7 - Gender, Sexuality, Intimacy

Summary

Humanity is immense, and reality has a myriad [of] forms. … It is equally excellent and inconclusive to say that one must write from experience…. What kind of experience is intended, and where does it begin and end?

— Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”

THE EXTENT TO WHICH JAMES WROTE from his own experiences has long been an important question for James scholars. What kind of experiences did he have? Did his range of experiences go beyond observation and contemplation? What was the quality of his closest friendships? Did he ever have a physical relationship with anyone? These questions concerning James's experiences urge scholars to focus on his capacity for intimacy, and that focus has led, in the last few decades especially, to the fraught and controversial topic of sex. As Hugh Stevens remarked in a 1998 essay about “In the Cage,” “The story of Henry James's sexuality has certainly held us sufficiently breathless round the fire, yet it remains as elusive and difficult (and as compelling and disturbing) as James's own Turn of the Screw” (“Queer Henry” 120).

The reticence with which most critics and scholars dealt with the subject of homosexuality in James's life and work changed significantly after the publication of Eve Sedgwick's “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic” in 1986.