Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity. Leland S. Person
to this encounter and to the excruciating experience of sitting “close to Chad” while the play goes on (21: 136), they conclude that James’s prose “chokes an erotic response that the use of words such as ‘rush,’ ‘flush,’ ‘strained’ and ‘pressure’ only serves to underscore—so much so that the carnal implications of the phrase ‘the long tension of the act’ ring out loud and clear, despite (or perhaps because of) James’s efforts to suppress them” (221). I don’t think James tries to suppress anything in this scene, however. Indeed, he goes out of his way to intensify the pressure that Strether experiences by making him sit through the first act of the play after he sees Chad. The proprieties of the theater prevent his reacting except inwardly to the “sharp rupture” his own subjectivity has suffered. James, in other words, keeps Strether, his gender and his sexuality, in suspense.
In one respect, the famous scene in the French countryside, in which Strether learns the sexual truth about Chad’s adulterous relationship with Marie de Vionnet, ends some of the suspense that the earlier scene with Chad has created. It constitutes the climactic “rupture” for his ambassadorial mission to France, because it prevents further suppression of the erotic and the destabilizing effect that diversified desire can have on male identity. As “queer as fiction” (22: 257), the scene also transports Strether into the world that the French novel richly evoked for James—that is, the world of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and especially George Sand. Marie de Vionnet’s switch to French when the question of her true relationship with Chad cannot help invoking Sand’s erotized masculine discourse about Musset. Kaja Silverman, furthermore, argues that this scene “encourages identifications which are in excess of sexual difference.” As a “primal scene fantasy,” it “opens onto both the positive or heterosexual, and the negative or homosexual versions of the Oedipus complex,” promoting “desire for the father and identification with the mother, as well as desire for the mother and identification with the father” (165). Strether’s gender alignment and sexual identifications, she implies, are paradigmatically dual—female as well as male, homosexual as well as heterosexual.
My concern, however, is less with the gender confusion implicit in this scene than with the possibilities of masculinity the scene opens up (and closes off). Kelly Cannon argues that Chad and Marie de Vionnet “represent the heterosexual union to which the sexually marginalized male comes unprepared physically and emotionally” (19), but he begs the question in that simple, either-or formulation of what responses Strether has available. If Strether identifies with both Chad and Marie, as Silverman points out, he identifies with a feminized masculinity and a masculinized femininity. The scene thus introduces the notion of masculinity “in the plural term.” To complicate matters further, Strether himself experiences a gender reversal as he reconstructs the scene. When he finally faces the “deep, deep truth of the intimacy” between Chad and Marie, he sees his former self as female: “he almost blushed, in the dark, for the way he had dressed the possibility in vagueness, as a little girl might have dressed her doll (22: 266).” Strether’s figure for himself, which seems (pro) created by the primal scene in which he has participated, raises several issues. Resorting to such infantilizing gender inversion reflects a masochistic selfrecognition that he does not measure up to turn-of-the-century ideals of heterosexually empowered manhood. But Strether’s figure also has a campy side and enables James to play with his character and his reader across lines of gender and gendered desire. The choice of figures—little girl rather than little boy—prolongs the negative identification of the primal scene, for example. If Strether performs the “little girl,” he may attract Chad, as Jeanne de Vionnet ultimately does. Such fantasmatic cross-gendering empowers a heterosexualized play of desire—a classic example of inversion in which desire for a man feminizes the male who desires. The doll-playing fantasy, however, in which Chad and Marie figure as a turn-of-the-century Ken and Barbie, suggests other fantasmatic possibilities. Having “dressed” them, as it were, in the euphemisms of repression, Strether now presumably undresses them as he imagines their sexual intimacy, playing with them separately and together and supposing, as James remarks, “innumerable and wonderful things” (22: 266). Those “things” surely allow Strether to imagine multiple roles and to experiment with a pluralized masculinity and sexual identity. Imagining the “wonderful” things that go on between Chad and Marie de Vionnet certainly involves Strether in the heterosexual imaginary, but in a scene “as queer as fiction” Strether can also occupy Marie’s subject and object position—desiring Chad and being desired by him. Perhaps the things that this “bad woman” has done to Chad or made him do to her are not so “dreadful” after all—and truly “innumerable and wonderful” when Strether cross-genders himself to imagine doing them.
In the early scene in which Strether and Waymarsh prepare for bed in a London hotel James stages another campy scene of flirtation or cruising that brings closer to the surface the question of what things—dreadful or wonderful—men might do to other men. Although Strether’s mission on Mrs. Newsome’s behalf seems designed to enforce a compulsory heterosexuality, Strether flirts with the possibility of homosexual desire and consummation when he puts Waymarsh to bed. “I want to go back,” Waymarsh coyly whines, as he keeps his eyes “all attached to Strether’s.” This direct gaze “enabled his friend to look at him hard and immediately appear to the higher advantage in his eyes by doing so” (21: 30). This direct look between men contrasts with the sort of indirection that cruising relies upon, but it still enables the two men to test their attraction, or “attachment,” to each other. “That’s a genial thing to say to a fellow who has come out on purpose to meet you!” Strether responds (21: 30). Waymarsh and Strether play with one another across the subject and object of Strether’s desire—what he calls “my desire to be with you” (21: 30)—but Strether postpones full disclosure of his desire (whether for Waymarsh or for Mrs. Newsome). “Oh you shall have the whole thing,” he teases. “But not tonight” (21: 31). However, when Strether assists Waymarsh to a “consummation” by helping him into bed, pleasuring himself with the “smaller touches of lowering the lamp and seeing to a sufficiency of blanket” (21: 31), he deflects the homoerotic possibilities with which he himself has flirted. Waymarsh appears to him both “unnaturally big and black in bed” and “as much tucked in as a patient in a hospital and, with his covering up to his chin, as much simplified by it” (21: 31).23 Indeed, despite the gender inversion that seems to accompany this hospital metaphor, Strether enjoys the “feeling” of playing a “nurse who had earned personal rest by having made everything straight” (21: 32). James’s metaphors both avow and disavow the homoerotic possibilities with which he and Strether have toyed. As he had at the theater, Strether seems to prefer cross-gendering himself to crossing another boundary, but James surely enjoys playing with possibilities of crossing both gender and sexual lines. From Strether’s cross-gendered position as a nurse, he will keep everything “covered up to the chin” and “straight”—causing “straight” to take on meanings that suggest deviations from conventional lines and making Strether seem like a male version of George Sand, inverting himself in reverse.24
As we shall see, James frequently opens the possibility of homosocial and homosexual attachment between men but then closes it off in favor of heterocentric plot developments. In this scene James takes pains to keep male-male desire at bay, or to triangulate it through the presence of a woman and Strether’s consciousness of his ambassadorial mission. Despite their intimacy and their flirtatious conversation, the two men deflect attention from their situation by discussing Mrs. Newsome—that is, by inserting a woman (albeit a manly one) into what becomes a heterosexually triangulated relationship. ‘You’re a very attractive man, Strether,” Waymarsh can observe, but he does so by attributing the observation (and the desire that goes with it) to “that lady downstairs” (Maria Gostrey) and to Mrs. Newsome (21: 32). Waymarsh does push Strether for some kind of commitment, asking why he suggests that his ambassadorial mission is also for him. Strether tries to have the dilemma both ways, but Waymarsh’s question obviously causes him some anxiety. James describes him as impatient and “violently” playing “with his latch” before he replies, “It’s for both of you.” Waymarsh turns over “with a groan” at this point and exclaims, “Well, I won’t marry you!” (21: 34). Strether escapes from the room in which he might have been closeted for the night with Waymarsh before he can complete his reply, leaving the matter in a state