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Talking in James

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Ruth B. Yeazell
Ruth B. Yeazell*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Abstract

Henry James’s late novels suggest a world of talk which is morally ambiguous because epistemologically unstable. James’s early and late dialogues are radically different: in the late fiction, talk becomes a process of imaginative collaboration, and language virtually creates the conditions under which perception is possible. In The Ambassadors, Parisian talk educates Strether even as it seems to dissemble. And in The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, conversation shapes the terms in which certain actions will be possible; talking together, characters create a world that fits the shape of their desires. Jamesian talk is at once hypocrisy and art: lying becomes a mode of vision. But if James’s liars are artists, his artists are also liars. We prefer Maggie Verver to Charlotte Stant not because she is more honest, but because her language makes for the most harmonious and inclusive order.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 91 , Issue 1 , January 1976 , pp. 66 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1976

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References

Notes

1 The Novels and Tales of Henry James, 26 vols. (New York : Scribners, 1907–09). All subsequent references to James's novels are to this New York Ed. unless otherwise noted.

2 All page references to The American are to the Signet Ed. (New York: NAL, 1963), based on the 1879 London text which, according to Leon Edel, who provides the afterword, is more carefully printed than the original text of 1877 published in Boston.

3 When juxtaposed with Maria Gostrey, Mrs. Tristram shows her limitations—both as character and as woman. Trapped in a disappointing marriage, she has developed her ironic tone primarily as a weapon with which to battle her husband, while Maria's irony is more that of the independent social critic who has no clearly fixed place in society. Compared with Miss Gostrey's, Mrs. Tristram's worldliness seems superficial. The narrator's ironically detached stance toward Mrs. Tristram further diminishes her in our eyes: “She lived in Paris, which she pretended to detest, because it was only in Paris that one could find things to exactly suit one's complexion. Besides, out of Paris it was always more or less of a trouble to get ten-button gloves” (p. 27). The Ambassadors treats Maria, like Strether, with a more gentle and sympathetic irony.

4 Citations from James's Prefaces to the New York Ed. have all been taken from The Art of the Novel, ed. Richard P. Blackmur (1934; rpt. New York: Scribners, 1962), cited as AN here and throughout.

5 Joseph Warren Beach proposes a distinction between two sorts of Jamesian dialogue—that of “confederates” and that of “antagonists.” He argues that the dialogue of antagonists is more mysterious and allusive than that of confederates, because the latter reveals the facts of the story and their meaning, while in the former, participants spar delicately with one another, continually trying to hide as well as to reveal information. But the case of Maria Gostrey should prove that any such distinction immediately breaks down in practice. Were it really possible to label the dialogues in this way, reading the late James would be a much less disturbing experience than it actually is. Beach's attempt suggests how uncomfortable even the best of critics are with the world James's late style creates. See The Method of Henry James (1917; rpt. Philadelphia: A. Saifer, 1954), pp. 77–92.

6 Several critics have taken it as such, speaking of “in-group game[s],” “social cliques,” and “homogeneous, closely-knit social group[s].” See David Lodge, Language of Fiction (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 197, 211; Beach, p. lxiv; and Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James ( 1962 ; rpt. Cambridge, Eng. : Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), p. 151.

7 In his discussion of Richardson's Pamela, forever guarding her technical “virtue” from the sinister designs of Mr. B., Ian Watt argues that “the eighteenth century witnessed a tremendous narrowing of the ethical scale, a redefinition of virtue in primarily sexual terms.” See The Rise of the Novel (1957; rpt. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), p. 157.

8 Sallie Sears writes perceptively about- the perfect fit between Kate's needs and Milly's situation. See The Negative Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 73 74. But it may be more accurate to say that Kate imagines a world to fit her needs, and that in forcefully imagining such a world she half creates it. If we try to distinguish clearly between the shape of actual facts and the characters' imagination of them, the language of the late novels continually defeats us.

9 Although her consciousness dominates the second half of The Golden Bowl, in one chapter (xxiv, Bk. iv. Ch. vii) the Princess does not appear at all. Temporarily liberated from the restrictions of Maggie's point of view, we go instead to Cadogan Place and listen to the Assinghams, engaged—as always—in discussing the Ververs.

10 Questions about the Ververs' moral attractiveness are not new, but they have been raised with special force in recent years. See, e.g., Charles Samuels, The Ambiguity of Henry James (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1971); Sears, The Negative Imagination ; and Philip Weinstein, Henry James and the Requirements of the Imagination (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1971).