certainly not the last, times he "plays" with Gothic
techniques, he has Newman take a trip to London. At that
time, Newman meets up with M. Nioche and his daughter

Noemie--his first acquaintances in Paris as well--and we

122

suddenly sense that the evil of Paris is quite at home in
London, "that vaster dustier Babylon" (p. 514). It is as
if James, at the end of the novel, sensed both the possi-
bilities and the limitations of the Gothic, and began to
see how the underlying characteristics of that genre might

be the stuff of great art.

NOTES FOR CHAPTER III

 

 

1The Ambassadors was written before The Wings of the
Dove though it was published after it.

2Oscar Cargill, The Novels of Henry James (New York:
Macmillan, 1961), pp. 204-05.

3R.F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the
Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London:
Macmillan, 1974), p. 34.

4Royal Gettman, "Henry James's Revision of The American,"
American Literature, 16 (1948), 295.

5Elsa Nettles, James and Conrad (Athens: University of?
Georgia Press, 1977), p. 89.

 

 

 

 

 

 

6Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces,
introd. R.P. Blackmur (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1935), p. 25.

7

 

 

Henry James, The Art of the Novel, pp. 21-22.

 

8Henry James, The Art of the Novel, p. 21.

 

9Henry James, The American (New York: Charles Scribner‘s;
Sons, 1907), p. 2. All further references to this work
appear in the text.

loEllen Douglas Leyburn, Strange Alloy: The Relation
of Comedy to Tragedy in the Fiction of Henry James (ChapeI
Hill: UniverSity of North Carolina Press, 1968), p. 23.

11Joel Porte, The Romance in America: Studies in
Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and James (Middletown:
Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), p. 207. The
remaining pages of the chapter are heavily indebted to
this excellent study.

12Porte, p. 204.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

l3Porte, p. 200.

14Porte, p. 203.

123

124

15Porte, p. 199.

16Porte, p. 201.

17William Stafford, "The Ending of James's The American:

Defense of the Earlier Version," Nineteenth-Century Fic-

 

A
t

 

THE PORTRAIT 93 A LADY:

 

ISABEL ARCHER IN THE HOUSE OF TERROR

In general, Henry James was most confident when deal-
ing with the international theme--which in his case is an
indication of just how congenial Gothic plots were to his
artistic imagination. Earlier we saw how he described

his "complacency" with the "subject" of The American; if

 

anything, his confidence in the subject of The Portrait

 

gf‘a Lady was even greater. As Leon Edel has shown,
James's letters to family and friends during the period

of The Portrait's composition reveal his belief that he

 

was involved in a work of major proportions.1 Most now
agree with this assessment, and it is generally accepted

that The Portrait is James's first masterpiece. Indeed,

 

F.R. Leavis asserts that it was in The Portrait 9£.E.EE§Z
that James's "genius functioned with freest and fullest
vitality."2

While I cannot ultimately subscribe to this view, I
am certainly in sympathy with some of the thinking behind
it. James's concern for the dignity and worth of the
human spirit is dramatized with an intensity, an eloquence,
and a lucidity whichtflmalater novels never quite recapture.
And for a critic like Leavis, whose interests are pre—

dominantly moral, even moralistic, this clarity of impact

125

126

can be all important. I will argue that the novels of the
major phase are finally richer and more humane (and thus
"moral" in the fullest sense of the term) in the vision of

life they communicate than is The Portrait; but these gains

 

have their attendant losses. Joseph Warren Beach describes

the relation of The Portrait to the later novels this way:

 

It has the open face of youth. There
is a lightness and freshness of tone
about it that never recures in the
more labored work of later years. It
is the first of his compositions
entirely free from crudity and the
last to show the unalloyed charm of
ingenuousness.

What should be emphasized for our purposes is that much of
this "lightness and freshness of tone" is derived from the

fact that here, as earlier in The American, James is writing'

 

arch Gothic romance. In fact, it is no exaggeration to

suggest that while The American contains some of the more

 

obvious Gothic extravagances and crudities, The Portrait

 

of a_Lagy is more like some of the classics of the genre
in important respects. Isabel Archer is, perhaps, a less
frail version of the typical Gothic heroine, but she is a
Gothic heroine all the same. Like Emily St. Aubert in The

Mysteries of Udolpho, and like Ellena Rosalba in The Italian,

 

Isabel is an orphan; and like them also she has symbolic
dimensions as the representative of an "enlightened" culture
who finds herself lost in a world which becomes progressive—

1y threatening and oppressive. Likewise the setting of The

127

Portrait is typically Gothic, moving as it does from the
confines of civilizationtx>the notorious Italian penninsulad
And as always, it is sexual involvement, either feared or
desired, which is at once the impetus to action and the
source of infinite danger.

In his notebooks, James discusses the conception of The:
Portrait e£_e Lady. With apprOpriate modification, it is an.
excellent generic description of Gothic plots:

The idea of the whole thing is that the
poor girl, who has dreamed of freedom
and nobleness, who has done, as she
believes, a generous, natural, clear-

sighted thing, finds herself in reality

ground in the very mill of the conventional.4

Here, as everywhere in Gothic and sentimental fiction,
moral virtue is associated with actual powerlessness. The
sentimental virtues of freedom, generosity, and natural
self-expression are extolled at the same time as they are
being exposed as dangerous liabilities in a world governed
by the conventional response.

The qualities which we have thus far enumerated are
certainly Gothic in origin. Yet the Gothicism of The
Portrait 9; e hegy_may be found in other places as well.
Here, for example, is the approach to Osmond's house on
Bellosguardo as Isabel first sees it:

Nothing could have been more charming
than this occasion--a soft afternoon
in the full maturity of the Tuscan

spring. The companions drove out of
the Roman Gate, beneath the enormous

128

black superstructure which crowns the
fine arch of that portal and makes it
nakedly impressive, and wound between
high-walled lanes into which the wealth
of blossoming orchards over-drooped and
flung a fragrance, until they reached
the small suburban piazza, of crooked
shape, where the long brown wall of the
villa occupied in part by Mr. Osmond
formed a principal, or at least a very
imposing, object. Isabel went with her
friend through a wide, high court, where
a clear shadow rested below and a pair
of light-arched galleries, facing each
other above, caught the upper sunshine
upon their slim columns and the flowering
plants in which they were dressed.5

Such rich, leisurely paced, sensuous description recalls
the pictorial elements of earlier Gothic fiction, and re—
minds us that James, like Mrs. Radcliffe was a writer of
travel literature. We see, moreover, that this use of
picturesque detail does for James what it always did. It
contributes greatly to the sensation of heightened con-
ciousness, of quickened sense of life, which it was always
in the power of the best Gothic fiction to evoke. Equally
revealing in this respect is the following passage des-
cribing one of the scenes of Isabel's girlhood-~in the
old house in Albany, New York:

The place owed much of its mysterious

melancholy to the fact that it was

properly entered from the second door

of the house, the door that had been

condemned, and that it was secured by

bolts which a particularly slender

little girl found it impossible to

slide. She knew that this silent

motionless portal opened into the

street; if the sidelights had not
been filled up with green paper she

129

might have looked out upon the little

brown stoop and the well-worn brick

pavement. But she had no wish to look

out, for this would have interfered

with her theory that there was a

strange, unseen place on the other

side--a place which became to the child's

imagination, according to its different

moods, a region of delight or of terror. (I, 130).
Phrases such as "mysterious melancholy" and "region of
delight or of terror" come straight from the deep well
of Gothic fiction. Yet we should take especial care to
see how these Gothic elements are employed in the passage.
Certainly this image of Isabel as a child makes her charac—
ter as an adult more intelligible. We see that, from an
early age, she is an imaginative, headstrong, romantically
inclined sort who becomes impatient with reality when it
fails to correspond to her theories about it. There may,
perhaps, even be a temptation to feel superior to her on
these grounds. Yet greater care is needed, for James is
not merely content to contrast the wild romantic dreams of
his protagonist with the more or less common environment
in which she finds herself. Isabel is romantic, and is
innocent--surely. But her vision is not, therefore, wholly'
discredited. For James reality was romantic, and the world
outside the window--be it the street, Albany, or the great
capitals of Europe--is a region of delight and terror.

Such considerations, moreover, allow us to make a

more precise description of James's use of romance in this

novel. First, however, we must deal with some of Richard

Chase's remarks in his classic work, The American Novel

 

130

and its Tradition. There Chase says the following about

 

romance in The Portrait:

 

The conscious assimilation of romance
into the novelistic substance of The
Portrait took place in two different
ways. It was assimilated into the
language of the book and produced a
general enrichment of metaphor. It
was also brought in in the character
of Isabel Archer, the heroine, who is
to a considerable extent our point of
view as we read. Isabel tends to see
things as a romancer does, whereas the
author sees things with the firmer,
more comprehensive, and more disillu-
sioned vision of the novelist. Thus
James brings the element of romance
into the novel in such a way that he
can both share in the romantic point
of View of his heroine and separate
himself from it by taking an objective
View of it.6

There can be no quarrel with Chase's assertion that images
taken from romance contribute to the metaphoric sub-
structure of the book; nor can we seriously quarrel with
the assertion that Isabel's innocence is characterized

by strong romantic inclinations. The problem with Chase's
analysis comes, however, when we ask ourselves what the
author's "objective view" of the matter really is. And
here we discover that, while James's view is distinct

from Isabel's he is far from dismissing the projections

of romance as mere silliness. Indeed, for him, romance,
properly understood, is a rich and complex way of knowing.
Thus the difference between the author and his creation is

not so much that the former is "realistic" and the latter

131

"romantic"; it is, rather, that James understood romance tc>
be a symbolic discourse of unparalleled suggestiveness,
while Isabel, in her initial stages at least, understood
it as a series of gestures and poses. James knew, if
Isabel did not, that romance could educate the imagination
to important truths.

An even clearer example of James's attitude toward
romance occurs when Edward Rosier first looks upon the
Palazzo Roccanera ("the Black Rock Palace"), the abode

of the Osmonds:

The object of Mr. Rosier's well-regulated
affection dwelt in a high house in the
very heart of Rome; a dark and massive
structure overlooking a sunny piazzetta
in the neighborhood of the Farnese Palace.
In a palace, too, little Pansy lived--a
palace by Roman measure, but a dungeon to
poor Rosier's apprehensive mind. It seemed
to him of evil omen that the young lady
he wished to marry, and whose fastidious
father he doubted of his ability to con-
ciliate, should be immured in a kind of
domestic fortress, a pile which bore a
stern old Roman name, which smelt of
historic deeds, of crime and craft and
violence, which was mentioned in "Murray"
and visited by tourists who looked, on

a vague survey, disappointed and depressed,
and which had frescoes by Caravaggio in
the piano nobile and a row of mutilated
statues and dusty urns in the wide, nobly
arched loggia overhanging the dark court
where a fountain gushed out of a mossy
niche. Inna less preoccupied frame of
mind he could have done justice to the
Palazzo Roccanera; he could have entered
into the sentiment of Mrs. Osmond, who
had once told him that on settling them-
selves in Rome she and her husband had
chosen this habitation for the love of
local color. It had local color enough,
and though he knew less about architecture

 

 

132

than about Limoges enamels he could see

that the proportions of the windows and

even the details of the cornice had quite

the grand air. But Rosier was haunted by

the conviction that at picturesque periods

young girls had been shut up there to

keep them from their true loves, and then,

under the threat of being thrown into con-

vents, had been forced into unholy marriages.

(II, pp. 100-01).
Like the passage describing Isabel's sanctuary and retreat
this passage has a complex double purpose. In the first
place, it serves to place Edward Rosier perfectly. He is
a kind but unprepossessing young man; he is in love with
Pansy, though his affection is "well-regulated," and does
not, in any case, blind him to the quality of Osmond's
possessions. Furthermore, he is evidently familiar with
the conventions of Gothic fiction, and there is, perhaps,
a temptation to smile at his fear that the sins of old Rome
might revisit this colony of expatriate Americans. But here
James's iron turns back upon itself for that is exactly
what does happen. Pansy Te shut up in the Palazzo Roccanera.
in order to keep her from her true love, Pansy is threatened.
with the convent if her affection for Rosier persists. In
other words, Rosier's fears, which might at first seem
foolishly romantic, prove to be prophetic. The Gothic
terror proves to be quite at home in the modern world.

Nowhere, however, is James's Gothicism more apparent

than in his presentation, on a subtle psychological plane,

of Isabel's encounter with evil. And in this James has

made a distinct departure from the method of the The

133

American. Newman is, finally, too crude a character, too
bouyant and worldly, too lacking in moral imagination, to
feel the real Gothic terror. Isabel, by contrast, deeply
feels the horror to which she has been exposed. Further-
more, this change in the presentation of the subject matter'
has inevitably brought about changes in James's novelistic

technique. In The Portrait, James has not wholly dis-

 

pensed with the paraphernalia of the Victorian nove1--the
references to himself as a "biographer" for example. Yet

as Leon Edel points out, we can see in The Portrait the

 

first tentative steps toward what will later become his

characteristic technique:

His was a constant search for ways by
which the story-teller might be, in
Joyce's formulation, 'refined out of
existence,‘ so that the story, like

the play in the theatre, narrates
itself. He had not yet developed

these devices in The Portrait of e
Lady, where he remained the omniscient
author; but in allowing us to see the
characters through each others eyes,

and in Isabel's internal monologue,

he is feeling his way toward the time
when he will remove himself as far as 7
possible from the narrative scene. . . .

 

As noted earlier, the attempt to involve the reader in this
new way is a development of some clearly recognizable
Gothic techniques, and it serves much the same function
here as it did in the earlier Gothic novels. On one level,
it is a powerful method for involving the reader in the

heroine's plight, and, indeed, it is Isabel's gradual

134

awakening to the evil around Inn: which makes the chief
interest of the book. The reader, who is privy to informa:-
tion unavailable to Isabel, can only watch in suspense as
she falls prey to Madame Merle and Osmond's designs. Yet
on a deeper level, James resorts to the restricted point-
of-view technique because, quite simply, he is concerned
with the morality of his art. He is aware that any attempt.
to interfere with the response of his reader could be as
reprehensible as the attempts his characters make to inter-
fere with one another.

Isabel Archer, when we first encounter her in the

early pages of The Portrait 2: e Lady, reveals herself

 

to be the self-reliant cousin of earlier Gothic heroines.
"I'm very fond of my liberty" (I, 24) she tells Ralph
Touchett on the occasion of their first meeting at Garden—
court. Of particular interest in these earlier stages is
the way in which James, like Radcliffe, Lewis, and Mary
Shelley before him, takes great pains to make clear the
nature of the kinds of childhood experiences which led to
the adult life he is exploring. For pages and pages we
are given delightful glimpses of Isabel's early life-~the
hours spent in her grandmother's old house in Albany and
the trip to Europe in which her father's indiscretion
allows a situation to develop wherein his three daughters
were "left . . . for three months at Neufchatel with a
French hehhe who had eloped with a Russian nobleman stayirm;

at the same hotel" (I, 43). In general, she had enjoyed

135

the kind of childhood which, by almost any standard, would

be considered enviable:

She had had everything a girl could have:
kindness, admiration, bonbons, bouquets,
the sense of exclusion from none of the
privileges of the world she lived in,
abundant opportunity for dancing, plenty
of new dresses, the London Spectator, the
latest publications, the music of Gounod,
the poetry of Browning, the prose of
George Eliot (I, 46).

 

From all appearances, this admirable upbringing has resulted
in a remarkably charming and vital young woman. All of the

characters in The Portrait are charmed by Isabel, and most

 

readers are as well--at least by her character as it is
revealed in the early pages of the novel. In fact, she
would seem to embody all that is good in the sentimental
ideal. She is, as was noted earlier, extremely self reliant;
but more than this, she is curious and open to experience in
healthy ways. We are told, for example, that even the
irregular circumstances of her stay in Neufchatel did not
share or unduly alarm her; she was, rather, inclined to view
the whole matter as part of a "romantic episode in a liberal
education" (I, 43). Later, Isabel is described in terms
which are even more appealing:

Her reputation of reading a great deal

hung about her like the cloudy envelope

of a goddess in an epic; it was supposed

to engender difficult questions and to

keep the conversation at a low tempera-

ture. The poor girl likedfix)be thought

clever but she hated to be thought
bookish; she used to read in secret

136

and, though her memory was excellent,

to abstain from showy reference. She

had a great desire for knowledge, but

she really preferred almost any source

of information to the printed page;

she had an immense curiosity about

life and was constantly staring and

wondering. She carried within herself

a great fund of life, and her deepest

enjoyment was to feel the continuity

between the movements of her own soul

and the agitations of the world. For

this reason she was fond of seeing great

crowds and large stretches of country,

of reading about revolutions and wars,

of looking at historical pictures . . . (I, 45).
Although her perception is colored by the naive romanticisnl
of these activities, this should not be allowed to obscure
the fact that, romantic though they may be, her intuitions
are nearly always accurate and lead her in the direction of
greater knowledge and fulfillment. She realizes, above all,
that happy as her early life has been, it has been a
cloistered happiness. She realizes that her growth as a
person requires more knowledge of the world. In a moment
of self examination which is both romantic and accurate,
Isabel sees that the "unpleasant" has "been even too absent
from her knowledge" and that it is potentially "a source of
interest and even of instruction" (I, 42). It is not that
she has any perverse desire to plunge into the murky depths;
rather she senses that a knowledge of suffering and evil is
somehow central to a full understanding of life. As the
vagueness of the term suggests, she does not at first have

a very clear idea of what the "unpleasant" might entail.

She does, however, intuit that those things which make life

137

most worthwhile are inseparably associated with those things
which most threaten it. Although she is alternately fas-
cinated and repelled by the idea of danger, like most Gothix:
heroines she is fated to confront it.

Coupled with this image of Isabel as an alive, curious;
person is the simultaenous perception that she is possessed.
of fine moral instincts. By the same logic which causes hen:
to require freedom and dignity for herself she is perfectly'
willing to extend these rights to others; and her greatest
fear in the social arena is of hurting other people or
using them unkindly:

She had an infinite hope that she should

never do anything wrong. She had resented

so strongly, after discovering them, her

mere errors of feeling (the discovery

always made her tremble as if she had

escaped from a trap which might have

caught her and smothered her) that the

chance of inflicting a sensible injury

upon another person, presented only as

a contingency, caused her at moments to

hold her breath. That always struck her

as the worst thing that could happen to

her. (I, 68).
What is presented here as a general code of conduct is
particularly evidence in her attitude toward marriage, for
it is there that the problem of evil becomes most focused
and acute. Isabel has too much respect for herself and
for the virtuescflfloyalty and trust to take marriage lightly.
And it is this rather than any insuperable coldness which

causes her to think that there is a "vulgarity" in "thinking'

too much" of marriage (I, 71). Quite simply, Isabel

138

believes that such powerful feelings ought to be taken

seriously and treated with respect:

Deep in her soul--it was the deepest
thing there-~lay a belief that if a
certain light should dawn she could
give herself completely; but this
image, on the whole, was too for-
midable to be attractive. Isabel's
thoughts hovered about it, but they
seldom rested on it long; after a
little it ended in alarms. (I, 71-72).

Whether we attribute these alarms to a fear of passionate
sexuality, or to a fear of surrendering sovereign choice
scarcely matters--assuredly both play a role. What does
matter is the way in which the passage serves to establish
the depth of Isabel's feelings. And this, combined with her'
real moral depth, makes her admirable even with her faults.
As the following passage makes abundantly clear, James

did not have an uncritical perspective on his heroine:

Altogether, with her meagre knowledge,
her inflated ideals, her confidence at
once innocent and dogmatic, her temper
at once exacting and indulgent, her
mixture of curiosity and fastidiousness,
of vivacity and indifference, her desire
to look very well and to be if possible
even better, her determination to see,
to try, to know, her combination of the
delicate, desultory, flame-like spirit
and the eager and personal creature of
conditions: she would be an easy victim
of scientific criticism if she were not
intended to awaken on the reader's part
an impulse more tender and purely expectant
(I, 69).

Isabel, like Emily St. Aubert, is guilty of the romantic

error of amiable minds--she has, that is, the defects of

139

of her virtues. And really the contradictions implied here
are all of piece in that they are only natural in a characten:
who is at the same time committed to a free exploration of
life and the preservation of certain cultural ideals.

The very vividness of James's characterization, moreover,
forces us to try to make sense of what subsequently happens.
After such promising beginnings, how are we to explain the
disaster which follows? What is it that blinds Isabel to
the evil around her and causes her to throw her life away?
Part of the anwer, surely, is that her notion of evil is
persistently abstract; she properly detests evil but has no
clear notion of what it is or of the subtlety with which
it works. However, it is pride as well as innocence which
ultimately leads to her undoing. Everyone who is most con-
cerned with Isabel, her "friends,"--the very people she
should be most inclined to believe--deplore the possibility
of a marriage to Osmond. Yet Isabel's good opinion of her-
self and her belief in her own moral sufficiency blinds her
to a truth more experienced observers readily perceive.

Furthermore, Isabel's inability to accept valuable
advice parallels her inability to take the lessons of art
and history seriously. Increasingly as the action of the
novel unfolds, our memory that she is a girl brought up
reading George Eliot and Robert Browning proves unsettling.

It seems inconceivable that a reader of Middlemarch should

 

marry for an ideal or that a reader of The Ring and the B095;

 

should find the history of Catholic Europe "picturesque,"

140

yet this is precisely what Isabel does. She sees the
gathering at Gardencourt as something out of a novel, and
realizes that in novels girls are not always treated well,
but fails to see how the universals of art could have any
bearing on her own life. And in what is one of the
cruelest ironies of the book she refuses Warburton at least
partly because her literary experiences have caused her to
believe that the ceremonial duties of the peerage will
unduly confine her. In the end, of course, she marries
someone whose love of ceremoney is even more oppressive.

Equally revealing are Isabel's attempts to sentimenta-
lize the French revolution. "In a revolution," she tells
the elder Mr. Touchett, ". . . I think I should be a high,
proud loyalist. One sympathizes more with them, and they“ve
a chance to behave so exquisitely. I mean so picturesquely"
(I, 100). In context, Mr. Touchett's humorous rejoinder
that behaving picturesquely means "going gracefully to the
guillotine" (I, 101) has sinister implications. Then, too,
Isabel's remark is fatuous on the face of it, for in the
larger thematic scheme of the novel the loyalists stand for
all those things which are most threatening to the
sentimental virtues.

The instance which causes us to see danger in Isabel's
remark is the same instance which leads us to distrust
Madame Merle and Osmond, and to deplore Isabel's relation
to them. After telling Isabel that there are sordid crimes

hidden in her past--"when I've to come out and into a strong

141

light--then, my dear, I'm a horror!"--Madame Merle ex-
plicitly identifies her ways with those of Europe before
the French revolution:

I speak as if I were a hundred years

old, you say? Well, I am, if you

please; I was born before the French

revolution. Ah, my dear, je viens de

TeTh; I belong to the old, old—wafld—(I, 279).
The eerie repetition of the word "old" suggests Satan--the
"old one"--and gives to this smooth Urbain woman the aura
of some hideous visitor from the nameless past. When, by
association, we recall Osmond's love of old things and his
remark that he is "convention itself" we begin to glimpse
the infernal depths which lie beneath what appears beautiful
and highly cultivated.

For our purposes, however, the central scene of this
discussion is the scene in which Isabel and Ralph Touchett
discuss the nature of ghosts. A newly arrived, naive
American, Isabel first looks at fine English country houses
through glasses tinted byrmnrreadings in Gothic fiction.

But instead of dark and forboding castles she finds only

the pleasant and genteel Gardencourt, and instead of a dark,
interesting villain, she finds only the fair and innocuous
Lord Warburton. All of this disarms her and leads her to
believe that the dangers depicted in these earlier novels
were fictitious only, and thus properly an object of humor
to a child of the enlightenment. Her cousin Ralph, however,

quickly takes the measure of her innocence and tries to

142

correct her blithe sense of superiority:

'But I like you all the same,‘ his
cousin went on. 'The way to clinch the
matter will be to show me the ghost.‘

Ralph shook his head sadly. 'I
might show it to you, but you'd never
see it. The privilege isn't given to
every one; it's not enviable. It has
never been seen by a young, happy,
innocent person like you. You must have
suffered first, have suffered greatly,
have gained some miserable knowledge.

In that way your eyes are opened to it.
I saw it long ago,‘ said Ralph.

'I told you just now I'm very fond
of knowledge,‘ Isabel answered.

'Yes, of happy knowledge--of pleasant
knowledge. But you haven't suffered, and
you're not made to suffer. I hope you'll
never see the ghost.‘ (I, 64.)

It is through lines like these that we begin to comprehend
James's transformation of the traditional, popular ghost
story. Isabel is indeed safe enough if ghosts are only
imagined as refined and stately apparitions serving some
higher moral order. But clearly this is not what James

has in mind. Like Mrs. Radcliffe, he views the supernatural
as having its origin in man's inner experience, although,
unlike her, he does not ascribe it to an overstimulated
imagination. For here, as in so much of his fiction, ghosts
are the children of partial knowledge, of unacknowledged

but potent realities which return to exact terrible revenge
for having been ignored. Ghosts do come to haunt Isabel as
the result of her imperfect understanding of the personal

and cultural past.

143

So Isabel proceeds magnificently, energetically,
maddeningly toward her fate--like, to use her own figure,
"a swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four
horses over roads that one can't see" (I, 235). For the
reader, who has the advantage of being about one step
further down the road than Isabel, the effect is rather
like that of watching a movie in which the heroine blunders
through the corridors of a darkened mansion toward the
discovery of some hideous secret.

Nowhere, perhaps, is James's sheer narrative ability
more apparent than in the manner in which he depicts Isabel's
gradual awakening to a world of horror. When Isabel first
begins to feel disconcerted by Madame Merle, she can attri-
bute it only to the fact that Madame Merle is "not natural"
and that she is "too perfectly the social animal that man
and woman are supposed to have been intended to be" (I, 274).
From here Isabel progresses to the perception that Madame
Merle is profoundly different from her, to the perception
that she is similar to Osmond in many ways and from thence
to the perception that there is something between Madame
Merle and Osmond. Isabel's response at the moment in which
she realizes that Mrs. Touchett had been right, that Madame
Merle had married her, is quintessentially Gothic:

As she went on Isabel grew pale; she
clasped her hands more tightly in her
lap. It was not that her visitor had
at last thought it the right time to

be insolent; for this was not what was
most apparent. It was a worse horror

144

than that. "Who are you--what are you?"
Isabel murmured. "What have you do to
with my husband?" (II, 326).

As the following passage suggests, the horror of this
encounter continues to haunt Isabel, and she is forced

to the recognition that she is in the presence of evil:

On the afternoon I began speaking of,
she had taken a resolution not to
think of Madame Merle; but the reso-
lution proved vain, and this lady's
image hovered constantly before her.
She asked herself, with an almost
childlike horror of the supposition,
whether to this intimate friend of
several years the great historical
epithet of wicked were to be applied.
She knew the idea only by the Bible
and other literary works; to the
best of her belief she had had no
personal acquaintance with wickedness.
She had desired a large acquaintance
with human life, and in spite of her
having flattered herself that she
cultivated it with some success this
elementary privilege had been denied
her (II, 329).

The final revelation, of course, is that Madame Merle
and Osmond were previously lovers and that Pansy is their
child. And it was in the hope that Isabel's wealth might
ultimately benefit Pansy that Madame Merle had worked so
hard to bring about the marriage. It is significant, how-
ever, that this illicit affair is not one of the true
horrors in the novel. For James is no conventional moralist,
and for him the sins of the body are not nearly so important
as the sins of the spirit which engendered them. Madame

Merle and Osmond are not evil merely because their passions

145

betrayed them at an earlier point in their lives; they are,
rather, evil because they manipulate the feelings and
natural impulses of others in order to achieve their own
selfish ends. And in this they betray their relation to a
whole tradition of Gothic villains and villainesses from
Robert Lovelace and Montoni to Urbain and Madame de
Bellegarde. Montoni and Madame de Bellegarde appeal to
different feelings than does Osmond--that is they manipulate:
Emily and Claire by playing upon their fears, while Osmond
manipulates Isabel through an appeal to her generous spiritq
But all three commit the sin of treating human beings as
means to an end rather than as an end in themselves.

When all is said and done--that is, when all past
transgressions are aired and there is nothing left to
discover--Isabel's objection to Madame Merle is summed up
in a simple phrase: "She made a convenience of me" (II, 410).
If this seems too much of an understatement, it is at least
a reminder of how much evil can spring from mundane sources.
Yet it is worth noting that, evil as Madame Merle is, she
is not finally so evil as Osmond. For just as Madame de
Bellegarde is more recognizably human than her son because
she is more passionate, so Madame Merle's crimes are more
forgiveable than Osmond's. When Isabel inquires if Madame
Merle has a "wild side" which has yet to be discovered, she
replies "Ah no, I fear my darkest sides are my tamest"

(I, 278). This is a remarkable piece of self revelation,

and the seeming paradox shows that Madame Merle is at least

146

aware of moral dimensions of her behavior. What she is
saying, in effect, is that a passionate, instinctual side
of her nature is the source of her virtue, while it is the
poised social self which is to be feared.

A11 of‘this is made even more explicit in Madame Merle's;

last exchange with Osmond:

He still had his head against the
cushion behind him; the ankle of one foot
rested on the other knee. So he sat for
a while. 'I should like to know what's
the matter with you,’ he said at last.

'The matter--the matter--!' And
here Madame Merle stopped. Then she
went on with a sudden outbreak of passion,
a burst of summer thunder in a clear sky:
'The matter is that I would give my right
hand to be able to weep, and I can't!‘

'What good would it do you to weep?‘

'It would make me feel as I felt
before I knew you.‘

'If I've dried your tears, that's
something. But I've seen you shed them.’

'Oh, I believe you'll make me cry
still. I mean make me howl like a wolf.
I've a great hope, I've a great need of
that . . . . You've not only dried up
my tears; you've dried up my soul.

. . . Don't you know the soul is
an immortal principle? How can it suffer
alteration?

'I don't believe at all that it's
an immortal principle. I believe it
can perfectly be destroyed. That's
what has happened to mine, which was a
very good one to start with; and it's
you I have to thank for it. You're
very bad," she added with gravity in
her emphasis.

'Is this the way we're to end?‘
Osmond asked with the same studied
coldness.

'I don't know how we're to end.

I wish I did! How do bad people end?--
especially as to their common crimes.
You've made me as bad as yourself.‘

147

'I don't understand you. You seem

to me quite good enough,‘ said Osmond,

his conscious indifference giving an

extreme effect to the words (II, 333-35).
This passage is long but worth quoting because it serves tc>
give evil a human face as well as to dramatize Osmond's
heartlessness. Madame Merle's difficulty in maintaining
her self possession makes her the more sympathetic, even
as it reminds us that she too, through her feelings, can
be victimized by Osmond's coldness. And his "civilized"
behavior, his "ecstasy of self control," characterized
most fully by the cynical and mocking allusion to Donne,
is made all the more hateful.

Of course what is clear to Madame Merle here is vividly'
portrayed much earlier in the novel in the remarkable scene
where Isabel, alone by the dying fire, reflects upon her
fate--a scene, it should be emphasized, which takes place
well before any of the final revelations. What Isabel
realizes at this point is that she has married a man who
seriously tries to make his life a work of art and who
looks upon his wife as a mere interesting addition to
his collection:

He had told her he loved the conventional;

but there was a sense in which this seemed

a noble declaration. In that sense, that

of the love of harmony and order and decency
and of all the stately offices of life, she
went with him freely, and his warning had
contained nothing ominous. But when, as

the months had elapsed, she had followed

him further and he had led her into the mansion

of his own habitation, then, then she had
seen where he really was.

148

She could live it over again, the
incredulous terror with which she had
taken the measure of her dwelling.
Between those four walls she had lived
ever since; they were to surround her
for the rest of her life. It was the
house of darkness, the house of dumb-
ness, the house of suffocation.
Osmond's beautiful mind indeed seemed
to peep down from a small high window
and mock at her. Of course it had not
been physical suffering; for physical
suffering there might have been a
remedy. She could come and go; she
had her liberty; her husband was per-
fectly polite. He took himself so
seriously; it was something appalling.
Under all his culture, his cleverness,
his amenity, under his good-nature,
his facility, his knowledge of life,
his egotism lay hidden like a serpent
in a bank of flowers (II, 196).

Although Isabel is thinking, not speaking, this is the same
shock of recognition which came to Vivaldi in the Inquisiticu:
and to Newman in the old house at Fleurieres; in the future
it was to come to Milly Theale at Matcham and at the

Palazzo Leporelli and to Maggie Verver at Fawns. It is the
horror beneath and beyond what had seemed good. The imagery
of the passage is, moreover, exquisite. The image of the
serpent, for example, suggests Satan and is yet another
indication of the infernal aspects of Osmond's nature. The
house imagery is even richer and has its roots deep in the
Gothic tradition. As R.W. Stallman observes, houses in
James's fiction "represent the accumulated refinement and

8 In other words, James's use

corruption of civilization."
of houses parallels exactly the way in which earlier Gothic

novelists used the haunted castle, and houses are as central

149

to his novelistic world as Railo found the haunted castle

to be in the world of the Gothic novel.9 For in a larger
sense, of course, the houses in this nove1--whether the old
house in Albany, Gardencourt, or the Palazzo Roccanera--are
haunted; they speak of the horrors of death and mutability
as well as of the horrors of the past which live on and
continue to menace the present. Thus Isabel's intuitive
association of her husband's mind with a "house of darkness"
has rich symbolic undertones. It suggests that the sinister
confines of the Palazzo Roccanera are both the scene of her
suffering and the image of the horrors of the past which
live on in her husband's state of mind.

Yet magnificent as this long internal monologue is—-
James called it "obviously the best thing in the book"10--
the most memorable passage for me comes later, immediately
prior to Isabel's departure for England. For there, in a
seemingly simple conversation between Isabel and Osmond
concerning the fate of his daughter, James truly carries
the torch to the back of the cave:

He considered a while the picture he
had evoked and seemed greatly pleased
with it. And then he went on: 'The
Catholics are very wise after all.

The convent is a great institution:

we can't do without it; it corresponds
to an essential need in families, in
society. It's a school of good manners;
it's a school of repose. Oh, I don't
want to detach my daughter from the
world,‘ he added; 'I don't want to make
her fix her thoughts on any other. This

one's very well, as she should, and she
may think of it as much as she likes.

150

Only she must think of it in the
right way.’
Isabel gave an extreme atten-

tion to this little sketch; she

found it indeed intensely interesting.

It seemed to show her how far her

husband's desire to be effective was

capable of going--to the point of

playing theoretic tricks on the

delicate organism of his daughter. (II, 348).
If we desire to contemplate the true horror of the Osmond
philosophy and all that it implies, we need go no further
than this passage. Osmond, as he makes this "little sketch"
is very much like the painter serenelyan:work in his studio;
and by means of this image combined with the easy cultured
rhythms of his manner of speaking, James succeeds in showing
on yet another level how evil may reside in precisely the
most civilized environment.

Madame Merle and Osmond are, however, conventional
types. Consequently, while we are impressed by the subtlety
with which James develops our sense of their evil, we are
never too much troubled by its source. We expect conven-
tionally evil characters to victimize the heroine. What
we don't perhaps expect is what William Gass observes of
Isabel's fate:

. . .it is by no means true that only
the "villains" fall upon her and try
and carry her off; nor is it easy to
discover just who the villains really are.
As long as we are comfortable with the assumption that evil.

comes about through the innocence of the heroine and the

machinations of the villains the novel feels relatively

151

comfortable and safe. When, however, evil is set loose from.
these confines and difused throughout the whole social
situation it becomes far more baffling and terrifying. As
Gass goes on to show, this is precisely what happens in

The Portrait:

 

So many of his characters are "perceptive."
They understand the value of the unmolded
clay. They feel they know, as artists,
what will be best for their human medium.
They will take EE_ the young lady (for so
it usually is). They will bring her out.
They will SE.£2£ her; make something Ef—her.
She will be beautiful and fine,*in short,
she will inspire interest, amusement, and
wonder . . . James knows, as his creations
so often do not, that this manipulation

is the essence, the ultimate germ, of the
evil the whole of his work condemns, and

it is nowhere more brutal than when

fronted by the kindest regard and backed
by a benevolent will.

 

 

 

 

In The American, Lizzie Tristram's behavior has some of

 

this terribly mixed quality. She takes up Newman and intro—
duces him to Claire partly because she is genuinely fond of
them both, but partly, also, because she senses that their
interaction will be rich in dramatic possibilities. In The
Portrait, by contrast, this sort of manipulation by friends
is nearly universal. Caspar Goodwood, Isabel's aggressively
masculine suitor, and Henrietta Stackpole, her friend, never
tire of formulating projects for her career, though their
motives for doing so vary. And as William Veeder is able

to observe as the result of a brilliant piece of close
critical reading, Lord Warburton's behavior partakes of a

certain "paternal domination." This is true in his relation

152

to his sisters, and is particularly evident in the proposal
scene where he gives "short nervous shakes to his hunting
crop" (I, 154) as he begins to sense that his proposal is
being met with resistance--a gesture which, as Veeder notes,
is suggestive of the "lordly instinct" to "trash what will
not submit to proprietorship." And when, much later on,
Osmond exclaims of Rosier "he ought to be horsewhipped"

(II, 115), the equation is complete. James can be seen

to be "linking the apparently polar figures of conserva-
tive Osmond and radical Warburton, and linking the

apparently polar roles of radical reformer and old-school

authoritarian."l3

What is true of these three characters is even truer
of Mrs. Touchett and Ralph. Note, for example, Mrs.

Touchett's explanation of why she has taken Isabel up:

"It occurred to me that it would be a
kindness to take her about and intro-
duce her to the world. She thinks she
knows a great deal of it--like most
American girls; but like most American
girls she's ridiculously mistaken. If
you want to know, I thought she would
do me credit. I like to be well thought
of, and for a woman of my age there's
no greater convenience, in some ways,
than an attractive niece" (I, 56-57).

There is no need to exaggerate this, for surely Mrs. Toucrustt
is not Madame Merle's malevolent equal. Like Madame Merle,
though, she makes a convenience of Isabel. Mrs. Touchett's;
perspective on the possibility of Isabel's alliance with

Lord Warburton also supports this point:

153

'Should you have liked me to marry
Lord Warburton?‘ Isabel enquired.

"Of course I should."
"I thought you disliked the English
so much."
"So I do; but it's all the greater
reason for making use of them" (I, 194).
This particular sentiment finds its parallel when Madame
Merle is trying to interest Osmond in Isabel:
"What do you want to do with her?"
he asked at last.
"What you see. Put her in your way."
"Isn't she meant for something
better than that?"
"I don't pretend to know what people
are meant forf'said Madame Merle. "I only
know what I can do with them" (I, 345).
It is by this simple device, this simple echoing of phrases,
that James brings forth the failures of Mrs. Touchett's
morality. Though she has virtues that Madame Merle does not
have, her selfish use of Isabel is symptomatic of a moral
climate where evil can grow and flourish.
Ralph Touchett's case is even more puzzling and dis-
turbing. Often he seems to represent the author's point
of view--that is his vision of things seems juster and less
vulnerable to raids of irony than those of the other
characters. He is humorous, kindly, possessed of moral
imagination and taste, and oddly touching; furthermore, he
is referred to, seemingly without irony, as an "apostle of

freedom" (II, 245)--high praise in James's fiction. In

view of this, it is one of the darkest twists of the story

154

that it is Ralph, not old Mr. Touchett as Isabel mistakenly
believes, who is "the beneficent author of infinite woe"
(II, 193). Of course this refers directly to Ralph's
arranging for Isabel's inheritance; but when the matter is
considered more closely it becomes apparent that this is
just the supreme example of what Ralph's attitude toward
Isabel really is. He may well love her, but he cannot for-
bear tampering with her life, and in so doing he denies her
her own humanity and makes her subservient to his own
limited vision. When, for example, he asks Mrs. Touchett
what she intends to "do" with Isabel, Mrs. Touchett replies
"Do with her? You talk as if she were a yard of calico"

(I, 59). The following example is even more chilling:

If his cousin were to be nothing more
than an entertainment to him, Ralph

was conscious that she was an enter-
tainment of a high order. "A character
like that," he said to himself--"a

real little passionate force to see

at play is the finest thing in nature.
It's finer than the finest work of art-—
than a Greek bas-relief, than a great
Titian, than a Gothic cathedral. It's
very pleasant to be so well treated
where one had least looked for it. I
had never been more blue, more bored
than for a week before she came; I had
never expected less that anything
pleasant would happen. Suddenly I
receive a Titian, by the post, to hang
on my wall--a Greek bas-relief to stick
over my chimney" (I, 86).

The error of Ralph's thinking should be abundantly clear le
this passage. For after noting that a soul like Isabel's

is finer than any work of art, he has, by the end of the

155

passage reduced her to an art object-~a "Titian" or a "Greek
bas—relief" fortuitously sent for his amusement.

Nor is this passage isolated; there is, in fact, enough
evidence of Ralph's "artistic" interest in Isabel to make
this one of the major motifs of the novel. On some occasions
he is the playgoer absorbed in the unfolding drama of
Isabel's life. "I content myself with watching you--with
deepest interest" (I, 211), he tells Isabel in a remark
which might profitably be compared with the following one
by Madame Merle: "I want to see what life makes of you"

(I, 268). At other times Ralph plays the dramatist, using
his powers to arrange Isabel's life to his own satisfaction.
The scene in which he convinces his father to make Isabel

an heiress reveals both this attitude and the dangers in-
herent in it. As Gass notes, putting Iago's words in
Ralph's mouth--"I want to put money in her purse" (I, 260)-—

14 And old Mr.

casts his actions in a sinister light.
Touchett, the one character in the novel who sees and likes
Isabel for what she is, has serious reservations about the
wisdom and morality of Ralph's proposal. "You speak of it
as if it were for your mere amusement" (I, 262), he says at.
one point. At another point he says "It seems to me
immoral" (I, 264); and at still another point he asks:
"Doesn'tilzoccur to you that a young woman with sixty

thousand pounds may fall victim to fortune hunters?"

(I, 264-65). To which Ralph replies:

156

"Decidedly. That's a risk and it has
entered into my calculation. I think
it's appreciable, but I think it's
small, and I'm prepared to take it."

Poor Mr. Touchett's acuteness had
passed into perplexity, and his per-
plexity now passed into admiration.
"Well you have gone into it!" he
repeated. "But I don't see what good
you're to get of it."

Ralph leaned over his father's
pillows and gently smoothed them; he
was aware their talk was unduly pro-
longed. "I shall get just the good
I said a few moments ago I wished to
put into Isabel's reach--that of
having met the requirements of my
imagination." (I, 265).

The requirements of Ralph's imagination prove to be very
different from Isabel's. She proves a smaller, more timid,
less insightful figure than he had imagined. His calcula-
tions go awry and Isabel marries the "sterile dilletant"
Osmond. Ralph is properly "shocked and humiliated" (II, 61)
by this turn of events, and realizes that "he had played
the wrong card, and . . . lost the game" (II, 141). But
even when faced with the catastrophe his meddling has
helped bring about he cannot give up his interest in
Isabel's career:

What kept Ralph alive was simply the

fact that he had not yet seen enough

of the person in the world in whom

he was most interested: he was not

yet satisfied. There was more to come;

he couldn't make up his mind to lose

that. He wanted to see what she would

make of her husband--or what her husband

would make of her. This was only the

first act of the drama, and he was deter—
mined to sit out the performance (II, 147).

157

Even when Isabel comes to him in obvious pain and in need
of comfort, his pride in his superior knowledge overcomes
his sense of decency. Despite the fact that Isabel would
find it humiliating, Ralph has "an almost savage desire to
hear her complain of her husband." And in the fact of her
obvious reluctance to do so "he tried and tried again to
make her betray Osmond; he felt cold-blooded, cruel,
dishonourable almost" (II, 251-52). Having failed in

his calculations about Isabel, Ralph would still have

her acknowledge that his calculations about Osmond had
been correct.

Even Isabel herself is guilty on occasion of profaning
the mystery of human beings just as she profanes the
mysteries of history and art. We are told, for instance,
that the word "specimens . . . played a considerable part
in her vocabulary" (I, 89). And when Ralph tells her that
Lord Warburton is a "specimen of an English gentleman"

(I, 90), she feels that that tells her all she needs to
know about him. Lord Warburton senses this and, with a
great deal of justice, accuses her of a certain
dangerous superficiality:

"You judge only from the outside . . .

you don't care . . . . You only want

to amuse yourself" (I, 112).
If Isabel rejects Warburton partly because he is a known

type, she accepts Osmond at least partly because he isn't;

158

He resembled no one she had ever seen . . . .

There were other people who were, relatively

speaking, original--original, as one might

say, by courtesy-~such as Mr. Goodwood, as

her cousin Ralph, as Henrietta Stackpole, as

Lord Warburton, as Madame Merle. But in

essentials, when one came to look at them,

these individuals belonged to types already

present to her mind. Her mind contained no

class offering a natural place to Mr. Osmond--

he was a specimen apart (I, 375-76).
The fact that she is willing to extend the courtesy title
"original" to these acquaintances hardly obscures the fact
that by reducing them to types she is not granting them
full humanity. But ironically, though Osmond is of a type
she had not previously encountered, and is of a type she
comes to wish she never had encountered, it is in her
dealings with him that Isabel is the most blameable. As
Lyall Powers puts it:

There is another aspect to Isabel's

weakness: she was herself touched

with the evil so eminently incarnate

in Osmond--the evil of emotional

cannibalism. Her coming to him with

"charged hands" was the equivalent

of purchasing him.15
What is more, Isabel realizes her complicity. She realizes
that, in part, she had "married on a factitious theory, in
order to do something finely appreciable with her money"
(II, 193). She had wanted to "launch his boat for him,"
and to be "his providence." (II, 192).

Thus, Isabel finds herself in a world where evil is

deeply interfused in the social situation. She is betrayed

by those who love her as well as those who are more

159

recognizably her enemies; and in the final summing up she
is betrayed by herself. It is, moreover, with these facts
firmly in mind that we must approach the question of what
Isabel's final gesture--the decision to return to Rome and
Osmond--means. During their final interview, Ralph asks
Isabel if she intends to return to her husband, and she
replies "I don't know--I can't tell" (II, 415). Yet after
her final encounter with Caspar Goodwood these doubts are

cleared up:

She had not known where to turn; but
she knew now. There was a very straight
path (II, 436).

Evidently, then, something happened in this final scene
which crystalized things in Isabel's mind and allowed her
to see what her proper course of action was. The key
passage here is the one in which her impression of his

final embrace is described in detail:

He glared at her a moment through the
dusk, and the next instant she felt

his arms about her and his lips on her
own lips. His kiss was like white
lightning, a flash that spread and
spread again, and stayed; and it was
extraordinarily as if, while she took
it, she felt each thing in his hard
manhood that had least pleased her,
each aggressive fact of his face, his
figure, his presence, justified of its
intense identity and made one with this
act of possession. So had she heard of
those wrecked and under water following
a train of images before they sink.

But when darkness returned she was free (II, 436) _

160

In interpreting this passage, we must resist the temptation,
typified by these lines by William Bysshe Stein, to see the
matter wholly as a question of Isabel's fear of mature
sexual involvement:

More than anything else, in the manner

of James's usual handling of coarse

innuendoes, this passage emphasizes

the animalistic sexual virility of

Goodwood. It in Isabel's mind is

associated with brutal rape; and as

the analogy of drowning so eloquently

argues, it is a forshadowing of death.

This means that for Isabel to give

herself voluntarily in an act of love

would be to lose the sense of deluded

innocence by which she identifies

herself. In the freedom which she

attains for herself she succeeds in 16

her rebellion against maternity. . . .
The problem with this kind of reading is that it so
thoroughly violates the delicate moral sub-structure of
the novel. To be sure, Isabel does not have a sexual
appetite to match Goodwood's "animalistic sexual virility";
but her rejection of this crude form of sexual engagement
doesrmfi:justify the suggestion that she is rejecting all
forms of adult sexuality. We see, moreover, that in a
larger sense the purely sexual element is secondary.
Perhaps most American girls would have married this
successful businessman. Isabel, however, is not like
most American girls--she expects more out of human
relationships--and this fact signifies greatly. For what

Isabel sees is that there is no question of her giving

herself to Goodwood "voluntarily in an act of love"; it

161

is, rather, all a question of "possession" on his part.
If, furthermore, Isabel associates Goodwood's embrace
with "rape", it is because the association is just.
Goodwood may not be a rapist, but he is determined to
have his will of Isabel despite the obvious fact that
she chooses not to marry him. And, to this extent, his
behavior partakes of the brutality which, as she knows,
poisons human relationships.

Isabel can see well enough what happens to women
who seek to escape the confines of a bad marriage. Her
examples are the Countess Gemini, a figure at once
spiteful and sad, and Mrs. Touchette whose withdrawal
from life and its complications will leave her "an old
woman without memories" (II, 407). Even more threatening
is Madame Merle, a figure who, according to Gass' rich
insight, is distressingly akin to Isabel:

Isabel Archer is thus free to try her

wings. She is thrown upon the world.

She becomes the friend of Madame Merle . . .

at bottom, like Isabel, identically

betrayed; like Isabel again, seeking

out her own ruin to protect Pansy . . . .

It is irony of the profoundest sort

that "good" and "evil" in their paths

should cross so closely.17
To this we might add that Madame Merle, when young, was
like Isabel a woman of strong feelings. In Isabel's
development the parallel becomes even more obvious. For:

just as circumstances caused Madame Merle to put her

feelings "in order" and to become the perfect social

162

creature, so, under Osmond's blighting tutelage, does Isabel
pass from a "free, keen girl" to a "fine lady who was
supposed to represent something" (II, 143). Here, as in

Wuthering Heights, we are reminded what a fearful expense

 

of spirit worldly self assurance can expect.

Close though they may be in many respects, Madame Merle
and Isabel are finally very far apart; and what distinguishes
one from the other is that Isabel suffers and learns, not
as in the case of Madame Merle to accommodate herself to the
social world, but to establish her superiority to it. As
Isabel sees in her long fireside meditation:

But this base, ignoble world, it

appeared, was after all what one was

to live for; one was to keep it forever

in one's eye, in order not to enlighten

or convert or redeem it, but to extract

from it some recognition of one's own

superiority. On the one hand it was

despicable, but on the other it afforded

a standard (II, 197).
We see, then, that Isabel's decision to return to Rome is
the sign of her superiority to this "base, ignoble world."
Moreover, what James is unmistakably saying through
Isabel's gesture is that we are most human in our capacity
for moral growth--which implies, of course, both freedom
and choice and the acceptance of the results of these
choices. Thus, Isabel comes to see that no matter how
Madame Merle and Osmond have schemed against her, it was

her choice which ultimately determined her act. Paradoxi-

cally, it is only by returning to the house of bondage that;

163

Isabel can assert her freedom and her humanity. Or in

Dorothy Van Ghent's more elegant phrasing:

Isabel, still seeking that freedom which

is growth, goes back to Osmond's claustral
house, for it is there, in the ruin where
Pansy has been left, that she has placed
roots, found a crevice in which to grow
straightly and freshly, found a fertilizing,
civilizing relationship between conscious-
ness and circumstance. 8

Isabel's life will doubtless not be pleasant, but it will,
at all events, be her life--the life she has freely chosen.

Yet it would be a mistake, finally, to suppose that

The Portrait closes on a note of unrelieved gloom and

 

intimations of stern duty fulfilled. For as Isabel
discovers in her deathbed conversation with Ralph, love is
a powerful concomitant to her moral growth. Significantly,
when the Gardencourt ghost does appear it is in the mild,
kindly figure of Ralph:

She heard no knock, but at the time the

darkness began vaguely to grow grey she

started up from her pillow as abruptly

as if she had received a summons. It

seemed to her for an instant that he was

standing there--a vague, hovering figure

in the vagueness of the room. She

stared a moment; she saw his white face--

his kind eyes; then she saw there was

nothing (II, 418).
It has indeed taken some "miserable knowledge" for this
spirit to appear, but it, in itself, is benign not malignu

Through difficult experience Isabel has learned to feel

as well as to think, and in this knowledge lies the

164

possibility of spiritual regeneration. Ralph tells her
that she will "grow young again," and she senses that there
is something "deeper" (II, 416) than her pain. It is partly
for love of Pansy that Isabel returns to Rome, and it is
love which allows her to pity and forgive Osmond and Madame
Merle. But beyond these attitudes toward specific
individuals, Isabel's experience points toward a more
general truth--namely that freedom and moral growth are
only possible through the offices of love, expressed as
a deep respect for the integrity of human beings. In what
has enormous implications for his later novels, James is
here suggesting that it is only through love that the end-
less cycle of coercion and manipulation can be broken.

It is important, by way of conclusion, to attempt to
arrive at a just appreciation of what James has accomplished

in The Portrait 9T e Lady. This is not easy to state pre-

 

cisely since James did not radically alter his essential

Gothic themes as he moved from The American, through The

 

Portrait 9£.E Lady, to The Wings 9T the Dove and The Golden

 

 

Bowl;lu:deepened them, rather. The moral universe of

The Golden Bowl is familiar to the reader of The American,

 

 

and the development in the intervening novels does not
involve dramatic departures and reversals so much as it
involves a gradual shift in emphasis and degree. Thus,

while The Portrait e£_e Lady is a magnificent novel in its

 

own right, it is not the sophisticated tale of terror that.

the later novels are.

165

The Portrait e£_e Lady develops the Gothic elements of

 

The American in at least two important ways. First of all,

 

Isabel Archer, while recognizably akin to Christopher Newman
and ultimately to such pursued maidens of Gothic fiction as
Emily St. Aubert and Ellena Rosalba, understands her com-
plicity in her fate as they do not. And she uses her new
understanding, her understanding that the Gothic terror is
really the terror of the world, as the basis of an attempt
to transcend the wretchedness of her condition. In this
sense she anticipates and makes possible the incomparably
subtle versions of the Gothic heroine which occur in the
later novels. Similarly, the ambiguous social situation of

The Portrait, wherein the "good" characters are the source

 

of much of the evil, anticipates the "machinations" of pity
and consideration which are among the chief horrors of The

Wings 9: the Dove and The Golden Bowl. If, however, The

 

 

Portrait egfle hegy develops the Gothic, it also maintains
some of the Gothic's instinctive conservatism. For while
there is a prelude to terror at Gardencourt, the terror it—
self is still firmly seated in the Mediterranean south; and
what is true of the setting is equally true of the conven-
tional figures of evil. Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle dc:
anticipate figures such as Merton Densher, Kate Croy, Prince:
Amerigo and Charlotte Stant, but they are more strongly
reminiscent of the Bellegardes. Again this is largely a
matter of tone, but Osmond and Madame Merle are too stylized

to be taken seriously in the way that Kate Croy and Charlxytte

166

Stant must be taken seriously. When, in the later novels,
James set his tale of terror firmly on British soil, and
imbued his conventional figures of evil with the same
intelligence and vitality with which he imbued Isabel Archer,

he completed his own internationalization of the Gothic.

NOTES FOR CHAPTER IV

lLeon Edel, Introd., The Portrait eT e Lady, by Henry
James (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), pp. Vii-viii.

2F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948; rpt. New York:
University Press, 1967), p. 127.

 

 

3Joseph Warren Beach, The Method 9T Henr James (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1918), p. 21 .

4Henry James, The Notebooks e: Henr James, eds. F.O.
Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock ( 9 7; rpt. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 15.

5Henry James, The Portrait e: e Lady (1908; rpt. New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922), p. 364. All sub-
sequent references to the text are to this edition.

6Richard Chase, The American Novel and its Tradition
(New York: Doubleday, 1957), p. 119.

7

 

 

 

 

Edel, p. xvi.

8R.W. Stallman, The Houses that James Built (East
Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1961), p. 16.

 

9Eino Railo, The Haunted Castle: h_Study eg the
Elements of English Romanticism (London: George Routledge

j

_& Sons, 1‘9—2'7). p. 7.

10Henry James, The Art 9: the Novel: Critical Prefaces,
Intro., R.P. Blackmur (1934; rpt. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1950), p. 57.

11William H. Gass, "The High Brutality of Good
Intentions," Accent, 18 (1958), 65.

12

 

 

 

GaSS, 66-67.

13William Veeder, Henry James--The Lessons of the
Master: Popular Fiction and Personal Style Th tHE'Nineteentml
Century (CHicago: The University of Chicago Press, 975 ,

p. I49.

 

 

167

168

l4Gass, 68.

15Lyall H. Powers, "The Portrait 9: e Lady: 'The
Eternal MysterycfifThings,'" Nineteenth-Century Fiction
14 (1959), 149.

16William Bysshe Stein, "The Portrait of a Lady: Vis

 

 

 

Inertia, Western Humanities Review 13 (1959), 190.
17

 

Gass, 69-70.

18Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and
Function (New York: Holt, Rinehart and WifiSton, 1953),
p. 228.

 

THE WINGS 9: THE DOVE: THE TERROR OF CIVILIZED EVIL

 

The Wings e; the Dove, published in 1902, contains all

 

of the Gothic elements which are central to The Portrait e:

 

e Lady. What had, however, changed in the intervening two
decades was James's sense oftflm:potentialities of his sub-

ject. And in this sense, The Wings Q: the Dove develops

 

and refines the Gothicism of The Portrait e£_e Lady every

 

bit as much as that great novel had developed and refined

the Gothicism of The American.

 

The Gothic elements of The Wings 9: the Dove parallel

 

almost exactly those found in the earlier novels. For
instance, the plot of this novel, in which two young
Europeans conspire to deceive a dying girl and thereby
obtain her fortune, uses the same sinister characters as
had the earlier works. Kate Croy and Merton Densher are
quite recognizably the scheming female and passive male
which are found in the paired figures of Madame Merle and
Osmond, Madame de Bellegarde and Urbain. Similarly, the
ultimate act of betrayal, the ultimate transgression, takes
place, as it always does in Gothic fiction, in the world of
Catholic Europe.

Yet given these parallels it is, nevertheless, obvious

that important changes have taken place. Venice, notorious

169

170

at least from the time of the Renaissance as a setting for
vice, luxury, and intrigue, may be the scene of Milly's
betrayal, but the source of this evil is in the society of
contemporary London. Indeed, the "descent" to Venice, to
use Merton Densher's charged term, serves as a rich symbolic
counterpoint to the London action; it is James's way of
making clear how the sins of the British capital are
identical to those of fabled Venice. Much the same is

true of Kate Croy and Merton Densher. While they are quite
prOperly seen as the literary descendants of a host of
Gothic villains, they are also quite obviously products of
a particular civilization. Thus, what James saw with

renewed vigor in the composition of The Wings eT_the Dove

 

 

is that real evil is at home in everyday life, and that
the devices of the literature of terror, fully explored,
are an adequate means of portraying contemporary reality.

The relation of a novel like The Wingegeg the Dove to the

 

earlier Gothic tradition is not one of analogy. but one of
identity. The evil of the Gothic world is the evil of

The Wings eh the Dove.

 

Nothing, perhaps, makes the subtlety and sophistication
of James's treatment of evil more apparent than the fact
that there is a problem deciding whose story The Wing§_e£
£22,2222 is. The most obvious answer is that it is Milly's
Story. in the same way that The Portrait 93 e $.3ch is
Isabel Archer's story and The American is Christopher

Newman's. But this is only partly true, for Milly's

171

experience is foreshortened. We don't get glimpses of her
childhood as we did in the case of Isabel Archer, nor do we
get any direct intimation of her final understanding of her
fate, her reaction at finding herself in the presence of
evil. We simply are not witness to her final interview
with Densher, and her letter is destroyed by Kate unread.l
Significantly, however, it is the experience of the evil
characters, Kate Croy and Merton Densher, which James chooses
to analyze in detail.

While James is concerned with Milly, he is equally
concerned with Kate and Merton and hheTh increasing aware-
ness of the horrible situation they have helped to create.

Thus we find in The Wings egtflm:Dove an increased use of the

 

restricted point of view which was prefigured so brilliantly
in Isabel Archer's fireside meditation. Only here James
uses the technique far more democratically, according to
what he calls his law of "successive centres."2 Not only

do we see this dark drama through Milly's eyes, but through
the eyes of Kate and Densher as well. And even though the
treachery of this pair is finally inescapable, the fact

that we have witnessed them trying to make their way through
the moral fog of London society makes their failings human
failings. As Joseph Ward notes, this is a distinct departure
from the way the evil characters are portrayed in The
Portrait e£_e heey:

Taken singly, the 'villains' of The
Wings have nothing of the absolute

172

malignity that James finds in persons
like Gilbert Osmond, who is driven to
an absolute degree and ruthless in

his tyranny. Nothing of the same can
be said of the malefactors in The Wings,
whose actions and inactions are caused
by common human failings. . . .3

 

As readers, we can no longer distance ourselves from the

source of evil. The recognition that evil in The Wings 9T

 

the Dove is not freakish or bizarre but, in fact, ordinary,

makes us realize that it is potentially our evil as well.

For these reasons, furthermore, The Wings e: the Dove

 

 

occupies in the canon a position roughly analogous to
that occupied by Lewis's 322.3225 in the earlier Gothic
tradition. It is the first novel in which he exhibits a
fully developed awareness that the self is the ultimate
source of the true Gothic horror and that real evil can
exist in people who remain in important ways admirable.
In attempting to explore these problems in more
depth we should begin if not end with a discussion of Milly
since she is the impetus to the thematically significant
action. As is so often the case, James's own critical
remarks provide a useful avenue of approach to the novel.

In the following passage from the Preface to The Wings e:

 

the Dove James is discussing Milly's impact on those

around her:

Somehow, too, at such a rate, one would
see the persons subject to them drawn

in as by some pool of a Lorelei--see

them terrified and tempted and charmed;
bribed away, it may even be, from more
prescribed and natural orbits, inheriting

173

from their connection with her strange
difficulties and still stranger oppor-
tunities, confronted with rare questions
and called upon for new discriminations.4
In other words, Milly functions as a prime mover in the
novel. She is the one, through her money, her freedom,
and her vulnerability who adds the element of danger and
romance to the stale and stifling air of London society.
It is her presence which brings about the possibility of

a deeper moral conflict in the lives of the people she

touches. As was the case in The Portrait eT e Lady, every-

 

body in The Wings e: the Dove has an "interest" in the

 

heroine-~and everybody thereby reduces her to the status
of an object.

Kate and Merton Densher, from this perspective, are
not horrible because they are socially deviant; they are,
rather, horrible because they are typical. Their "plot"
is really just another version of what others have in mind.
Lord Mark would marry Milly for her immense wealth. Aunt
Maude would have Milly marry Densher in order to clear the
way for Kate's marriage to Lord Mark and his title. Even
Susan Stringham, who is in many important respects Milly's
most purely devoted friend, is attracted to her because her
predicament has such rich "literary" overtones as the fabled

5 And, of course, Susan inadvertently

"romantic life itself."
furthers the plot Kate and Densher have hatched by encourag-
ing Densher's attentions to Milly on the grounds that it

could give her something to live for.

174

Such considerations of Milly's predicament should not,
however, lead us to see her as more of a persecuted maiden
than she really is. The temptation to do so is natural
enough giventflmzpowerful literary tradition of heroines
dying because they are too good for a tainted world. If
anything, this temptation is strengthened by the realization
that Milly is a character whose source is in James's bio-
graphy. She is, as he put it, the "ghost" of his cousin
Minny Temple wrapped in "the beauty and dignity of art."6
Admittedly, too, there is a strong element of the pathetic
in the story. Like Clarissa Harlowe, Milly does "turn her
face to the wall" when the world, in the figure of Merton
Densher, reveals its ugly face. Yet for all this, Milly is
far from pathetic; and though she is victimized ultimately,
it is because her decision to embrace life before dying
entails inevitable risks.

The details of Milly's circumstances quite clearly
establish her relation to earlier Gothic heroes and heroines.
Her illness is, of course, romantic to a high degree. And
like many characters in Gothic fiction, including Christopher
Newman and Isabel Archer, she is an orphan. VShe is the
"final flower" of a "luxuriant tribe" which included "free-
living ancestors, handsome dead cousins, lurid uncles," and
beautiful vanished aunts" (I, 111). Such general desolation
suggest the presence of some powerful curse whose obscure
poison is still at work. The practical effect of all of

‘this, moreover, is that she is not constrained by the kinds

175

of practical difficulties most people labor under. Her
illness, her immense wealth, and her lack of immediate
family give her a large measure of freedom. It is the
sort of laboratory situation which makes it possible for
her to pursue the things in life which are most worth
knowing and most worth experiencing.

Like the earlier Gothic heroines, Milly is "free" if
that term has any meaning whatever. But even more important
she, like them, actively pursues her fate. Cautious,
sensitive, properly decorous, Milly always acts, nevertheless,
in ways which lead to greater self awareness and knowledge
of the world. And like all the heroines out of Gothic
fiction she discovers that the greatest excitement, the
greatest danger, greatest intensity of feeling, are derived
from one's relationship with other people. When the last
curtain has been drawn aside and the innermost recesses of
the castle explored, there is still the mysterious elemental
confrontation between the self and others.

In contrast to Isabel Archer, Milly seems to grasp
this truth readily, even intuitively. Whereas Isabel had
to learn that there were harsh human realities behind
picturesque art, Milly sees from the beginning that the
truths most worth knowing are to be found in human relation—
ships. Thus, it is significant that when we first meet
Milly she is seated high in the Swiss Alps, the quintessen-

tial cliche of picturesque art:

176

The whole place, with the descent
of the path and as a sequel to a sharp
turn that was masked by rocks and shrubs,
appeared to fall precipitously and to
become a "view" pure and simple, and a
View of great extent and beauty, but
thrown forward and vertginous. Milly,
with the promise of it from just above,
had gone straight down to it, not
stopping till it was all before her;
and here, on what struck her friend as
the dizzy edge of it, she was seated at
her ease (I, 123).

Here is the Europe of ruined castles and magnificent
scenery--the Europe, in short, which had been fabled in
the guidebooks. And a generation of romantics and
post-romantics had looked to the Alps as the symbol of
heightened consciousness, of interest, and of danger.

Yet with Milly, we get the impression that she is taking
in the scene only as a means of taking the measure of

its magnificent emptiness. Indeed, her immediate reaction
to all of this magnificence is to decide to foresake it

in favor of the social magnificence of London:

The girl brought it out in truth as she
might have brought out a huge confession,
something she admitted herself shy about
and that would seem to show her as
frivolous; it had rolled over her that
what she wanted of Europe was "people,"
so far as they were to be had, and that
if her friend really wanted to know,

the vision of this same equivocal quan-
tity was what had haunted her during
their previous days, in museums and
churches, and what was again spoiling
for her the pure taste of scenery. She
was all for scenery-~yes; but she wanted
it human and personal, and all she could
say was that there would be in London--
wouldn't there?--more of that kind than
anywhere else (I, 134).

177

It is in the juxtaposition of passages like the two quoted
directly above that we get a sense of how fully James
learned to exploit the Gothic formula. Milly is perhaps
the first heroine in the tradition to consciously realize
that a passion for the rich and the strange needn't involve
long voyages or exotic landscapes. She realizes that
everything which is rich and strange can ultimately be
found in the self and in others. Although Milly does not
at this point name Merton Densher as a possible reason for
going to London (Susan Stringham is forced to bring his
name up), it subsequently becomes clear that for Milly,
much of the romance of London life resides in his person.

Milly's progress in London is very much like Newman's
progress in Paris or Isabel Archer's progress at Garden—
court or in Italy. While she is fascinated and intrigued
by the glitter and display of social convention--as a
"romance" or "fairy-tale" is the way she figures it--she
is simultaneously aware that beneath it are dangerous
depths begging to be explored:

Susie had an intense thought and

then an effusion. "My dear child, we
move in a labyrinth."

"Of course we do. That's just the
fun of it!" said Milly with a strange
gaiety. Then she added: "Don't tell
me that--in this for instance--there
are not abysses. I want abysses" (I, 186).

This brief exchange accurately defines the world in which

Milly finds herself as well as her motive for remaining

178

there. Indeed, the prolonged description of Milly's initial
stay at Lancaster Gate serves as an adequate introduction
to the labyrinths and abysses of London life. When, for
example, she tells Lord Mark that "she scarce even then knew
where she was," his reply takes the form of the statement
that "there was no such thing, today in London, as saying
where anyone was" (I, 150). In another phase of the con-
versation Lord Mark as much as tells her that she has been
a success in London because of her money. "Nobody here,"
he tells her "does anything for nothing" (I, 160). As a
result, there can be little wonder that Milly begins to
suspect the possibility of a "sinister motive" in the "ob-
scure depths of a society constituted from far back" (I, 154).
Milly's immediate distrust of Lord Mark and all his
brutal and stupid superciliousness is quite understandable.
It should be noted, however, that though Kate is far
subtler than Lord Mark, Milly's distrust extends to her
as well. Milly is attracted to Kate and grateful for her
attentions, butijsnever entirely free from the notion that
Kate's handsome face and figure hide something unpleasant,
possible sinister. When Milly first meets Kate she finds
her to be a "nicer" version of "the wondrous London girl. . .
conceived from the tales of travelers and the anecdotes of
New York, from old portraits over Thheh and a liberal
acquaintance with the fiction of the day" (I, 171). The
comparative degree is important here because it suggests

that while Kate is "nicer" than the wondrous London girl,

179

she is not quite nice. And as her conversations with Susan
Stringham show, Milly suspects Kate of having "some secret,
some smothered trouble, besides all of the rest of her
history" (I, 172). It is, moreover, precisely Kate's
attitude toward Mrs. Stringham which begins to transform
Milly's uneasiness into the kernel of real suspicion. She
realizes that a world where Susan Stringham is a potential
threat is very much different indeed than her own world:

There were more dangers, clearly, round

about Lancaster Gate than one suspected

in New York or could dream of in Boston.

At all events, with more sense of them,

there were more precautions, and it was

a remarkable world altogether in which

there could be precautions, on whatever

ground, against Susie (I, 182).
Such intimations of "secret smothered troubles," of "history,"
danger, of suspicionsanxiprecautions, help to create the
underlying sensation of terror which is so much a part of
the Gothic appeal of this novel.

Although she exhibits little of Isabel's energy and
recklessness, Milly, like Isabel, is anything but a helpless
victim. It is her fate, and one which she actively embraces,
to seek out and confront the danger which she senses. To
this process she brings admirable resources. She is
resourceful, intelligent, and a close observer of people.
Furthermore, Milly, like everyone else, has her own strategy

for getting along in society. As the following passage

indicates, Milly's "dove-like" nature is in many respects

180

an artful pose contrived to forestall embarassing inquiries
about her health and her conduct:
It gave her straightway the measure of the
success she could have as a dove: that
was recorded in the long look of deep
criticism, a look without a word, that

Mrs. Lowder poured forth. And the word,
presently, bettered it still. "Oh, you

exquisite thing!" The luscious innuendo

of it, almost startling, lingered in the

room, after the visitors had gone, like

an oversweet fragrance. But left alone

with Mrs. Stringham Milly continued to

breath it: she studied again the dove-

like and so set her companion to mere

reporting that she averted all inquiry

into her own case (I, 284).
So Milly continues to charm those around her, using her
meekness, her innocence, and her selflessness as a means
of furthering her ends. This is not meant to suggest that
she is in any sense a malicious schemer; but her active
complicity in her fate does suggest that she is a stronger,
and hence more tragic figure than is commonly allowed.

Although Milly's awakening to the world of horror is

a step-by-step, page-by-page process, it is a process which
can be effectively charted through special attention to
three important recognition scenes. Significantly, each
of these scenes involves the richest of Gothic devices--the
old house or building which speaks so powerfully of the
accumulating influences of the past, and the mysterious
work of art.

The first of these recognition scenes occurs when

Milly confronts the magnificent Bronzino at the "great

181

historic house" at Matcham. Milly's mood is exalted; she
is enjoying "all the freshness of response of her young life,
the freshness of the first and only prime" (I, 209), when
Lord Mark, much as if he were inquiring if she had seen the
castle spectre, asks "have you seen the picture in the house,
the beautiful one that's so like you?" (I, 217). Their
progress it suggests very much a pleasant and beguiling
journey through a labyrinth of history and art:

She got with her companion into the house;

they brushed, beneficiently, past all

their accidents. The Bronzino was, it

appeared, deep within, the long afternoon

light lingered for them on patches of old

colour and waylaid them, as they went, in

nooks and opening vistas (I, 219).
The charm is powerful. Matcham draws round Milly its
"mystic circle" and "things melted together--the beauty
and the history and the facility and the splendid midsummer
glow: it was a sort of magnificent maximum, the pink dawn
of an apotheosis coming so curiously soon" (I, 220). Yet
when Milly does finally come into the presence of the
Bronzino she is overwhelmed by the realization that the
beautiful subject of the painting is "dead, dead, dead"
(I, 221). Death haunts the palace of art; the beast of
the heart of the labyrinth is a masterpiece which reminds
Milly of her own mortality. She sees that the beauty and

splendor of European culture is at once a monument to human

achievement and the tombstone of lost generations.7

182

An equally important, though unarguably less dramatic
scene is the one in which Milly takes sanctuary in the
National Gallery. She has learned from Sir Luke Strett
that her situation is grave, and her interest in Merton
Densher and his possible involvement with Kate are troubling
subjects to her mind. There "among the Titians and the
Turners" (I, 287) in the "quiet chambers, nobly overwhelming,
rich but slightly veiled," she seeks to escape "the personal
question" (I, 288). Yet the personal question comes back
to her rather violently when she recognizes Mertin Densher
and even more violently when she sees that he is accompanied:

She was unable to think afterwards how

long she had looked at him before

knowing herself as otherwise looked

at; all she was coherently to put

together was that she had a second

recognition without his having noticed

her. The source of this latter shock

was nobody less than Kate Croy--Kate

Croy who was suddenly also in thewline.

of vision and whose eyes met her eyes

at their next movement. Kate was but

two yards off--Mr. Densher wasn't alone

(I, 293).
The three of them are, of course, "sublimely civilized"
(I, 295), and Kate soon manages to make Milly "provisionally
take everything as natural" (I, 293). In subsequent inter-
views Kate is even able to convince Milly that she doesn't
love Densher. The moment has had its effect, however, for
Milly's imagination has been alerted to the fact that the

cultural treasurers of Europe may be intimately associated

with the basest and most common arrangements and deceptions.

183

Perhaps the most sinister recognition scene takes place
in the Palazzo Leporelli, the Venetian counterpart to the
haunted house at Matcham and a later version of the Palazzo
Roccanera and the house at Fleurieres:

Palazzo Leporelli held its history still

in its great lap, even like a painted

idol, a solemn puppet hung about with

decorations. Hung about with pictures

and relics, the rich Venetian past, the

ineffaceable character, was here the

presence revered and served . . . (II, 135).
It is in this setting that Milly is once again beset by Lord
Mark, and in this setting also that she begins to understand
how her immense wealth and precarious health could make her
an attractive target for a fortune hunter. The occasion
is a particularly lovely summer day when Venice and the
Palazzo Leporelli show themselves to advantage. Milly is
charmed by the scene in that it suggests the possibility of
a richer more exalted life, but she also realizes that her
vision is an "impossible romance" a "poetry" (II, 147) which
will never be hers to possess. And instead of being charmed
by her titled companion, she senses in his obvious intent to
propose and in his tasteless inquiries about her health the
possibility of some darker design:

With that there came to her a light:

wouldn't her value, for the man who

should marry her, be precisely in the

ravage of her disease? She mightn't

last, but her money would. For a man

in whom the vision of her money should

be intense, in whom it should be most

of the ground for "making up“ to her,
any prospective failure on her part to

184 .

be long for this world might easily

count as a positive attraction. Such

a man, proposing to please, persuade,

secure her, appropriate her for such

a time, shorter or longer, as nature

and the doctors should allow, would

make the best of her, ill, damaged,

disagreeable though she might be, for

the sake of eventual benefits; she

being clearly a person of the sort

esteemed likely to do the handsome

thing by a stricken and sorrowing

husband (II, 149-50).
All of this should be sufficient to complete the portrait
of Milly as an alert young woman with an imagination richly
alive to the possibilities of evil. She sees that making
a convenience of others is the morality of Europe, and she
is capable of imagining the kind of plot which Kate and
Densher set afoot. Consequently, her blindness to what
they are up to is really the result of a sort of willed
innocence; she refuses to believe of them what she could
readily believe of Lord Mark. She sees, and this is of
the essence, that a life without love and trust, where
human relations are reduced to a game of ploy and counter-
ploy, is finally unendurable. Her decision, then, to leave
her money to Densher even in the face of his betrayal is
an affirmation of the triumph of the spirit over a blighted
social world.

Milly's highly developed sense of evil, her ability

to imagine the specific forms treachery could take, sheds
new light on her relationship to earlier Gothic heroines.

For unlike earlier Gothic heroines, particularly those of

Mrs. Radcliffe, Milly maintains her sentimental faith even

185

after a deep personal involvement with the reality of human
treachery. By contrast, Emily St. Aubert, the heroine of

Mrs. Radcliffe's The Mysteries 2T Udolpho, returns from her

 

adventure with her sentimental faith not only intact but

essentially unchallenged. Evil in The Mysteries 9T Udolpho

 

remains in recognizable places and persons and can be
counted on not to stalk about at random. Consequently,
the ultimate adequacy of her sentimental idealism is not
something Emily is forced to deal with. Even Isabel
Archer's experience may be profitably contrasted with
Milly's on this point. As her decision to return to Rome
indicates, she is able to maintain her faith in the
integrity of individual human judgments even though they
may result in profound uneasiness. Yet this is made the
easier because Isabel's fate, as she herself comes to
realize, is intelligible if not deserved. It is difficult,
however, to say anything like this about Milly Theale.
Her innocence is not the relatively simple romantic inno-
cence of Isabel Archer, but far closer to the innocence
which any person of high intelligence would necessarily
have in an unfamiliar social setting. Thus, the heart of

darkness as it appears in The Wings eT the Dove is not overt

 

 

anti-social behavior nor gross, easily recognizable,
failures of perception; it is, rather, social and ordinary
in the highest degree. And Milly is, finally, less an
innocent victim than an idealist who maintains her vision

in a world fundamentally hostile to it.

186

Yet if Milly is a deeper, subtler, more intelligent
version of the typical Gothic heroine, this should not be
allowed to obscure the fact that the real development of
the Gothic in this novel is to be found in the characters
of Kate Croy and Merton Densher, two handsome, intelligent,
and sensitive young people whose fate it is to discover
in themselves a real capacity for evil. Indeed, one of
the chief interests of the novel is the process wherein
these two move from the innocence and playfully sensual
charm of their early walks (Kate compares herself to "the
housemaid giggling to the baker") to a point where they
can scarcely bear to look each other in the face.

It is only a slight exagerration to say of Kate Croy
what Professor Garber has said of Catherine Earnshaw--to
say, that is, that she is a "seasoned version of dark
malevolence . . . from pure English stock." The exagerra-
tion is, in any event, justified if it serves to establish
the point that Kate is a further domesticized version of
the archetypal Gothic villain. For unlike Catherine
Earnshaw, Kate is no child of the Yorkshire moor; she is,
rather, distinctly a London girl with all the social
attitudes and attachments which that term implies. Any
judgment we make of her actions must, therefore, be
founded on the realization that the evil she embodies is
civilized rather than uncivilized in origin. The Gothic

villain, it would seem, can be female as well as male, and

187

can be the product of English drawingrooms as well as
castles in the Apenines.

That James is greatly concerned to show Kate to be a
product of the London life is evident from the amount of
time he spends analyzing her background, particularly her
impossible family situation. In fact, one of the more
telling characteristics of this novel is that we really
know more about the villain than we do about any other

character. The situation in The Portrait e: e Lady was,

 

of course, quite the reverse; it was the relationship
between Isabel's early upbringing and later course of her
career which was examined in detail. Here, however, James
has posed himself a different species of problem altogether.
Here he is concerned with the kind of past which produces a
Gothic villain. And what we immediately perceive in this
regard if that Kate, like Milly, lives under the shadow of

an ancestral curse which she feels most acutely:

Her father's life, her sister's, her
own, that of her two lost brothers-~the
whole history of their house had the effect
of some fine florid voluminous phrase, say
even a musical, that dropped first into
words and notes without sense and then,
hanging unfinished, into no words nor any
notes at all. Why should a set of people
have been put in motion, on such a scale
and with such an air of being equipped for
a profitable journey, only to break down
without an accident, to stretch themselves
in the wayside dust without a reason? (I, 4).

The most immediate manifestation of this ancestral curse is,

of course, Lionel Croy, Kate's horrid father. As the opening

188

scene in his "vulgar little room" makes abundantly clear,
he is perfectly odious. His greed, the deceptions he is
willing to stoop to, and his evasions make Kate, wicked
though she might later turn out to be, seem noble. And
Kate knows only too well that the "dark disasters of her
house" (I, 66) andtfluaunrelieved wickedness of her father
are not the sort of past which can be easily buried and
forgotten. Witness, for example, this chilling but insight-
ful exchange between Kate and Merton Densher:
"Well then," said Kate, "he has done

some particular thing. It's known--only,

thank God, not to us. But it has been

the end of him. You could doubtless find

out with a little trouble. You can ask

about."

Densher for a moment said nothing;
but the next moment he made it up. "I
wouldn't find out for the world, and I'd
rather lose my tongue than put a question."

"And yet it's part of me," said Kate.

"A part of you?"

"My father's dishonor." Then she
sounded for him, but more deeply than ever
yet, her note of proud, still, pessimism.
"How can such a thing as that not be the
great thing in one's life?" (I, 68).

In this case, the father has doubly cursed the daughter.

For not only has he left her in financial distress, but he
has also left her with the kind of imagination which can
never be satisfied with cramped quarters and meagre budgets.
And worst of all, he has left her an inheritance of pessi-
mism; she is hopeless that life can really be better.

Temptation for Kate is represented by the figure of

Maude Lowder--an elderly and wealthy aunt who wishes to

189

parlay Kate's handsomeness and vitality into a socially
advantageous marriage for the family. In this scheme she
is aided by Mr. Croy and Kate's sister, Mrs. Condrip, both
of whom hope that any success Kate might have through Aunt
Maude will eventually benefit them. Kate, however, sees
quite clearly that living with Aunt Maude on Aunt Maude's
terms is inconsistent with being morally virtuous. She
sees that she will, in effect, be selling herself-~not in
the common, vulgar sense--but in the sense that her most
intimate personal attachments will ultimately be determined
by social considerations. At one point she figures herself
as a "tembling kid" about "to be introduced into the cage
of the lioness" (I, 29). On another occasion she has this
remarkable insight into what Aunt Maude is and what she

represents:

She was a complex and subtle Britannia,

as passionate as she was practical, with

a reticule for her prejudices as deep

as that other pocket, the pocket full

of coins stamped in her image, that the
world knew her best by. She carried on,
in short, behind her aggressive and
defensive front, operations determined

by her wisdom. It was, in fact, we have
hinted, as a besieger that our young lady,
in the provisioned citadel, had for the
present most to think of her, and what
made her formidable in this character

was that she was unscrupulous and immoral.
So, at all events, in silent sessions and
a youthful off-hand way, Kate conveniently
pictured her: what this sufficiently
represented being that her weight was in
the scale of certain dangers--those dangers
that, by our showing, made the younger
woman linger and lurk above, while the
elder, below, both militant and diplomatic,

190

covered as much of the ground as possible.
Yet what were the dangers after all, but
just the dangers of life and of London?
Mrs. Lowder gee London, gee life--the
roar of the siege and the thick of the
fray (I, 32).

Kate's reflections at this point anticipate James's later

comments intjm:Preface to The American. She realizes that

 

the dangers and terrors she faces are inextricably bound
up intimasocial life of London, and that while they may
"look like nothing," they "involve the sharpest hazards to
life and honour."

Furthermore, it is in Kate's early deliberations that
we recognize her identity with a figure like Richardson's
Lovelace, in so many ways the progenitor of the typical
Gothic villain, as well as with more obvious examples of
the type such as Father Schedoni and Melmoth. Like these
earlier characters, Kate is possessed of a certain intellec-
tual honesty. She understands very well the principles on
which the world operates, and is able to assess her own
situation clearly and realistically. She sees that the
"world was different . . . from her rudimentary readings"
and that "material things spoke to her" (I, 28). It is,
moreover, a world where "the more you gave of yourself the
less of you was left" (I, 33). Kate "had seen the general
show too early and too sharply" (I, 65), but instead of
being horrified by the world's ugly face she quite con-

sciously decides to plunge in and swim with the current.

191

In the following passage Kate's thoughts reveal her attitude

toward the "monster" of London society:

. . .it might on some sides be a strange

and dreadful monster, calculated to devour

the unwary, to abase the proud, to

scandalize the good; but if one had to

live with it one must . . . learn how (I, 277).

It is clear, then, that Kate embarks on the adventure
of her life with a keen appreciation of the issues involved.
Yet it would be a mistake to see her as entirely cynical
and debased. If nothing else, Kate is loyal to her family--
so much so, in fact, that she offers to live with them in
poverty rather than dishonor herself by moving in with

Aunt Maude:

"But you have offered to live with
your sister?"

"I would in a moment if she'd have
me. That's all my virtue--a narrow
little family feeling. I've a small
stupid piety--I don't know what to call
it." Kate bravely sustained it; she
made it out. "Sometimes, alone, I've
to smother my shrieks when I think of
my poor mother. She went through things--
they pulled her down; I know what they
were now--I didn't then, for I was a
pig; and my position compared with hers,
is an insolence of success. That's what
Marian keeps before me; that's what
Papa himself, as I say, so inimitably
does. My position's a value, a great
value, for them both"--she followed and
followed. Lucid and ironic, she knew
no merciful muddle. "It's hhe_value--
the only one they have" (I, 71).

What becomes apparent from all of this is that Kate's pride,

her love of material things, her very real sense of honor,

192

and her family loyalties createaiprison of conflicting
demands from which she cannot easily extricate herself.
She doesn't want to live with Aunt Maude, for that would
be dishonorable, yet she cannot live with her family
because they, desiring the financial benefits of her
attachment, won't have her. Immediate marriage to Densher
is out of the question because they haven't (she thinks)
sufficient means and because her family would disapprove.
Thus trapped, Kate settles on intrigue as the best way to
harmonize the chaotic elements of her life--an intrigue
which involves the manipulation of all those around her:
most particularly the rich young heiress, Milly Theale.
Like most villains in the Gothic tradition, Kate
succeeds beautifully for a while. Through her "infernal
cleverness" she manages to hold Densher's love while con-
vincing Aunt Maude that she feels nothing for him; she
manages, also, to keep the odious Lord Mark at bay. Above
all else, she manages to persuade Densher to give the
impression that he is reciprocating Milly's obvious love
for him. Yet Kate is also like most Gothic villains in
that her plan is doomed to failure--not, it should be
emphasized, because of any failure of energy or will on
her part, but because the whole conception is flawed. Long
before the final scene with Densher, the multiplying
ironies of Kate's condition alert the acute reader to
the fact that all is not going well. She is, for example,

forced to prostitute herself to her lover in order to keep

193

her sceme going. And it is significant that it is Lord
Mark, the most debased and stupid character in the novel,
who first sees through her plans--a clear indication of
just how sordid they really are. But the greatest irony
of all is that, materially, she gets almost exactly what
she wants. Milly does fall in love with Densher and does
leave him the money, but it is the fact that she does so
despite their scheme not because of it that makes all of
the difference.

The one thing which Kate cannot accurately predict is
the spiritual change which Milly's action brings about in
Merton Densher. Nowhere is this clearer than in the scene
where Densher, just back from Venice, urges her to marry
him immediately, before they learn the contents of Milly's
will, in order that their scheming will appear as only "an
ugly madness . . . a bad dream" (II, 348). Kate's reply
to this is "I don't see, you know, what has changed" (II,
348). Because, of course, from her purely material point
of view nothing has changed. Milly was going to die anyway
and had no heirs with a greater claim to her fortune, so
there could be no harm in Densher being "kind" to her.

The fact that such machinations deny Milly her humanity and
reduce her to the statue of an object does not seem to
matter to her. Similarly, Kate destroys the letter to
Densher in which Milly explains her final actions--destroys,
that is, Milly's spiritual testament--but has no scruple

about openingtflmaletter from New York which gives the

194

monetary details of Milly's bequest. The guality of Milly's
experience does not count for Kate, and she thereby stands
indicted of furthering her own ends by manipulating the
feelings of others--the classic mark of the Gothic villain.
Like Ambrosio, for instance, Kate is a character of

immense intelligence, vitality, and will. Densher, and
through him James, does hertflmyjustice of taking note of
what a remarkable person she might have been in other
circumstances:

What a person she would be if they hee

been rich-—with what a genius for the

so-called great life, what a presence

for the so-called great house, what a

grace for the so-called great positions (II, 394) .
The fact that Kate's crimes are indicative of wider social
failings does not, finally, exonerate her. It does, however,
serve to remind us how incompatible the great life is with
moral virtue. And to that extent it is an effective answer
to those critics who argue that James is an apologist for
the social class she portrays.8

Merton Densher is in many respects the passive male

most characteristic of James's fiction. He seems at least
slightly out of his depth in a world controlled by women.
There are subtle nuances of behavior and conversation which
go over his head, and he seems always to be in the embaras-
sing position of having to have even the most basic of
social truths spelled out to him. Yet as Christof Wegelin

notes, his very passivity renders him a species of everyman,

195

the protagonist of a "morality play" in which the "good and
bad angel" vie for possession of his soul.9

Densher's personal qualities render him James's single
most effective device for involving the reader directly with
the evil at the center of the novel's action. Like Densher,
most readers of James feel themselves to be literate and
s0phisticated, and perhaps like him enjoy a certain smug
satisfaction in being more aware of the difficulty of moral
problems than is the greater mass of humanity. And to the
extent that we share Densher's perspective we are fooled as
he is fooled. We too get lost in the moral labyrinth of
James's world only to discover in the end that the world is
a much more dangerous place than we could have imagined,
and that our imaginations are much less adequate to deal
with it than we could ever have believed.

The great irony of Densher's life is that he is aware
of so many things. He is intelligent--as intelligent, in
fact, as anyone in the novel, but even this can't save him.
It is Densher, for example, who first shows signs of
possessing the fine literary eye which can perceive the
horrors which are concealed behind the external opulence of
Lancaster Gate:

It was the language of the house itself
that spoke to him, writing out for him,
with surpassing breadth and freedom,
the associations and conceptions, the
ideals and the possibilities of the
mistress. Never, he flattered himself,

had he seen anything so gregariously
ugly--operatively, ominously so cruel.

196

He was glad to have found this last name

for the whole character; "cruel" somehow

played into the subject for an article--

that his impression put straight into his

mind. He would write about the heavy

horrors that could still flourish, that

lifted their undiminished heads, in an

age so proud of its short way with false

gods (I, 78).
The effect here is quintessentially Gothic. Densher, a child
of the enlightenment, feels superior to the "false gods" his
age continues to worship. Yet, ironically, he too is fated
to suffer spiritual desolation at their altar. Though Aunt
Maude's drawingroom is far removed from the castle of
Lindenberg in Lewis's The Monk, Densher's attitude toward
the "heavy horrors" he sees parallels the attitude of
Raymond and Agnes toward the Bleeding Nun. Raymond and
Agnes draw cartoons of the Bleeding Nun and treat her, on
the whole, as an amusing local legend. In the end, of
course, the Bleeding Nun is revealed as the wrathful spirit
of a dead ancestor who carries off the pair and holds them
in bondage until atonement is made. Similarly, Densher
belittles these horrors, sees them in fact as the "subject
for an article," only to discover in the end that he too
has been swept away by the brutal materialism which is the
ancestral curse of his culture.

Much later in the novel it is Densher who realizes

that there is evil precisely in the elegance of Venice.

Take, for example, the following passage from the period

when Densher is last in Venice:

197

There were stretches of the gallery

paved with squares of red marble,

greasy now with salt spray; and the

whole place, in its huge elegance,

the grace of its conception and the

beauty of its detail, was more than

ever like a great drawing room, the

drawing room of Europe, profaned and

bewildered by some reverse of fortune (II, 261).
As readers we are now capable of passing over an imaginative
bridge of Densher's construction. For it is Densher who
first senses the symbolic identity of Venice, "the drawing
room of Europe," and Aunt Maude's own drawing room. This
sense of identity is only confirmed when we consider that
Lord Mark, and all that he represents, is associated with
the Piazza San Marco, the very center of Venice; the symbol
of St. Mark, the evangelist, is the 1ion--which in turn
suggests Aunt Maude, the "lioness" of Lancaster Gate. Yet
Densher's vision is only partial; he is sensitive to the
imagery of crass and crushing materialism which surrounds
him, but he fails to realize the extent to which he himself
has been corrupted. When, after Milly refuses to see him,
the revelation does come, it is predictably humiliating.
He is forced to see that he, who had always prided himself
on his sophistication and moral acuity, is in reality a vul-
gar fortune hunter who has repayed love with.ruthless deceit.
And Venice, the city of beauty, of arrangements, of art,
shows it hidden ugly face as all of nature rebels:

It was a Venice all of evil . . . a Venice

of cold lashing rain from a low black sky,

of wicked wind ranging through narrow
passages . . . (II, 259).

198

Densher had felt that he could know evil without
really being touched by it. That this is not so is made
clear to him only in retrospect when he begins to reflect
upon the kinds of grim games they have all been playing

with Milly's life:

He had not only never been near the facts
of her condition--which had been such a
blessing for him; he had not only, with
all the world, hovered outside an impene-
trable ring fence, within which there
reigned a kind of expensive vagueness,
made up of smiles and silences and
beautiful fictions and priceless arrange—
ments, all strained to breaking; but he
had also, with everyone else as he now
felt, actively fostered suppressions
which were in the direct interest of
everyone's good manner, everyone's pity,
everyone's really quite generous ideal.
It was a conspiracy of silence, as the
cliche went, to which no one had made

an exception, the great smudge of
mortality across the picture, the shadow
of pain and horror, finding in no quarter
a surface of spirit or of speech that
consented to reflect it. "The mere
aesthetic instinct of mankind----!" our
young man had more than once, in the
connection, said to himself; letting

the rest of the proposition drop, but
touching again thus sufficiently on the
outrage even to taste involved in one's
having to see. So then it had been--a
general coޤEious fool's paradise, from
which the specified had been chased like
a wounded animal (II, 299).

Here as everywhere in the Gothic the "mere aesthetic instinct
of mankind," the source of so much grace and beauty, can

become a source of terror when it is used to control and

limit the possibilities of human life--when, that is, it

199

becomes a means of ignoring "the great smudge of mortality
across the picture."

From this we see that Densher is finally both a villain
and a victim. He has, of course, "made a convenience" of
another human being, and his villany is, therefore, inescap-
able. Yet he is a victim in that the evil he commits is
not the product of conscious malice alone, but of human
fraility, a far deeper and subtler failure of perception
as well. What is more, Densher partakes of a larger dignity
in that he makes no effort to diminish the seriousness of
what he has done. Significantly, he does not reject Kate
out of hand. He would marry her without the money in the
hopes that through love they might "bury in the dark
blindness of each other's arms the knowledge of each other
that they couldn't undo" (II, 392). To marry with the money
is, however, unthinkable; it would deny the importance and
validity of what, at enormous cost, has been learned.

A final assessment of this novel reveals that it is

greater far than The Portrait 2£.E Lady and incomparably

 

greater than The American. And to a large extent this is

 

so because the Gothic terror of The Wings e: the Dove is

 

far more real, far less easy to put aside than it had been
in the earlier novels. Kate Croy's humanity and her
association with the forms and conveniences of our culture
make her a more unsettling figure than had been Gilbert
Osmond or Madame Merle--to say nothing of the Bellegardes.

And in the experience of Merton Densher we get a chilling

200

glimpse of the possibility that the real Gothic terror may
reside in a terrible gulf between perception and knowledge
which sits at the dark heart of human affairs. Yet for
these very reasons it is inaccurate to say, as F.O.

Matthiessen does, that The Wings e: the Dove is James's
10

 

masterpiece. The problem is, precisely, that The Wings

 

e; the Dove is James's most pessimistic novel. What he was
to call the "Medusa head of life" appears to have been most

11 Although Densher does

threatening to him at this point.
assert his moral superiority to the general show, we are
aware that, as so often occurs in Gothic and sentimental
novels, he is simultaneously acknowledging his weakness in
the face of the evil he perceives. That the moral
imagination held within it the possibility of redeeming
society as well as of establishing one's superiority to it

was something James could not at this point conceive. It

remained for James's true masterpiece, The Golden Bowl, to

 

 

demonstrate how the old Gothic terror might be traced to its

last hiding place and therein be overcome.

NOTES FOR CHAPTER V

1In his Preface to The Wings of the Dove, James speaks
of the second half of the novel as being "false and deformed,"
as a result of a regrettable but necessary "economy of compo-
sition." Aesthetically there might be something to this in
that the foreshortening of Milly's experience in the second
volume does transgress the tight rounded structure of which
James was so enamored. From our point of view, however, it
is far more interesting to note how the problem of evil, as
portrayed in the figures of Kate Croy and Merton Densher,
could so warp and distort the novel's aesthetic structure.
See: Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces,
Intro., R. P. Blackmur) 1934; _rpt. New York: Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons, 1950), pp. 302- 306.

 

 

 

2The Art eT_the Novel, p. 296.

3Joseph A. Ward, The Imagination of Disaster: Evil in
the Fiction QT Henr James (Lincoln: The University of
Nebraska Press, ), p. 129.

4

 

 

 

 

The Art eT the Novel, p. 291.

 

5Henry James, The Winge of the Dove, 2 vols. (New York:
Charles Scribner' s Sons, 1909), p. _107. All subsequent re-
ferences to the text are to this edition.

6Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother (1914; rpt.
London: W. H. Allen, 1959561—'p. 544.

 

 

7Although the context is different, the discussion here,
as well as the subsequent discussion of Lord Mark and Milly
at the Palazzo Leporelli, follow closely F.O. Matthiessen,
Henry James, The Ma'or Phase (London: Oxford University
Press, 1944), p. 65-66.

8See Maxwell Geismar, Henry James and The Jacobites
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963).

9Christof Wegelin, The Image of Europe in Henry James
(Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1958), p. 107.

10

 

 

 

Matthiessen, p. 43.

11Henry James, The Notebooks of Henrngames, eds. F. O.
Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (1947; rpt. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 321.

201

 

 

THE GOLDEN BOWL: THE GOTHIC TEXT OF LIFE

 

James's characterization of Merton Densher suggests a
useful method of approaching the richly complex problems of

his greatest novel, The Golden Bowl. Any inclination to

 

feel superior to Densher, to feel that the evil in which he
becomes embroiled is somehow easily recognizable and easily
avoidable, is suppressed by the realization that he is

literate sensitive and informed. In The Golden Bowl, James

 

has carried the whole process one step further. For if the
reader contemplates Densher's fate, he participates in the
fate of the Prince and Maggie; and by placing the terrors

of experience in the respective consciousnesses of this pair
James succeeds in making them more acutely real. Little can
be gained by pretending that the novel does not thereby
become difficult, but it is difficulty with a purpose--not
the product of James's senility as F.R. Leavis asserts.1

It was, above all James's intention to portray the difficulty
of acting morally when imperfect perception is a reality of
the human condition.

Thus, the reader of The Golden Bowl becomes an active

 

participant in the moral drama which it embodies; and the
densities of James's prose are but the reflection of his
attempt to recreate the moral labyrinth of ordinary social

life. The effect of the opening passage depicting the
202

203

shaded faces and "huge beribboned hats" of London's Bond
Street is that of immersing us directly in the action.

It is August, just before the last of the fashionable
would leave London for the summer, and Prince Amerigo is
taking a solitary ramble through one of the city's most
fashionable districts. From this point on, whether the
perspective is Amerigo's or Maggie's, we share the baffle-
ment of the character. We must struggle to employ our
intelligence and moral sense even as they struggle to
employ theirs. As a result, we see with an immediacy not
otherwise possible how difficult it is to function morally
in a complex civilization.

Gone are the simple Gothic polarities of The American,

 

The Portrait 2£.2 Lady, and, even, of The Wings of the Dove,

 

 

and in their stead we find a far more sophisticated version

of the old terror. For in the world of The Golden Bowl good

 

and evil are often appallingly alike. Indeed, a review of
the critical literature reveals that there is by no means
a universal agreement as to who the villains in this novel
are.2 Nor is this mere critical perversity. For while I
will argue that good and evil are finally distinguishable

in The Golden Bowl, it is with the awareness that, as was

 

the case in The Portrait gf‘a Lady, the "good" characters

 

have evil characteristics, and have, consciously or un-
consciously, helped to create a situation where villainy
can flourish. Here, however, this theme is treated with

a sophistication which makes Ralph Touchett's "artistic"

204

interest in Isabel's life seem almost crude. And in the end
the villainy appears less the product of malevolence or in-
human scheming than the product of flawed human beings, with
inevitably flawed perception, Operating in a morally ambig-
uous setting. As Joseph Ward puts it: "It is the human
situation itself which produces the intense moral evil."3
Adam Verver's role is particularly relevant here. As
F.O. Matthiessen quite accurately remarks, "the character
most comparable to Adam Verver in James's earlier work is

Christopher Newman, in The American."4 And, indeed, the

 

innocence suggested by their respective names, coupled with
their status as self-made millionaires from the American
west, makes this comparison valid. Yet insofar as Adam is
figured as a "pirate" or "plunderer" whose intention it is
to "rifle the Golden Isles" his character is somewhat
sinister; and when, as in the case of Amerigo, he makes
human beings part of his collection, he suggests Gilbert
Osmond. And for the reader familiar with the specific
forms of Osmond's fiendishness, the following remark by
Maggie to the Prince can only be unsettling:

"You're at any rate a part of his collection,"

she had explained--"one of the things that

can only be got over here. 'You're a rarity,

an object of beauty, an object of price.

You're not perhaps absolutely unique, but

you're so curious and eminent that there

are very few others like you--you belong

to a class about which everything is known.
You're what they call a morceau de musee."5

205

Maggie and Adam feel comfortable with Amerigo because they
feel they know everything there is to know about him; but,
as always in the novels we have been discussing, the attempt
to impose one's limited imagination upon others has evil
consequences.

In her own way, Fanny Assingham is guilty of this same
kind of "collecting." Fanny is in many respects a sympathe-
tic character. Though slightly ridiculous, she is warm and
highly intelligent, and her practical instincts do, finally,
help redeem the situation. However, her "irrepressible
interest in other lives" (I, 254) suggests Ralph Touchett
and the kind of evil he had helped set afoot. Fannie prides
herself on having "made" the Prince's marriage and decides
to try to do the same for Charlotte--all because it is
"great fun" (I, 88). Yet intelligent as she is, her calcu-
lations fail and the situation goes badly awry.

What Fanny couldn't calculate was how Maggie, through
her innocent efforts to do so much for Charlotte and her
father, could help to create the sort of unnatural situation
where evil could flourish. As Fanny observes with respect
to Maggie, "her feverish little sense of justice" brought
Charlotte and Amerigo together "as her grossest misconduct
couldn't have done" (I, 396). What begins to emerge, then,
is the distinct impression that it is this particular con-
figuration of characters in this particular place which
leads to the creation of evil, not any one character alone.

To quote Fanny once again:

206

"It's their mutual consideration, all
round, that has made it the bottomless
gulf; and they're really so embroiled
but because, in their way, they've been
so improbably good" (I, 394).

There is great evil at work in the world of The Golden Bowl,

 

but it is subtler than we have been accustomed to, and it

is probably the product of a conflict between habits of mind
and certain culturally induced attitudes rather than some-
one's terrifying will.

These difficulties become the more apparent when we
consider a character like Prince Amerigo. As the Gothic
formula dictates, he is an Italian nobleman with a family
history which connects him with the accumulated horrors of
the past. Yet as the following passage suggests, James is
aware enough of the literary conventions he is in touch
with to be able to manipulate them for his own purposes:

A sobriety that might have consorted with
failure sat on his handsome face, con-
structing regular and grave, yet at the
same time oddly and, as might be, func-
tionally almost radiant, with its dark blue
eyes, its dark brown moustache and its
expression no more sharply "foreign" to
an English view than to have caused it
sometimes to be observed of him with a
shallow felicity that he looked like a
"refined" Irishman (I, 4).
Nor, really, is there any good reason why the Prince should
be out of place in London. His English is perfect to the
point that "no note of strangeness remained." It is the

language he finds "convenient, in life, for the greatest

number of relations . . . oddly, even for his relation

207

with himself" (I, 5-6). As the opening paragraph of the
novel makes clear, furthermore, London is the modern metro-
polis which most nearly approximates the glory, the grandeur,

and the cruelty of ancient Rome:

The Prince had always liked his London,
when it had come to him; he was one of
the Modern Romans who find by the Thames
a more convincing image of the truth of
the ancient state than any they have left
by the Tiber. Brought up on the legend
of the City to which the world payed
tribute, he recognized in the present
London much more than in contemporary
Rome the real dimensions of such a case.
If it was a question of an Im erium, he
said to himself, and if one w1shed, as

a Roman, to recover a little the sense

of that, the place to do so was on London
Bridge, or even, on a fine afternoon in
May, at Hyde Park Corner (I, 3).

The greed and ambition of Gothic villains such as Montoni
or Schedoni are paralleled here by this pleasant young
Italian's easy, even unconscious assumption that a large
measure of the world's material comfort is his birthright.

As F.O. Matthiessen originally noted and Joel Porte

develops at some length, The Golden Bowl is at least

 

partially the story of Prince Amerigo's journey into
uncharted waters--his journey in discovery of the New World.6
For if he is comfortable with the old European ethic,
embodied now in London, he finds his American friends to be

strange phenomena indeed. Significantly, the very "white-

ness" of their innocence reminds him of The Narrative of

 

Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe's eerie variation of the Gothic:

 

208

He remembered to have read, as a boy,
a wonderful tale by Allan Poe, his prospec-
tive wife's countryman--which was a thing
to show, by the way, what imaginations
Americans could have: the story of the
shipwrecked Gordon Pym, who, drifting in
a small boat further toward the North Pole--
or was it the South?--than anyone had ever
done, found at a given moment before him a
thickness of white air that was like a
dazzling curtain of light, concealing as
darkness conceals, yet the color of milk
or of snow. There were moments when he
felt his own boat move upon some such
mystery. The state of mind of his new
friends, including Mrs. Assingham herself,
had resemblances to a great white curtain (I, 22).

As Matthiessen remarks, Amerigo is "used to curtains of
black and doesn't know what to expect in Maggie's realm
of moral innocence where the existence of evil seems to

7

be lost in a shroud of 'white mist.'" What all of this

suggests is the possibility that the Gothic formula is
susceptible to interesting turns and reversals, and that
the old world "villain" can be the victim of people and
attitudes he cannot understand. In another remarkable
passage Amerigo hints that if the moral sense of old
Europe can be figured as the "tortuous stone staircase"
of an old castle, the American moral sense can be figured
by the "lightning elevator" of an office building:

"I should be interested," she presently

remarked, "to see some sense you don't

possess."

Well, he produced one on the spot.

"The moral, dear Mrs. Assingham. I

mean, always, as you others consider it.

I've of course something that in our

poor dear backward Rome sufficiently

passes for it. But it's no more like
yours than the tortuous stone staircase--

209

half ruined into the bargain!--in some
castle of our quattrocento is like the
"lightning elevator" in one of Mr.

Verver's fifteen-story buildings.

Your moral sense works by steam—~it

sends you up like a rocket. Ours is

slow and steep and unlighted, with so

many of the steps missing that--well

that it's as short, in almost any case,

to turn round and come down again" (I, 31).

 

In underlying suggestion, of course, is that from the per-
spective of Europe the moral sense which works by steam can
generate its own terror and awe. And the Gothic reversal
becomes complete when we see Amerigo pine for the "lost
paradise" of the "big black palace" which he familiarly
calls the "Palazzo Nero" (I, 164).

One characteristic of Maggie's moral sense is that she
cannot imagine that there are others--and this contributes
greatly to the precariousness and falsity of the Prince's
position. What, indeed, is he supposed to do with the
innocence of a family in which "duplicity, like 'love,‘
had to be joked about. It couldn't be 'gone into'?" Amerigo
tries to tell Maggie that he has depths beneath the public
self with the charming historical name which so enthralls
her--but instead of warning her this only serves to make
him more attractive. Amerigo comes to see that while the
Ververs value him as a fine specimen of old European
nobility, they don't realize that the subjects they so
fear, love and duplicity, are intimately associated with

the qualities they so value:

210

There were situations which were ridiculous,
but that one couldn't yet help, as for
instance when one's wife chose, in the

most unusual way, to make one so. Precisely
here, however, was the difference; it had
taken poor Maggie to invent a way so
extremely unusual--yet to which, none the
less, it would be too absurd that he should
merely lend himself. Being thrust, system-
atically, with another woman, and a woman
one happened, by the same token to exceedingly
like, and being so thrust that the theory

of it seemed to publish one as idiotic or
incapable--this was a predicament of which
the dignity depended all on one's own
handling. What was supremely grostesque,

in fact, was the essential opposition of
theories-~as if a galantuomo, as he at least
constitutionally conceived galantuomini,
could do anything but_blush to "go about"

at such a rate with such a person as Mrs.
Verver in a state of childlike innocence,
the state of our primitive parents before
the fall (I, 335).

The opposition of theories is complete, for whereas the
Ververs would find even the hint of illicit relations
grounds for shame and embarassment, the Prince is embarassed
to have it generally supposed that his relation to Charlotte
is innocent. In his more sexually mature world it is far
more normal for handsome young men and women in their degree
of social intimacy to be physically intimate as well. We
see, finally, that Amerigo's association of the Verver's
innocence with the prelapsarian innocence of Adam and Eve
is highly significant. The Verver's innocence is, as Joseph
Ward notes, "a kind of evil in itself" in a "fallen world."8
None of this should be taken to suggest that James is
condoning adultery; nor should it be taken to suggest that

James was unaware of the dubious nature of the Prince's

211

moral view--that of "doing the best for one's self one can--
without injury to others" (I, 31). What James does, however,
see in this novel, and see more clearly than ever before, is
that even the most moral code of conduct can be the source
of evil when it is imposed in ignorance of the conditions of
life as it is commonly lived. And as will subsequently
become clearer in the discussion of Maggie, the Prince's
philosophy is not wholly corrupt. If it contains the
potential for selfishness and moral laxity, it is also the
product of long and rich social experience. Properly under-
stood, the Prince's philosophy can be a guide to civilized,
if not perfect conduct.

Though Charlotte Stant proves to be more villainous
than Amerigo, and is, in fact, the closest James gets in

The Golden Bowl to creating a conventional figure of evil,

 

she, like him, is to a certain extent a victim of circum-
stances. She doesn't so much plan the ensuing evil as
drift into it. And there is a very real sense in which
her guilt lies merely in not having taken extraordinary
trouble to avoid being thrown into a close relation to the
Prince. Here again the root of the problem is the unnatural
set of circumstances which the Ververs create. It is
difficult to imagine what physical and emotional satisfac-
tions married life can have for Charlotte when her husband
treats her "as of less importance to him than some other
women"--Adams interest in his daughter being "the greatest

affection of which he is capable" (I, 262). Like Amerigo,

212

Charlotte has a spouse who ignores her; hence the note of
exasperation in the following speech is perfectly under-
standable:
"What do they really suppose," she asked,
"becomes of one?--not so much sentimentally
or morally, so to call it, and since that
doesn't matter; but even just physically,
materially, as a mere wandering woman" (I, 305).
Husbandless, childless, bored, and thrown by perverse cir-
cumstances into the company of a man she exceedingly likes,
Charlotte quite naturally falls from the grace of her
married state.
The naturalness and sincerity (Hi the passion Charlotte
and the Prince feel for one another is a subject worthy of
some added emphasis. Particularly worth noting is the way

in which their relation can be contrasted with the relation

between Kate Croy and Merton Densher in The Wings of the

 

Egyg. Although, Kate and Merton do display a plaful,
youthful eroticism early in the novel, sex is finally for
them a means of manipulation. Sex is the price Merton
exacts and Kate pays to keep their sordid scheme going.

By contrast, sex between Charlotte and the Prince is the
result of passion not policy. Their involvement is the
result of giving in to a strong and long-felt passion in a
situation which makes it only too easy to do so. Thus
their "adultry," while a betrayal, is the result of
feeling and thereby innocent of the sin of cold hearted

calculation. The scene where Charlotte comes to the Prince

213

with her "handsome rain-freshened face" is particularly
revealing of their deep sensual attraction. The sight of
her with her casual dress and her air of happy freedom
evoke for Amerigo and the almost overpowering memories of
youthful love:

The sense of the past revived for him

nevertheless as it hadn't yet done:

it had made that other time somehow

meet the future close, interlocking

with it, before his watching eyes, as

in a long embrace of arms and lips,

and so handling and hustling the pre-

sent that this poor quantity scarce

remained sufficiently there, to be

wounded or shocked (I, 298).
Admittedly, this is the Prince's impression, but there is
no evidence to suggest that it is a vision of things
Charlotte does not share. Consequently, whatever conclu-
sions we want to draw about the conduct of this pair, it
should be apparent that it contained little if anything
that was truly loathsome.

It can be instructive to compare and contrast

Charlotte Stant and Kate Croy in other ways as well.
Kate is quite obviously the Jamesian villainess Charlotte
most resembles. Both are dark, handsome, marvelously
energetic women. Though we know little of Charlotte's
family, we do know that she, like Kate, has been brought
up with an imagination too rich to be satisfied by
impoverished means. Like Kate also she is willing and

able to face the fact that the material world speaks to

her insistently. Yet despite these obvious similarities

214

of character and attitude, Kate and Charlotte do differ in
important ways. Whereas Kate quite consciously embarks on
an ugly intrigue, Charlotte cautiously searches for the

safe path. Unlike Kate, whose sole virtue is a small family
feeling, Charlotte shows signs of real moral awareness. In
the scene where Adam Verver proposes to her, she is really

quite scrupulous.

"I won't pretend I don't think it would
be good for me to marry. Good for me,
I mean," she pursued, "because I'm so
awfully unattached. I should like to be
a little less adrift. I should like to
have a home. I should like to have an
existence. I should like to have a motive
for one thing more than another--a motive
outside myself. In fact," she said, so
sincerely that it almost showed humour,
"in fact, you know, I want to be married.
It's well,--it's the condition."

"The condition--?" He was just vague.

"It's the state, I mean. I don't
like my own. 'Miss', among us all is
too dreadfu1--except for a shop girl.
I don't want to be a horrible English
old maid."

"Oh, you want to be taken care of.
Very well then, I'll do it."

"I dare say it's very much that.
Only I don't see why, for what I speak
of," she smiled--"for a mere escape from
my state-—I need do quite so much."

"So much as marry me in particular?"

Her smile was as for true directness.
"I might get what I want for less."

"You think it so much for you to do?"

"Yes," she presently said, "I think
it's a great deal" (I, 219-220).

There is the temptation here to think that Charlotte's
comments are based on a lack of physical attraction to Adam.

Indeed this is precisely how he himself understands them:

215

"Of course, yes-~that's my disadvantage: I'm not the natural,
I'm so far from being the ideal, match to your youth and
beauty." But to all this Charlotte gives "a slow headshake
that made contradiction soft--made it almost sad" (I, 220).

It is not the age difference which most troubles Charlotte--
it is, rather, her suspicion that relations founded on

abysses of ignorance are likely to prove threatening to

life and honor.

Like Amerigo, Charlotte tries to warn her prospective
spouse that there are hidden depths to her personality.

"Do you think you've 'known' me?" she rather pointedly asks.
But Adam, like his daughter finds the possibility of
unknown dimensions in Charlotte intriguing, not troubling.
In fact, his reply to her question echoes strongly Maggie's
response to a similar question posed by Amerigo:

"What is it then--if I accept it--but

as strong a reason as I can want for

just learning to know you?" (I, 221).
Not even Charlotte's ominous reply--"when it's a question of
learning, one learns sometimes too late" (I, 221)--can dis-
may such aggressive innocence.

Charlotte's honesty appears in other places--most
notably when she gives Adam the opportunity to read the
strange ambiguous telegram from Amerigo which would most
likely have put an end to their relationship. And in the
face of these very real admirable qualities it is worth

asking wherein the source of Charlotte's villainy lies.

216

As a necessary concomitant to that question one must ask
wherein her villainy exceeds that of the Prince. The answer
requires the subtle moral intelligence which Christof

Wegelin exhibits on this point:

If Amerigo's lack of sharp corners, as Mr.
Verver has put it to him, and the ease, too,
of his moral accommodations are the result

of long social experience, what seems the
same social expertness in Charlotte 13 really
a wholly different matter--the result not of
slow and perhaps incomplete growth but of a
recent corruption. The same conduct, or what
appears to be the same conduct, has different
foundations in him and her; the same appear-
ances hide realities different because they
are conditioned by different civilizations.
To draw once more on The Portrait of a Lady,
this difference forms a parallel to the
difference between Warburton and Osmond,

who constitute similar threats to Isabel
Archer's moral existence, but whose differ-
ent antecedents nevertheless give them motives
of wholly dissimilar moral values. The
difference between Amerigo and Charlotte,
too, is that his tact, although it serves

to cover his own freedom, is motivated very
largely by an alert sense of social respon-
sibility, a sense of the needs of others,
hers by a sense of her own needs.

 

While Charlotte is possessed of a moral sense, it is not
immorality which most concerns her; it is rather the public

appearance which is threatening. It is her "doom" to

 

"arrange appearances," and when she becomes convinced that
appearances can be kept up--when she becomes convinced that
the moral innocence of Adam and Maggie put them at her
mercy--she agrees to the marriage. Her relationship with

Amerigo becomes inevitable after that.

217

That Charlotte's immorality is the immorality of all
Gothic villains is clear enough if we are alive to the
nuances of James's language and thematic imagery. Thus,
while Amerigo, the Italian, is figured as a "refined Irish-
man," Charlotte, the American, has an almost unnatural
"felicity in the use of Italian" (I, 54); and as Wegelin
points out, her convent education and her "birth in Florence"
to parents "themselves already of a corrupt generation" (I,
55) is "pointedly reminiscent" of Gilbert and Pansy Osmond.10
At another point, she tells Adam that "it is I that am old.
You are young" (I, 218), thereby suggesting her relation to
Madame Merle who, as we recall, said virtually the same
thing to Isabel Archer. When, finally, Charlotte and Amerigo
decide to consummate their long standing passion in
Gloucester, she associates it with age-old images of
oppression and betrayal--with "Cloisters or towers or
something . . . or the tomb of some old king" (I, 358) .

Anyone who is seriously inclined to exculpate
Charlotte should pay close attention to the fifth chapter
of the second book of volume-one where Charlotte comes to
stay with the Ververs, and effectively drives off Miss
Lutches and Mrs. Ranch, the shameless fortune hunters who
are already in residence. Much as Lord Mark recognized in
Densher a superior adversary, so the Miss Lutches and Mrs.
Ranch recognize that Charlotte has them overmatched:

"she 'acted'--as the Borgia wine used to

act. One saw it come over them--the extent
to which, in her particular way, a woman,

218

a woman other, and so other, than them-

selves, could be charming. One saw

them understand and exchange looks,

then one saw them lose heart and decide

to move. For what they had to take home

was that it's she who's the real thing" (I, 195)

 

Charlotte's charms are subsequently made abundantly clear,
but with nuances of language which unmistakably connect

her to the evil of the Gothic tradition. "Every evening
after dinner" she plays Adam Verver his "favorite things"
on the piano with "practiced passion" and "a felicity that
never failed" (I, 202). Later she is revealed as "mistress
. . . of the regulated, the developed art of placing him
high in the scale of importance" (I, 204-205). Charlotte's
felicity, charms, and comparative poverty suggest no one so
much as Madame Merle. And indeed it is suggestive to con-
sider that Charlotte is as Madame Merle would have been had
she succeeded in making the "great" marriage she always
dreamed about. But at any rate, the accumulation of detail
is such that it is impossible not to associate Charlotte
with the manipulative skills of the Gothic villain.

Yet the scene in which Charlotte's character is most
tellingly revealed has none of these lurid overtones though
it is perhaps even more sinister in effect. The occasion
is the Ambassador's ball, and in the conversation between
Charlotte and Fanny which takes place there we witness
Charlotte subtlely tormenting the old friend who has
literally done so much for her. Fanny is understandly

concerned that the seeds of her clever Scheming might bear

219

evil fruit. And what cannot be escaped is that Charlotte,
quite cruelly and with a positive delight, enjoys manipulat-
ing or "fixing" Fanny. By acknowledging her illicit rela-
tions with Amerigo she ensures Fanny's silence--for they
both know that any ensuing scandal will inevitably cast the
older woman in the role of the evil procuress. The irony,
of course, is that while Charlotte does succeed in silencing
the one person who knows of her previous relation with
Amerigo, and thus succeeds in her present relation for a
time, she is ultimately a victim of the same process. No
one is so thoroughly fixed as is Charlotte at the end of
the novel--compelled as she is to give up all that is dear
to her without a murmur of protest.

It is good to remind ourselves at this point that
James knew how to create an Osmond and a Madame Merle;
that he chose not to here is indicative that he had some-
thing else in mind when he created his villains. Charlotte
and the Prince are not fiendish, nor are they "purely
selfish"--they are, rather, more or less recognizable social
types. And James highlights their relation to Osmond and
Madame Merle, and from thence by extension to a host of
Gothic villains, in order to remind us that the evil of
the Gothic novels still flourishes. Nor is this evil
necessarily a matter of murder or intrigue, though murder
and intrigue are certainly among its more sensational mani-
festation. But whether we are talking about Charlotte's

conscious egoism and selfishness, or Amerigo's blander more

220

instinctive variety, the two are alike in that they help
perpetuate a world where "making a convenience" of others
is the poison of social relations.

It is, however, Maggie Verver who is finally the most
interesting and most important character in the novel; and
throughrmnzexperience we see how the culminating work of
James's career is also the rich culmination of his use of
the Gothic. For in the terms that we have been using,
Maggie is the Gothic heroine who triumphs over the forces
of evil. Historically, one of the characteristics of Gothic
fiction was that while the heroes and heroines triumph on
a moral plane, the evil of the world was left distressingly
intact and unredeemed. A few characters, after great
suffering, manage to find way-stations of grace in a chaotic
world, but while they are superior, they are so in seclusion
or death. Maggie, by contrast, begins as the girl who
"wasn't born to know evil" (I, 78) only to have her sense
open "to what's called Evil--with a very big E.,. . . To
the discovery of it, to the knowledge of it, to the crude
experience of it . . . to the harsh bewildering brush, the
daily chilling breath of it" (I, 385). Yet instead of
being paralyzed or defeated, Maggie uses her imagination
and intelligence to meet evil where it lives and achieve a
measure of triumph over it.

As is typical in the Gothic romance, Maggie's initial
innocence is associated with early reading experiences.

These experiences are quite general here; nothing so specific

221

as Robert Browning or George Eliot is mentioned--rather we
see that Maggie is intrigued by tales of the "wicked Pope"
(I, 10). Still, the point is much the same. Maggie is at
play in a world far more dangerous than she realizes. She
and her father are "like a pair of stage pirates," collect-
ing the beauties of Europe, sublimely unconcerned with the
greed, treachery, and violence which made this beauty
possible. Similarly, she is attracted to the Prince because
of his romantic name and romantic background, but fails to
consider that the interesting sins of his ancestral past
may yet live in him. Bob Assingham, with a more realistic
understanding of the meaning of Amerigo ' 3 past, slyly refers
to the illustrious ancestor for whom he was named as "the
old one" (I, 80). Maggie, however, fails to see that one's
family history, intertwined as it is with one's personal
history, is something one never quite escapes. And when
she gaily remarks "Oh I'm not afraid of history" (I, 9), we
are instantly aware that this too is an innocence that can
only end in some miserable knowledge.

From the first, then, James takes pains to show us the
serious limitations of Maggie's vision. And the chief
interest of the story lies in participating in the slow
but inexorable process of Maggie's awakening to a world of
evil. While it is true that Maggie's most important
realizations take place in Book II, they are well prepared
for by events which take place early on. In particular,

the birth of the baby boy, the Principino, gives ample

222

occasion for thought because of the peculiar strain it puts
on natural familial affections and arrangements:

It was of course an old story and familiar

idea that a beautiful baby could take its

place as a new link between a wife and

husband, but Maggie and her father had,

with every ingenuity, converted the pre-

cious creature into a link between a mama

and a grandpa. To Principino, for a chance

spectator of this process, might have be-

come, by an untoward stroke, a hapless

half-orphan, with the place of the immediate

male parent swept bare and open to the next

nearest sympathy (I, 156).
At this point it is doubtful that Maggie could have any real
sense of the dangers which this could all set afoot. For
like the mythical child in the nursery, the husband and
father can come back to exact revenge for having been
ignored. Yet it is certainly the memory of this sort of
gentle transgression which comes back to haunt Maggie when
she begins to reflect on the "funny form" of their life.

In any event, what is presented here as a vague uneasi-
ness hardens into real suspicion in Book II when the
narrative passes from the Prince's consciousness into that
of Maggie. In the process we can see Maggie passing from
a state where, in Charlotte's words, she adores her husband
but "doesn't think of him" (I, 257) to one in which she
both adores him and thinks of him very much. Significantly,
Maggie's first real insight comes about even as the Prince
and Charlotte are alone in Gloucester. She is thinking

about her life, and what occurs to her is that there is

something wonderfully symmetrical though distressingly

223

outlandish about the arrangements they seem to have com-
munally arrived at. Her figure for it is:

a strange, tall tower of ivory, or perhaps

rather some wonderful, beautiful, but out-

landish pagoda, a structure plated with

hard, bright porcelain, colored and figured

and adorned, at the overhanging eaves, with

silver bells that tinkled ever so charmingly

when stirred by chance airs (II, 3).
On the question of the meaning of this elaborate symbol
James is uncharacteristically direct:

The pagoda in her blooming garden figured

the arrangement--how otherwise was it to

be named?--by which, so strikingly, she'd

been able to marry without breaking, as

she liked to put it, with her past (II, 5).
The pagoda is pure, frail, and beautifully crafted, but it
is also lifeless and the slightest bit unnatural. As such,
it may perhaps serve as an adequate symbol for the chaste
love between father and daughter, but as a symbol for an
arrangement including her husband it can only be ghastly.
It is a monument raised to high artificiality at the
expense of natural instinct. Significantly, these intima-
tions that something is very wrong come to Maggie at a
time when she is beginning to feel anew her love for her
husband, and is beginning to feel that such a total lack
of turbulence of any sort is unnatural:

She had lived long enough to make out

for herself that any deep seated passion

has its pangs as well as its joys, and
that we are made by its aches and its

224

anxieties most richly conscious of it.

She had never doubted of the force of

the feeling that bound her to her husband;
but to become aware, almost suddenly,

that it had begun to vibrate with a
violence that had some of the effect of

a strain would, rightly looked at, after
all but show that she was, like thousands
of women, every day, acting up to the
full privilege of passion (II, 7-8).

In reading such a passage we recall that within the Gothic
tradition it is passion which simultaneously leads to en-
lightenment and danger. How much Mrs. Radcliffe's characters
see and feel is admittedly open to question; but beginning

with Lewis's The Monk and continuing on in such works as

Frankenstein, Melmoth the Wanderer and Wuthering Heights

 

 

this is undoubtedly the case. Maggie Verver, like Milly
Theale, Isabel Archer, and Christopher Newman before her,
begins to move out of the coccoon of her initial innocence
when she begins to understand passion as a potent reality
rather than as a rhetorical pose. Her first gesture of
renewed passion--her "knock" on the pagoda wall--is to
simply wait up for the Prince's return from Gloucester.
And it is the oddity of the Prince's reaction--his visible
sensation that there is something to be considered or
measured in what is, after all, a very natural act--which
alerts Maggie to the possibility of a more sinister under-
lying reality. Furthermore, as Maggie's suspicions grow,
the imagery of her associations becomes progressively more
violent. She sees that even with this small timid act she

has ceased to be a stage pirate:

225

She had put her thought to the proof,

and the proof had shown its edge; this

was what was before her, that she was

no longer playing with blunt and idle

tools, with weapons that didn't cut (II, 9).
Having acknowledged passion as a motive in herself, Maggie
can begin to understand how it might motivate others; and
the intensity of her own feelings alerts her to the kinds
of dangers which might lurk beneath the apparent tranquility
of their marital arrangements. Yet the subsequent descrip-
tion of Maggie as a "timid tigress" (II, 10) coupled with
this imagery of weapons proves upon reflection to be even
more unsettling. For the image of Maggie as armed for
battle suggests no one so much as it suggests Maude Lowder,
the "lioness" of Lancaster Gate. As eventually becomes
clear, the equation of Maggie with Aunt Maude is not the
least inappropriate; for the innocent girl is rapidly
becoming a passionate woman with formidable resources to
bring into the social arena.

Once Maggie's moral imagination is heightened by a new
capacity for passion and perception, revelations follow
quickly. Most immediately, she notices that every change
in her own behavior brings about an immediate coordinated
response from Charlotte and Amerigo. She sees that, for
them, relations with her are a matter of policy--that they
are "treating" her--"proceeding with her"--and that they

have a common "view of her situation, and of the possible

forms her own consciousness of it might take" (II, 41-42).

226

Yet if this vision is in some sense threatening, it is also

a stimulus to further perception:

This new perception bristled for her, as

we have said, with odd intimations, but
questions unanswered played in and out of
it as well--the question, for intance, of
why such promptitude of harmony should

have been important. Ah, when she began

to recover, piece by piece, the process
became lively; she might have been picking
small shining diamonds out of the sweepings
of her ordered house (II, 42).

Though by no means obvious, there are nuggets of value, of
meaning, about for those with the quick poetic eyes to see
them. Maggie now has such eyes, and as she begins to dis-
cover, they are an enormous resource in this sort of
domestic warfare. Her knowledge that Charlotte and Amerigo
are acting in tandem gives her a sense of her own power

over them:

It wasn't that she wished she had
been the remembered party and possessed
herself of its secrets; for she didn't
care about its secrets--she could con-
cern herself at present, absolutely,
with no secret but her own. What
occurred was simply that she became
aware at a stroke, of the quantity of
further nourishment required of her
own, and the amount of it she might
somehow extract from these people;
whereby she rose of a sudden, to the
desire to possess and use them, even
to the extent of braving, of fairly
defying, of directly exploiting, of
possibly quite enjoying, under the
cover of an evil duplicity, the felt
element of curiosity with which they
regarded her. Once she was conscious
of the flitting wing of this last im-
pression--the perception, irresistible,

227

that she was something for their queer

experience, just as they were something

for hers--there is no limit to her con-

ceived design of not letting them escape

(II, 49-50).
Just as Milly Theale came to realize that there was a power
in being dove-like, so Maggie realizes that there is power
in being a Princess. And it should not escape us that the
powers of a Princess are of a worldly rather than of a
spiritual variety. Thus Maggie's desire to "possess and use"
Charlotte and Amerigo "under the cover of an evil duplicity"
establishes her connection to the traditional Gothic villain.

Throughout the remainder of the novel we have on yet

another level the curious experience of seeing the tradi-
tional Gothic formula reversed, or at least twisted to the
point that there is a real ambiguity as to who is the
prosecutor and who the victim. In some respects Maggie is
the traditional Gothic heroine wandering in a world fraught
with supernatural evil. At one point in her passage, for
example, her situation is likened to "some strange shore
to which she had been noiselessly ferried and where, with
a start, she found herself quaking at the thought that the
boat might have put off again and left her" (II, 41); such
imagery suggests, of course, Charon, the ferryman, and the
"strange shore of Hades." At another point, when Maggie
feels that Charlotte is too much involved with her and
with Amerigo, Charlotte ceases to be "Charlotte" or "Mrs.

Verver" and becomes instead the evil "stepmother" by whom

Maggie is "menaced" (II, 75). But this image of Maggie is

228

tempered by the concurrent realization that she enters quite
willingly into the spirit of this evil world. She is like a
"spying servant" (II, 43) who plies "her art" (II, 54) upon
her companions.

In the labyrinthine world of The Golden Bowl knowledge

 

is power, is everything. To the extent that Amerigo and

Charlotte are in the unenviable position of not knowing what

Maggie is up to, they are her potential victims. Her

innocence, which had originally blinded her to their rela-

tion, has now become a mask which prevents them from seeing

how far her cogitations have taken her. Maggie has, in

Joseph Ward's words, become a "deceiver, aggressor, and

mistress of intrigue to gain her victory."11
It is not necessary or really possible to rehearse

all of the details which lead to Maggie's full awareness

of the kind of relationship Amerigo and Charlotte have

enjoyed. Her fear of and fascination with knowledge, her

love of her father, and her passion for her husband all

push her toward the final revelation. Yet it is worth

noting how this revelation comes about. In what is by now

recognizable as one of James's favorite techniques, Maggie

decides to "wander a little wild" through the crowded

streets of London. In their agony and confusion, both

Isabel Archer and Milly Theale lose themselves in the streets

of London. So Maggie, too, embarks on a little romance

which has the effect of putting her more closely in touch

with her own humanity. Gone are the precious discriminations

229

of the drawing room to be replaced by a world of simple
vitality where the emotions are closer to the surface.
Thus it is appropriate that it is here, in the midst of
common humanity, that Maggie learns that her husband and
her old friend have engaged in the commonest form of betrayal”
The important scene in which Maggie reveals her know-

ledge of the golden bowl and all of its implications to
Fanny and Amerigo immediately follows this little adventure.
As important, however, as this scene is, it is only a stage
in the process of unfolding revelations. For Maggie, the
question of what her husband and Charlotte have done is
fairly well settled. The question for her now is that of
deciding what to do about it. As Laurence Holland suggests,
it is this problem which is the source of the terror in the
second volume and is the greatest threat to life and honor:

The second volume is tense with terror

while measuring the cost in beauty,

integrity, and suffering which is

exacted in the process of breaking

with the past and redeeming it, while

discovering that the bowl must not

only be gilded to salvage the past

but that it must be broken, it must

be sacrificed in order to create even

the promise that the reality it sym-

bolizes may be transformed. 2
As Fanny Assingham predicts, Maggie does not act like the
conventionally wronged woman. Her desire to keep the symbol
of her husband's guilt before his eyes lasts but a little

while, and is immediately superseded by "her desire to

spare him" (II, 185). Maggie seeks a new arrangement for

230

her life, but it must be one in which her past is redeemed
and made usable by her new knowledge. The symbol of such

a new arrangement can never, therefore, be "the golden bowl—-
as it was to have been" (II, 216), for as an image of human
relations the bowl must be flawed no matter how skillfully
wrought it appears on the surface. A more fitting symbol,
rather, is the broken bowl which in Maggie's hands "might
still quite beautifully, a few steps away, have passed for
uninjured" (II, 182-183). For in it, potentially, the

beauty of the arrangement is achieved with the full knowledge
of the cracks, and it becomes a monument not to human perfec-
tion but the image of perfection which can be achieved in a
flawed world.

The immediate consequence of Amerigo's brief conversa—
tion with his wife over the wreckagecflfthe golden bowl is
that he begins to take a new interest in her. As a result
of that they begin to act in tandem against Charlotte.
Maggie recognizes that Amerigo will have lied to Charlotte
by denying to her that he has any new knowledge of what
his wife knows, and that now the situations are wholly
reversed. It is Charlotte who is "the haunted creature"
trapped in the cage of a "deluded condition" (II, 229).

It is in this state of relations that the party moves
on to Fawns where the "crisis . . . hovered for them, in
the long passages of the old house, after the fashion of
the established ghost" (II, 211). Significantly, James

chooses the British summer house, the sumptuous expression

231

of so much rich civilization, as the scene for his most
powerful presentation of terror. For Fawns is James's
final and most fully domestic version of the archetypal
Gothic castle. Like the castle at Udolpho, Fawns is cut
off, isolated, from civilization; but like Udolpho it is
also potently suggestive of all that that civilization re-
presents. Though vastly different in outward appearance,
Udolpho and Fawns are alike in that each is the character—
istic architectural expression of an age. The cruelties
and superstitions which are intimately associated with the
Gothic castle are different from the insolence and power
with which the British summer house is associated, but
both are equally terrible.

That James saw Fawns as part of a continuous tradition
going back to the earlier Gothic is obvious from the way
in which his use of houses changes in the four novels

studied here. In The American, the locus of terror is

 

the summer house at Fleurieres, a structure which dates
from the sixteenth century and greatly resembles a medieval

castle. In The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the

 

 

2223, however, the historic Italian palace is paired with

the historic. British summer house in such a way that they
inevitably appear related. The Palazzo Roccanera, the site

of Isabel's incarceration, is associated with Gardencourt
where she makes many of her crucial decisions; The Palazzo
Leporelli, where Milly is confronted with Densher's treachery,

is associated with Matcham, where she first senses the

232

primitive horror which can lie behind beautiful things. In

The Golden Bowl this pairing ends, and only Fawns remains.

 

But the development of James's use of houses makes it clear
that Fawns, is Fleurieres, is Udolpho. As the action at
Fawns progresses, the atmosphere gets progressively eerie
and the imagery violent. Maggie, like generations of Gothir:
heroines before her, is exploring the house of terror.

The scene which I take to be the most important one
in the book occurs after all of the involved parties--
Maggie, Amerigo, Adam and Charlotte Verver, Fanny and
Colonel Assingham--are reassembled. The scene is a simple
one. The members of the party have dined and are enjoying
their large leisure. Charlotte and Amerigo, as partners,
sit down to a game of bridge with Adam Verver and Fanny
Assingham. Bob Assingham retires to a desk at one end
of the room to write some letters, while Maggie tries to
concentrate on the lifeless abstractions of a literary
journal. But something in the arrangement of the partici-
pants unsettles Maggie and leads to this extraordinary
vision of horror.

She saw at all events why horror itself
had almost failed her; the horror, that
foreshadowed in advance, would, by her
thought, have made everything that was
unaccustomed in her cry out with pain;

the horror of finding evil seated, all

at its ease, where she had dreamed only

of good; the horror of the thing hideously
behind, behind so much trusted, so much
pretended nobleness, cleverness, tender-

ness. It was the first sharp falsity she
had known in her life, to touch at all

233

or to be touched; it had met her like

some bad-faced stranger surprised in

one of the thick-carpeted corridors of

a house of quiet on a Sunday afternoon . . .

(II, 237).
Here is the sort of subtle terror, the terror of not knowing
whether everything or nothing is wrong, which can rival
anything evoked at Bly in "The Turn of the Screw." As
the history of the Gothic proves, the terror is the
greatest when it seems to arise out of familiar and safe
circumstances. And in placing the seat of horror in England
rather than in a notoriously corrupt Latin setting, James

internationalizes his Gothic vision in much the same way

that Wuthering Heights had internationalized the earlier

 

Gothic. The parallels with Emily Bronte's great novel run

even deeper than this, however. For if The Wings of the

 

Dove is in one sense James's version of The Monk--a work,

 

that is, which belies a preoccupation and fascination with

an energetically evil character, The Golden Bowl, like

 

Wuthering Heights, undertakes the far greater demonstration

 

of how the encounter with evil is the necessary basis for
the establishment of civilized values.

Yet it is precisely this parallel, suggestive as it is
of important similarities between the two novels, which

make clear their important differences. In Wuthering Heights,

 

the evil of the social code is to be found in the narrow
notion of civility which leads Catherine Earnshaw to reject

Heathcliff on the grounds that he would degrade her, or

234

which leads Lockwood to take such a detached and superior
view toward the passionate story he hears from Nelly Dean.

And the idea of civilization in Wuthering Heights involves a

 

rational accommodation with the rough, often violent,
vitality of life--a view which suggests the views of an
eighteenth-century humanist like Henry Fielding.

In The Golden Bowl, as in the other novels discussed,

 

contact with the rough vitality of life humanizes the
characters and enriches their understanding; it is the
image of poor unaccommodated men which must not be absent
from the elegant geometry of civilized values. But for
James the narrowness of a particular middle or upper class
code--exemplified, say, by Amerigo's inability to notice
anyone beneath his social station--is a relatively minor
source of evil. The real source of evil is a far more deep
seated problem of perception , the problem of how even in
our most virtuous interpretations of life we often reduce
other human beings to the status of objects. The relation-
ship Ralph Touchett bears to Isabel Archer is an early
manifestation of this problem, but it is less developed

and cruder than the presentation here; further, Ralph's
realization, such as it is, comes only in retrospect, and
has none of the complexity of the tense internal drama
wherein Maggie comes to see what has happened to her, and,
significantly, how she must act given that knowledge. For
in the figure of Maggie Verver we have not just the typical

Gothic heroine whose fate it is to gain some miserable

235

knowledge, but a heroine who triumphs over evil by refusing
to assert the superiority of her own vision in public.

What is particularly significant in this light is
that Maggie's protest, the Gothic protest from time
immemorial of the "thing hideously behind" is mute. To
the assembled gathering she shows only a "vague mild face."
Maggie is aware of the evil seated all at its ease, but she
is simultaneously aware that to feel about the assembled
group "in any of the immediate, inevitable, assuaging ways,

the ways usually Open to innocence outraged and generosity

betrayed, would have been to give them up . . ." (II, 237).1

Maggie is aware of this, moreover, because of a superiority
of imagination and artistic insight. While she hovers on
the terrace outside of the smoking-room in the "outer
darkness" the people within appear as "figures rehearsing
some playcfifwhich she herself was the author" (II, 235).
Moments later the vision is transformed into a still richer

vision of the power she now possesses:

She walked to the end and far out of the
light; she returned and saw the others
still where she had left them; she passed
round the house and looked into the
drawing-room, lighted also, but empty
now, and seeming to speak the more in

its own voice of all the possibilities
she controlled. Spacious and splendid,
like a stage again awaiting a drama, it
was a scene she might people, by the
press of her spring, either with serenities
and dignities and decencies, or with
terrors and shames and ruins, things

as ugly as those formless fragments of
her golden bowl she was trying so hard

to pick up (II, 236).

3

236

Here is the artistic imagination being used to enrich and
preserve life. Such knowledge as Maggie possesses could be
used for the worst of selfish purposes, but in her it awakens
a sense of responsibility toward those around her. But
still the question remains. She cannot not act. Should
she preserve the apparent "serenities and dignities" of
the seated group or should she expose the deception behind
these appearances and bring "terrors and shames and ruins?"
The answer arises out of the next scene in which Maggie

confronts Charlotte, "the splendid shining supple creature"
who is "out of the cage" and "at large" (II, 239). Marius
Bewley, who calls the scene "one of the most astonishing
things James ever wrote," beautifully describes the Gothic
horror which it evokes:

The very words on the page seem paralyzed

in an apprehension of disaster, and an

atmosphere of dread is evoked from circum-

stances which, innocent in themselves,

loom through the summer darkness in sini-

ster outline. The action, the movements

of Charlotte and Maggie, occur with

ritualistic slowness and economy, and

the confrontation scene has a density

of symbolism that presents the conflict

between Maggie and Charlotte as a showing

forth of those deeper conflicts between

appearance and reality, truth and false-

hood, that always lie at the heart of

James's deepest meaning.l4
Unsurprisingly, since she is the mistress of arranging

appearances, Charlotte, too, has the artistic eye to see

meaning in the arranged scene:

237

They presently went back the way she had
come, but she stopped Maggie again within
range of the smoking—room window and made
her stand where the party at cards would
be before her. Side by side for three
minutes they fixed this picture of quiet
harmonies, the positive charm of it and,
as might have been said, the full signi-
ficance--which, as was now brought home
to Maggie, could be no more after all
than a matter of interpretation, differing
always for a different interpreter. As
she herself had hovered in sight of it a
quarter of an hour before, it would have
been a thing for her to show Charlotte--
to show in righteous irony, in reproach
too stern for anything but silence. But
now it was she who was being shown it by
Charlotte, and she saw quickly enough
that as Charlotte showed it so she must
at present submissively seem to take it (II, 244).

There is rich ambiguity here, but some care is needed for

it is not the ambiguity of moral relativism. James is not
saying that the possible arrangements that Charlotte could
imagine are of the same status morally as what Maggie might
see. It is, rather, as Wegelin notes, an ambiguity arising
out of a "conflict between absolute and pragmatic morality."15
From an absolute standpoint Maggie should seek retribution
from those who wronged her. Practically, however, this
would be immensely difficult and the result uncertain. As
Bewley suggests, Charlotte would be at her element in any

16 Adam does love his wife more than is

ensuing "scene."
commonly allowed, and Maggie's lack of "proof," in a legal
sense, would make it exceedingly difficult for him to choose
between the testimony of his daughter and his wife. Such a

scene would be painful all around, and might even help

238

further the present arrangement. Adam could, under such
circumstances, agree to a separation of the parties only
if he believed his daughter.

There is, moreover, another "interpretation." What
Maggie sees and sees again through the open window is a
group of people living "more or less" decently. If the
dark beast of human evil is not wholly absent from the
premises, it is, at least, at bay. There is not moral
perfection, but there is harmony and consideration. And
for Maggie to destroy this would be to risk being wrong in
her every goodness. It would be to risk being the per-
petrator of the old Gothic evil, that of imposing one's
absolute vision on others. It would be to deny others the
necessary fiction by which they live.

Thus, Maggie intuitively senses that if the situation
is to be redeemed, if the unnatural foursome is to be
separated without a violent and painful breach, she must
violate another tenet of her morality--she must consciously
and purposefully lie. The "right," she comes to see, "was
only a question of not by a hair's breadth deflecting into
the truth" (II, 250). Therefore, to Charlotte's direct
question, she denies upon her honor that she has any grounds
of complaint against her. Bewley's reading of this passage
is worth quoting both for what is so right about it and
what is so wrong:

the sinister quality, that air of pervasive

unlocalized evil that is characteristic of
James, is due to an inversion of ordinary

239

human values, and even of appearance and

reality itself. It is as if the old tra—

ditional moral vessels that had long held

our sense of evil had been cracked, and

evil itself had seeped through the whole

fabric.
If by "traditional moral vessels" is meant any particular
code of moral absolutism this is no doubt true; it does not
follow, however, that because evil has seeped through the
fabric of life chaosi£;come again. James still, as always,
is a serious moralist and seeks to preserve life and
dignity in the face of what threatens it. But he was
acutely aware of how freedom and dignity could be most
threatened by traditional notions of what is right, and
how minor virtues must sometimes be violated to preserve
the major ones. Thus, Maggie allows herself to be guilty
of, in Bewley's words, "the finer hypocrisies" precisely
because she has a finer conscience. Yet if the evil is,
finally, the unavoidable evil of life, it is real evil
nevertheless, and the kiss which seals Maggie's cold
"conscious perjury" has the air of a witches' pact.

In the final rearrangement which sends the Ververs back
to American City while the Prince and Princess remain in
London absolute justice is not, as Ward quite accurately
notes, done.18 Amerigo suffers very little for what he has
done, while Charlotte, in the end, suffers horribly. Perhaps
nothing establishes more firmly Maggie's moral depth than

the sympathy with which she views the suffering of this

friend who had so cynically betrayed her. She knows that

240

separation from Amerigo and from the grand life of Europe
will be "like a knife in her heart" (II, 311). It is,
moreover, her sympathy for Charlotte which leads to an
exchange between her and Amerigo which embodies in so many
respects the fullness of James final vision:
"It's terrible"--her memories prompted
her to speak. "I see it's always terrible
for women."
The Prince looked down in his gravity.
"Everything's terrible, cara--in the heart
of man. "She's making her life," he said.
"She'll make it" (II, 349).
Here again we have the subtle but important contrast between
the Princess's quick moral sympathies and the Prince's more
worldly view. Maggie sees the spiritual suffering and
humiliation which Charlotte must go through, while Amerigo,
from his materialistic perspective knows that suffering
ends and that life goes on.

When, therefore, at the novel's end, Maggie turns and
embraces her husband, it is an act which symbolizes the
union of all that they represent. It is, of course, the
culmination of James's international theme, which Wegelin
quite rightly sees as the "concrete image" of the "idea of
some eventual sublime consensus" which James speaks about

19

in one of the prefaces. Wegelin then goes on to say:

For just as the subject of The Golden
Bowl reaches beyond the international
situation, so the closing scene repre-
sents more than a social fusion. It
is in fact a symbolic climax of the

 

241

mutual interfusion of two virtues-—of

the discipline of Maggie's spiritual

energy by Amerigo's form, the quicken-

ing penetration of his form by her

spirit. . . .2
A note of caution should, perhaps, be introduced since if
both are virtues they are not necessarily equal. James
always and to the end valued the spiritual acuteness
symbolized by Maggie above the charm and grace of Amerigo.
But Wegelin is certainly right in emphasizing the extent to
which James was trying to lay the groundwork of understanding
for a trans-Atlantic culture.

In the context which we have been developing here the
embrace carries still wider significance. For Maggie is
probably the first heroine in the Gothic tradition to embrace
the Gothic villain in the full consciousness of what she is
doing. To be sure, this is exaggerating somewhat for effect
and does scant justice to Amerigo. It is justified, however,
if it serves to make the terrors which must be overcome and
the grave difficulties which must be braved in order for this

embrace to take place. In other words, it would be absurd

to suggest that The Golden Bowl ends on a note of unrelieved

 

 

optimism. Maggie does not redeem the world, though she does,
through energy, will, intelligence and love redeem her own
small corner of it; she does put her own house in order.

But the fact that this redemption took such immense effort,
costing, really, not less than everything, and involved such

a deep compromise with evil, is indication enough that if

242

James did not find virtue helpless he found it always in
distress. He could have had few illusions that the old
Gothic evil and the old Gothic terror, emanating as they

do from the past, from institutions of our own making, front
others, and, finally, from ourselves, would not have been

insolent and strong in the modern world.

NOTES FOR CHAPTER IV

lF.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948; rpt. New York:
New York University Press, 1967), p. 126.

2See: Walter Wright, "Maggie Verver: Neither Saint Nor
Witch," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 12 (1957), 59-71.
Wright's excellent summary of the various positions taken
in this debate make it redundant to attempt such a summary
here.

3Joseph A. Ward, "Evil in The Golden Bowl," Western
Humanities Review, 14 (1960), 47.

4F.O. Matthiessen, Henry_James, The Major Phase
(London: Oxford University Press, 1944), p. 88.

5Henry James, The Golden Bowl (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1909), p. 12. All subsequent references
to the text are to this edition.

6Joel Porte, The Romance in America: Studies in
Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James (Middl letown,
Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 19691] pp. 217- 218.

7

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Matthiessen, p. 87.

8Joseph A. Ward, The Imagination of Disaster: Evil
in the Fiction of Henry James (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1961), p. 149.

 

 

 

 

9Christof Wegelin, The Image of Europe in Henr James
(Dallas: Southern Method1st University Press, 130.
10

Wegelin, p. 123.

11"Evil in The Golden Bowl," p. 56.

 

12Laurence B. Holland, The Expense of Vision: Essa s
on the Craft of Henry James (Princeton: Princeton Un1ver-
Eity Press, 1964), p. 381.

13Though he quotes different evidence, Wegelin makes
essentially this same point. Wegelin, 135.

 

 

243

244

l4Marius Bewley, "Appearance and Reality in Henry James,"
Scrutiny 17 (1950). p. 98.

15Wegelin, p. 136.

16Bewley, p. 99.

l7Bewley, p. 100.

18Imagination of Disaster, p. 154.

 

19Wegelin, p. 140. James's phrase is from the Preface
to "Lady Barbarina." See: The §£2.2£ the Novel: Critical
Prefaces, Intro. R.P. Blackmur (1934; rpt. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950), p. 203.

20

 

 

Wegelin, p. 140.

CONCLUSION

With the writing of The Golden Bowl James finally

 

realized the fictional possibilities of the Gothic which
he had discussed with such intelligence some forty years
earlier in his review of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Aurora

Floyd. For the terror of The Golden Bowl, the almost

 

 

supernatural dread which it evokes, is "connected at a
hundred points with the common objects of life." It is
the terror of the "cheerful countryhouse and the busy
London lodgings;" and it is, therefore, "infinitely the
more terrible." If, as Professor Garber suggests, Emily

Bronte "internationalized" the Gothic in Wuthering Heights,

 

Henry James can be said to have permanently domesticized

it in The Golden Bowl. And the old Gothic terror seems

 

especially dreadul when comfortable distinctions between

 

what is safe and what is dangerous begin to fail.

Though stressing James's relationship to this older
romance tradition is unusual, it should be not construed
as posing a threat to his literary reputation. As the
examples of Chaucer and Shakespeare show, James is not
the first great literary artist to be heavily indebted to
a popular tradition. The four novels studied here are far

greater than any of the early Gothic novels, The Castle of_

 

245

246

Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Monk, for exampleu

 

 

It should, however, be emphasized that focusing on James
relation totflmapopular tradition of the Gothic provides a
convenient yardstick for measuring his achievement. To a
large extent his greatness resides in his success in trans-
forming the conventions of the literature of terror into a
far more subtle, far more humane vision of human life.

Yet even framing the whole issue in this fashion runs
the risk of stressing James's uniqueness unduly. To say

that The Golden Bowl is an incomparably greater novel than

 

Thg_Mgnk is merely to state the obvious. But it does not
follow from this that the early Gothic novels were nothing
more than a kind of macabre foolishness. Virtually from

the first, the Gothic embodied a germ of literary experience,
a complex mode of seeing, which was far more serious. The
novel which began the Gothic tradition, Horace Walpole's

The Castle of Otranto, was in many respects a light, even

 

whimsical flight of fancy. However, Walpole's basic plot
situation provided a rich source of poetical images which
had the power to evoke, as poetry always dOes, a deeper
understanding of experience.

Radcliffe and Lewis, almost in tandem, took the essen-
tial situation which Walpole had imagined and transformed
it into a far more sophisticated form of fiction. Neither
writer was quite willing to face the full implication of
what they sensed. Both preferred to center their dramatic

action in remote exotic settings, and both developed rather

247

contrived strategies for explaining away the terror they
evoked--Radcliffe provided common sense explanations for
her horrors while Lewis assigned them to the workings of
the devil. Yet in their differing ways both Radcliffe and
Lewis managed to suggest that the deep underlying horror
was both natural and human. Through a character like Emily

St. Aubert, the heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho,

 

Radcliffe suggests that innocence may be most threatened

by its own failures of perception. Similarly, it is through
the figure of Ambrosio, the title character of The Monk,

that M.G. Lewis suggests that human malevolence may be the
effect of a perverse education. Thus, even some of the
earliest practitioners of the genre were aware of the
terrible mixture of good and evil in human affairs. They

saw that "evil" villains could have admirable human qualities
and that "innocent" heroines could participate in the
creation of evil.

Later novelists like Emily Bronte picked up this
essential insight and developed it further. And as evil
became more associated with "civilized" personalities, it
became more associated as well with the civilized world.
Yet, the more this process is considered, the more it
becomes apparent that it is arbitrary to restrict the
term Gothic to those novels which came earliest in the
tradition. In other words, the typical Gothic stage pro-
perties, the isolated house or castle, the ghosts, the

creaking chains, were in themselves the least important

248

aspect of the tradition. Much more important was the way

in which these images and techniques, in numerous variations,
could be brought in to examine certain philosophical and
moral assumptions. At its core, the Gothic is a novelistic
tradition which uses the romance form to test the adequacy

of sentimental ideals. Though every novelist properly seen
as part of the Gothic tradition uses the typical images

and devices in one way or another, they are all characterized
by a dread of those things which threaten to control the

free individual.

It is in this sense that Henry James's relation to the
Gothic tradition becomes very relevant indeed. Graham
Greene suggests that in order to properly appreciate any
writer it is necessary to go beyond technical achievements
"to track the instinctive, the poet writer back to the
source of his fantasies."l When this is done with James,
it is apparent that there is an extraordinary consistency
in the makeup of James's moral universe. Although Graham
Greene does not have the Gothic specifically in mind when
he discusses James's moral consistency, his remarks do
reinforce what has been said here about the nature of
James's artistic development:

No writer has left a series of novels
more of one moral piece. The differences
between James's first wroks and his last
are only differences of art. . . . In his
early works perhaps he rendered a little
less than the highest kind of justice; the
progress from The American to The Golden

Bowl is a progress from a rather crude and
inexperienced symbolization of truth to

 

 

249

truth itself: a progress from evil
represented rather obviously in terms
of murder to evil in propia persona,
walking down Bond Street, charming,
cultured, sensitive--evil to be dis-
tinguished from good only in the
complete egotism of its outlook.2

 

Nothing which Greene says is intrinsically at odds with the
argument that James, in his most characteristic novels, is
employing a literary mode which is recognizably Gothic. On
the contrary, the perception of James's essential Gothicism
adds depth to Greene's remarks by placing them in a proper
relation to literary history. For when an attempt is made
to characterize James's fictional world, to describe what
it is that produces the indelible impression that there is
consistency of vision and response in his work, it is
apparent that this impression stems from the realization
that he is working in a familiar literary tradition.

James knew the conventions of Gothic fiction well, and
when he was in the process of composing his most character-
istic novels, he instinctively turned to them as a means of
giving coherence to his experience. He, like all Gothic
novelists, achieved his greatest emotional effects by
examining what dangers are inherent in sentimental notions
about the nature of freedom and the nature of feeling; and
like all Gothic novelists he was keenly aware of the myriad
forces, both sociological and psychological, which could
menace the individual. Yet from the standpoint of literary

history, nothing, perhaps, is so interesting as the fact

250

James's development of the Gothic both parallels and fulfills
the development of early Gothic.

In The American the typical Gothic stage properties are

 

rather crudely and obviously employed; but beginning with
The Portrait gfya Lady, his first masterpiece, and continuing

in The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, his last com-

 

 

pleted novels, these elements are progressively refined.
It is important to note, however, that these novels are
refinements not radical departures; the essential literary

material remained the same. And if in The Golden Bowl

 

James has gone beyond anything to be found in the earlier
Gothic, his achievement in this the first great modern novel
is very much continuous with the earlier Gothic and would

not have been possible without it.

NOTES FOR CHAPTER VII

1Graham Greene, "Henry James," in Derek Verschoyle ed.
The English Novelists: A_Survey of the Novel by Twenty
Contemporary Novelists (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1936), p. 231.

 

 

 

2Greene, p. 232.

251

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