Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity. Leland S. Person
of his relationship with Mrs. Newsome.25
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s account of James’s representation of compulsory heterosexuality in “The Beast in the Jungle,” furthermore, bears on Strether’s predicament in the last part of The Ambassadors. In writing his essays on Sand, James wrestles with his own sexuality and returns again and again—compulsively, as it were—to the most striking example of compulsive heterosexuality he has encountered. At the same time, as a woman who was also a man, George Sand could project a special type of both heterosexuality and homosexuality—a woman who transgenders herself not to be with other women, but to be with men. As James writes in his 1897 essay, “to feel as George Sand felt … one had to be, like George Sand, of the true male inwardness; which poor Musset was far from being. This, we surmise, was the case with most of her lovers, and the truth that makes the idea of her liaison with Mérimée, who was of a consistent virility, sound almost like a union against nature” (“She and He” 748). For James the Sand-Musset affair represented gender reversal, with Musset playing a feminine, or at least a less than masculine role. Musset is “unmanly,” in James’s view, because he “cries out when he is hurt; he resorts frequently to tears, and he talks much about his tears” (Review of Biographie 610). James surmises that Sand appropriates the male role and male identity by being more masculine than her male lovers, who, like “poor Musset,” are thereby cast in the female role. But the issue for James is more complicated, for when he does imagine a male with a “consistent virility,” he must also imagine an “unnatural,” or homosexual, union with the masculine Sand. In this respect, then, the Sand-Musset affair does not sound “like a union against nature,” since both lovers are transgendered. Whereas the Sand-Musset relationship suggests an inverted heterosexuality, the Sand-Mérimée affair represents a homoerotic heterosexual union between a masculine woman and a masculine man. Gender and sexual constructs have become fluid indeed, as James’s transgendered George Sand experiences both homosexual and heterosexual desire for men.
James’s dilemma about being feminized or homosexual resembles Strether’s quandary as he confronts the Chad Newsome-Marie de Vionnet relationship, which he, like James, although for different reasons, views as unnatural. It would be a stretch of logic to argue that the fictional lovers’ differences in age and nationality stand in for the reversed gender positions in Sand’s love affairs, but the point is not that Strether must identify himself as one or the other, masculine or feminine. The novel, like James’s essays on Sand, represents more complicated possibilities, suspending male identity between masculine and feminine poles and “cutting,” or intersecting, it with a spectrum of desire. The male body in both cases becomes the site of gender and sexual indeterminacy. Male subjectivity, predicated upon a range of gendered object choices, comes to occupy a “no man’s land” of suspense. Maleness becomes a construct while writing about it presages gender improvisation. In his remarkable characterization of Strether’s state of mind (in his preface to the New York Edition of the novel), James figures his hero’s subjectivity as a “clear green liquid” in a “neat glass phial,” but he goes on to stress the liquid’s changeability and so to establish a protean subjectivity. The liquid, “once poured into the open cup of application, once exposed to the action of another air, had begun to turn from green to red, or whatever, and might, for all he knew, be on its way to purple, to black, to yellow. At the still wilder extremes represented perhaps, for all he could say to the contrary, by a variability so violent, he would at first, naturally, but have gazed in surprise and alarm; whereby the situation clearly would spring from the play of wildness and the development of extremes” (Art of the Novel 314). Strether may seem like an unlikely candidate for such internal violence at the “still wilder extremes,” but many readers would say the same about Henry James and his representation of gender and sexuality.
Although James observes that it would have “sickened” Strether to “feel vindictive” toward Chad (22: 295)—that is, like an angry and punishing father—the scene in the country, which “disagreed” with Strether’s “spiritual stomach” (22: 265), does enable him to restore some gender equilibrium. But an equally important scene, especially in light of James’s essays on Sand, occurs when Strether visits Madame de Vionnet for the final time, because in her presence Strether feels “freshly and consentingly passive” (22: 278)—much like James in Sand’s “presence” before Balzac intervened. While Strether’s reconstruction of the scene in the country has made him feel girlish and demoralized, the scene in Madame de Vionnet’s apartment, like James’s invocation of Balzac in the 1902 essay, restores him to a manly place. There he assuages his need for punishment by imaginatively projecting Madame de Vionnet’s demoralization. His picture of her as “exploited” and “afraid” for her life, as a “maidservant crying for her young man” (22: 284–85), differs radically from James’s depiction of Sand. Marie’s tears and sobs, which remind Strether of sounds that “come from a child,” contrast sharply with Sand’s “inward impunity” even as they recall his own girlish infantilization. “Nothing perhaps gives more relief to [Sand’s] masculine stamp than the rare art and success with which she cultivated an equilibrium,” James observed. “She made from beginning to end a masterly study of composure, absolutely refusing to be upset, closing her door at last against the very approach of irritation and surprise” (“She and He” 752). In his 1914 review James conscripts Sand into the ranks of feminist activists as a woman who dealt with life “exactly as if she had been a man” (Review of George Sand 779–80). In contrast, Madame de Vionnet, Strether thinks repeatedly, is a woman. Indeed, she is a representative of women, and thus, in his view, “to deal with [her] requires the ability to walk on water” and demands that he act the part of a man (22: 285). In constructing himself as Marie’s savior, of course, Strether also switches the object of his ambassadorial desire. His original mission was designed as an intervention in a “monstrous” heterosexual union, the prerequisite for Chad’s deprogramming and installation as head of the family business. Saving Marie from Chad rather than Chad from Marie frees Strether from his obligation to Mrs. Newsome and from the arguably masochistic relationship he enjoys with her, and it reverses his relation to Chad and Marie. Switching sides, however, does not eliminate the double identification or double desire that Strether has experienced. This transposition, Strether’s movement to Marie’s side, simultaneously fulfills and disavows the desire he feels in Chad’s presence. Reversal enables and prevents inversion. That is, Strether identifies with Marie at the very moment when doing so makes him safe from acting upon any desire for Chad. As transposable objects of desire, then, Marie and Chad are really objects of foreclosed desire. Strether’s reversal of loyalty forecloses upon the possibility of any affair of his own—with either of them.
James’s arguably successful effort to solve the riddle that George Sand posed for his masculinity can illuminate the end of The Ambassadors, because the suspense that Strether’s “sharp fantastic crisis” creates for his gender identity ends in much the same way as James’s over the course of the three Sand essays. When Strether turns down Maria Gostrey’s veiled proposal by explaining that he is following a logic of getting nothing for himself out of the “whole affair,” his response is as untrustworthy as Maria’s claim that he returns to America with only his “wonderful impressions” (22: 326). James Gifford considers Strether’s refusal a “renunciation of heterosexuality,” but he also points out that such a renunciation “only makes his self-imposed (homo) sexual exile all the more pitiable” (84). In other respects as well, Strether chooses a modest life as a man, like John Marcher, to whom little is likely to happen. He will return from Paris with “treasures of imagination” (22: 224) and with his masculinity at least tentatively and imaginatively in place—but unchanged. In fact, when he fills the interval between his final meetings with Marie and Chad by escorting Maria Gostrey about Paris, he enjoys this “happy interlude” the more for his being able to play the “kindly uncle” to Maria’s “intelligent niece from the country” (22: 291). He gets for himself, then, what James got from Balzac: an independent, unaffiliated, uncompromised manhood. In contrast to Sand, who follows a policy of “free appropriation and consumption,” of having her cake and eating it too, Strether embraces this logic of renunciation. As James says of Balzac, Strether is “always fencing himself in against the personal adventure, the personal experience, in order to preserve himself