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The Abasement of Mrs. Warren Hope

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert L. Gale
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Extract

When in 1934 Edmund Wilson published his brilliant and provocative essay “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” in which he questions the reliability of James's center of revelation in “The Turn of the Screw,” he provided scholars an intriguing method for approaching much modern fiction. It seems to me that, for example, Roy P. Basler's reading of Poe's “Ligeia” as the unbalanced narrator's unwitting admission that he has murdered his second wife through inability to forget his first, and Simon O. Lesser's interpretation of Hawthorne's “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” as a revelation of unconscious reluctance to seek a substitute father both owe much to Mr. Wilson. And so do a host of recent Jamesian critics: for two examples among at least a dozen, Marius Bewley, who regards Oliver Lyon, the central intelligence of “The Liar,” as more culpable than the prevaricating colonel; and William Bysshe Stein, who, far from sympathizing with Pemberton in “The Pupil,” brands him a prude. The temptation to doubt the accuracy of the narrator or the central intelligence of a short story by Henry James is beguiling, fatally so sometimes; but succumbing to the temptress can give pleasure to the reader often and an enriched meaning to many a story.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 78 , Issue 1 , March 1963 , pp. 98 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963

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References

Note 1 in page 98 Hound & Horn, vu (April-June 1934), 385–406. Mr. Wilson's immensely popular essay in turn owes something—and the debt is acknowledged—to Edna Kenton, “Henry James to the Ruminant Reader: ‘The Turn of the Screw’,” Arts, wi (November 1924), 245–255. For an admirable discussion of the whole critical problem of James and “the unreliable narrator,” see Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction ([Chicago]: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 339–374.

Note 2 in page 98 “The Interpretation of ‘Ligeia’,” College English, v (April 1944), 363–372. This provocative reading has been forcefully challenged, however, by James Schroeter, in “A Misreading of Poe's ‘Ligeia’,” ? M LA, LXXVI (September 1961), 397–406.

Note 3 in page 98 “The Image of the Father,” Partisan Review, xxn (Summer 1955), 372–381.

Note 4 in page 98 The Complex Fate: Hawthorne, Henry James and Some Other American Writers (London: Chatto and Windus, 1952), pp. 86–87. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction, pp. 347–364, extensively discusses the unreliable central intelligence of this same short story and also the unreliable narrator of “The Aspern Papers.”

Note 5 in page 98 “ ‘The Pupil’: The Education of a Prude,” Arizona Quarterly, xv (Spring 1959), 13–22. See also Terence Martin, “James's ‘The Pupil’ : The Art of Seeing Through,” Modern Fiction Studies, iv (Winter 1958–59), 335–345, in which Pemberton is interpreted as villainous. In addition, David Kerner, in “A Note on ‘The Beast in the Jungle’,” Univ. of Kansas City Review, xvn (Winter 1950), 109–118, sees John Marcher as distorting his image of the real May Bartram through hallucination, while Perry D. Westbrook, in “The Supersubtle Fry,” NCF, vin (September 1953), 134–137, refuses to grant any greatness to the dying novelist Den-combe in “The Middle Years” but suggests instead that Dr. Hugh flattered him by pretending that he had lost his rich patient because of his devotion to the novelist. For leads to other treatments of unreliable narrators and centers of revelation in James, see Booth's helpful descriptive bibliography in The Rhetoric of Fiction, pp. 425–427.

Note 6 in page 98 Most critical studies of James's fiction totally ignore “The Abasement of the Northmores”; but see F. 0. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock, eds., The Notebooks of Henry James (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1947), p. 297, and Osborn Andreas, Henry James and the Expanding Horizon: A Study of the Meaning and Basic Themes of James's Fiction (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1948), pp. 55–56.

Note 7 in page 99 The Notebooks of Henry James, p. 297. Booth points out that James occasionally changed his original plans for stories by later deciding to have them told by strange narrators, and then adds that “we can … conclude that the relationship between his developing narrators and the original subjects was often more complex than his own critical talk recognizes”; The Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 346. Booth does not mention “The Abasement of the Northmores.”

Note 8 in page 99 The Novels and Tales of Henry James, New York Edition, 26 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907–17), xvi, vii. In discussing “The Abasement of the Northmores,” Harold T. McCarthy also notes only its compression; Henry James: The Creative Process (New York and London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1958), pp. 100–101.

Note 9 in page 99 Novels and Tales, xvi, 195. Subsequent references to this short story will be made parenthetically in the text and in the footnotes.

Note 10 in page 100 Earlier we read that Mrs. Hope thought “there had been somewhere and somehow a wrong” (p. 196).

Note 11 in page 100 Mrs. Hope recalls her husband's “easy power” twice before (pp. 197, 198). James uses the same phrase in Roderick Hudson when he describes Rowland Mallet's wonder whether “for men of his friend's [Hudson's] large easy power there was not an ampler moral law than for narrow mediocrities like himself” (Novels and Tales, I, 189). Note also how Mallet in a letter to his cousin Cecilia complains concerning Hudson: “He's the most extraordinary being, the strangest mixture of the clear and the obscure. I don't undersand so much power—because it is power—going with so much weakness, such a brilliant gift being subject to such lapses. The poor fellow isn't made right, and it's really not his fault; Nature has given him his faculty out of hand and bidden him be hanged with it” (i, 294). The answer is that Hudson fails to discipline his admittedly great power and so ends tragically; perhaps Warren Hope, if indeed he ever had the “easy power” his pardonably prejudiced wife credits him with, similarly failed through lack of self-discipline or because he too was not “made right.” See G. H. Bantock, “Morals and Civilization in Henry James,” Cambridge Journal, vu (December 1953), 169, where the first of the two passages above from Roderick Hudson is quoted and then briefly discussed.

Note 12 in page 100 With less real reason, Mrs. Hope (1900) behaves for a while as does the abandoned Milly Theale of The Wings of the Dove (1902), who when she learns that she has been deceived is also said to have turned her face to the wall (Novels and Tales, xx, 270, 274). Similarly, Mrs. Louisa Brash of “The Beldonald Holbein” (1901) turns her face to the wall when abandoned (Novels and Tales, xviii, 405).