Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity. Leland S. Person
of embodiment and an “understanding that the body is not free to change its shape at will. The finitude of gender difference,” she goes on,
does not prevent gender from being constructed in alternative ways in various cultures. And an acceptance of gender difference does not commit one to fictions of unity, stability, and identity, or to a promotion of the hierarchical, oppositional structures of patriarchy. In contrast, the challenge to gender difference posed by the post-modern idea of a “radically heterogenous” sexuality is largely a denial of finitude, embodiment, history—an ideological fantasy based on unlimited autogendering. Such a fiction may be liberating in some ways, but it is also a form of highly aestheticized “play,” which tends to avoid responsibility for the socially situated and psychologically invested nature of human interaction. (“Narcissism” 88 n. 4)
My sense of James’s representation of gender and sexuality does veer toward the danger zone (in Ash’s view) of excessively fictionalizing those characteristics—of creating a form of “aestheticized ‘play.’” While I certainly understand that writing is a form of behavior and thereby subject, like other forms of behavior, to certain constraints and determinations, I think that the field of fiction does allow an author like James considerable freedom for writerly play—in this case, experimental play with heterogenous gender and sexual configurations.
This open view of James’s relation to masculinity, which I posited in a 1991 PMLA article, challenged the assumptions of much James criticism. That essay seems limited now, largely because it pays too little attention to James’s engagement with homosexuality. In the past decade critics such as Eve Sedgwick, Kelly Cannon, John Carlos Rowe, Richard Henke, Hugh Stevens, Eric Haralson, Michael Moon, and Wendy Graham have broadened our understanding of James’s representations of gender and sexuality—thanks in many cases to the influence of gay, lesbian, and queer studies. Cannon focuses most explicitly on James and masculinity and especially on James’s representation of “marginal” male characters, who reflect his interest in unsettling rather than fulfilling the terms of “conventional manhood” (1), but Cannon equates masculinity rather simplistically with aggressiveness and heterosexual passion. Most usefully, however, he argues that these male characters’ displacement to the margins signifies both positively and negatively. Marginalization confirms each character’s lack of conventional masculine attributes, but it also offers a liberated space where alternative masculinities may be tested. Like James himself, Cannon claims, these marginal males battle society’s “conventional image of masculinity (physical aggression, heterosexual activity)” and yearn for “atypicality (androgyny, homosexuality, passivity)” (41). Henke and Rowe come to similar conclusions. Focusing on James’s early novels (Watch and Ward, Roderick Hudson, and The American), Henke argues that James “challenges a singular conception of masculine identity” (257), while “exposing the onerous constructedness of the male subject which patriarchy needs to keep hidden in order to preserve the inviolability of masculinity” (“Embarrassment” 271). But Henke also recognizes that James plays with gender constructs and “is capable of seeing gender in more than essentialist terms, as role, performance, the practice of social conventions, or relative constructions” (“Man of Action” 237). In Rowe’s analysis of the “other” Henry James he discovers a writer who “achieves a psychic alterity that can take erotic pleasure and intellectual satisfaction from subject positions no longer tied to strict gender and sexual binaries” (The Other Henry James 29). All three critics emphasize James’s interest in exploring alternatives to conventional gender and sexual paradigms.
Whereas Cannon, Henke, and Rowe touch only lightly on homoeroticism in James’s writing, many recent scholars have brought James and James studies out of the closet to the point where we can almost take James’s homosexuality for granted. “Something extraordinary began happening to James in the mid-1890s, and more frequently in the next decade,” Fred Kaplan asserts in his 1992 biography. “He fell in love a number of times” (401)—each time with a younger man. Kaplan goes on to detail James’s relationships with John Addington Symonds, Jonathan Sturges, Morton Fullerton, Hendrik Andersen, Howard Sturgis, and Jocelyn Persse, and these relationships clearly figure behind some of James’s fictional works—with Symonds, for example, providing the “germ” for Mark Ambient’s character in “The Author of Beltraffio.” Although Kaplan argues for the “lack of full sexual self-definition” in these relationships (453), despite the extravagant imagery of James’s many love letters, he does emphasize James’s longing for emotional companionship and convivial embraces (452). Indeed, like Leon Edel before him, he stresses the literary, or epistolary, essence of these relationships, suggesting James’s sublimation of sexual desire in acts of aesthetic appreciation. For her part, in her tour de force analysis of “The Beast in the Jungle,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick finds James to be a closeted gay male writer who, like his heterosexual counterparts, represents “homosexual panic” and “heterosexual compulsion” (Epistemology 196). In later essays, she stresses James’s anal eroticism, which she grounds in his notorious problems with constipation, and she considers him “a kind of prototype, not of ‘homosexuality’ but of queerness, or queer performativity” (“Shame and Performativity” 236). Michael Moon, although acknowledging that James has proven “something of a disappointment to some gay readers hoping to find in his work signs of a liberatory sexual program for male-male desire of the kinds available in the writings of some of his contemporaries, such as John Addington Symonds and Oscar Wilde” (A Small Boy 31), insists that James’s “less readily legible relation to the emergence of homosexual identity in his lifetime” renders his fiction no less encoded with homoerotic significance. Indeed, Moon argues, using James’s “determinedly and painstakingly antisensational model of a major queer culture-making career might yield us a considerably different set of templates for delineating both our expectations of queer art and for specifying our terms for its frequently—reliably—expectation-defying surprises” (2). Moon seeks the “‘monstrous’ and outrageous” qualities in James’s writing, and in A Small Boy and Others he focuses on the first volume of James’s autobiography (from which he takes his own title) and “The Pupil,” in which he persuasively decodes “perverse” adult desires for young Morgan Moreen (27).6
Hugh Stevens and Wendy Graham also emphasize the homoerotic imaginary in James’s novels, and both apply the insights of gay, lesbian, and queer theory in provocative, subtle readings of several Jamesian texts. Stevens, for example, claims that even the early James “was already a gay novelist, who created lasting fictions which, ahead of their time, explore the workings of same-sex desire, and the difficulties of admitting such desires, within a cultural formation marked by homosexual prohibition” (115). Graham offers more particularized accounts of James’s homosexuality by arguing for his meticulous engagement with contemporaneous events and publications, especially in the emergent field of sexology. Paying careful attention to the sexological discourses of James’s era, she considers him a case of gender inversion, with which she thinks he felt “comfortable, up to a point” (9).7
These studies of James sexuality and particularly his homosexuality represent the most exciting critical development in James studies over the past decade, and I hope that the present study can add to this understanding. In the process I want to attend carefully to the terms in which James himself understood and represented gender and sexuality and to avoid what Jonathan Ned Katz calls “retrolabeling” (333). In his important recent study of “sex between men before homosexuality” (his subtitle), Katz interests himself in “different historical ways of naming, conceiving, and, ultimately, constructing sexuality, gender, and kinds of persons” (302). Katz, in other words, reads forward from the historical record to the present, resisting the temptation to impose contemporary templates of sexual behavior and identification on the case studies he selects. “We may refer to early-nineteenth-century men’s acts or desires as gay or straight, homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual, but that places their behaviors and lusts within our sexual system, not the system of their time,” Katz warns. “Projected on the past, homo, hetero, and bi distort our present understanding” (9). Although he does not mention Henry James, Katz’s historical and historicizing project can offer an appropriate theoretical model for examining James’s writing as itself an example of gender and sexual theorizing. As Katz explains, the “names people