Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity. Leland S. Person
by the name Mannling those who prefer powerful and masculine adults receive the name of Weibling, the urning who cares for adolescents is styled a Zwischen-urning. Men who seem to be indifferently attracted by both sexes, he calls uranodionings. A genuine Dioning [heterosexual male], who, from lack of women, or under the influence of special circumstances, consorts with persons of his own sex, is denominated Uraniaster. A genuine urning, who has put restraint upon his inborn impulse, who has forced himself to cohabit with women, or has perhaps contracted marriage, is said to be virilisirt, a virilized urning. (228)
Even this rudimentary proliferation of categories, based largely on the gender differences of the homosexual subjects’ object choices, illustrates the difficulty of gender and sexual classification.11
John Addington Symonds went further in his “A Problem in Modern Ethics,” which James read in 1891, toward liberating gender characteristics from sexual orientation. “It is the common belief that all subjects from inverted instinct carry their lusts written in their faces,” Symonds wrote; “that they are pale, languid, scented, effeminate, painted, timid, oblique in expression.” This “vulgar error rests upon imperfect observation,” he concluded. “The majority differ in no detail of their outward appearance, their physique, or their dress from normal men. They are athletic, masculine in habits, frank in manner, passing through society year after year without arousing a suspicion of their inner temperament” (107). We may cringe today at the distinction Symonds accepts between homosexual males and “normal men,” but his celebration of a diverse homosexuality is significant. Furthermore, the implicit idea that masculinity could actually disguise homosexuality, especially in a culture of increasing sexual surveillance, may well have attracted someone like James, fascinated as he was with the problematics of representation and interpretation. Writing homosexually without “arousing suspicion”—James knew how to do that. Even though James inherited a relatively simple model of gender and sexual deviance, his own representations of gender and sexual identity became much more complex.
In this study I would like to keep both gender and sexuality—“sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire,” to repeat Butler’s terms—in play as variable frames of reference for understanding the ways James explores and constructs male identity in his writing. Ahead of his time, I think James recognized that gender and sexuality existed independent of one another—that desire for variably gendered objects could construct a variably gendered and sexualized subject.12 No where does such variability bristle so much as in the essays James wrote about George Sand. Sand destabilized masculinity and heterosexuality for James in many different ways. Yet instead of trying to restore conventional gender differences, James attempts to keep masculinity open—multi-directionally, as it were—for both men and women. That is, he does not simply admit Sand under the sign of masculinity but repositions himself in complex and problematical ways within an expanded category of masculinity that must include this transgendered and transsexualized female man.
Before I examine the ways that gender issues are played out in James’s Sand essays and in The Ambassadors, I want to return to “Hugh Merrow,” for James’s portrait of the artist as an immaculate father-creator discloses a richly ambiguous connection between art and masculinity. The story seems rooted, as James Gifford suggests, in a male fantasy of parthenogenesis (68). In substituting a single male artist for the couple who have tried unsuccessfully to conceive a child, “Hugh Merrow” works a variation on the primal scenes that Silverman finds in many of James’s works. The Archdeans come to Merrow, they tell him, because of the skill he displayed in painting another child: “happy little Reggie Blyth, six years old, erect in a sailor-suit.” Granting to Merrow an extraordinary procreative (and phallocentric) power, the Archdeans assure him, “You can have as many [children] as you like—when you can paint them that way!” (Complete Notebooks 589, 592).13 The most intriguing question that “Hugh Merrow” raises, of course, is why James emphasizes the child’s undecided gender? The answer, I think, involves the way the child mirrors and even engenders its creators. Because Mrs. Archdean wants a girl, while Mr. Archdean wants a boy, they decide to let Merrow create whichever he thinks he can do best (592). “Which would you rather do?” Mrs. Archdean asks him. “Which would most naturally come to you, for ease, for reality?” (593). Where gender is concerned, the Archdeans will give Merrow, as they say, a “free hand,” but this, of course, is precisely the problem. While touting the pleasures of improvisation, James himself had worried about his imaginative “stream” exceeding his control—breaking its bounds and becoming a “flood.” Similarly, Hugh Merrow seems to fear the engendering power of his own imagination—that is, the gender determination that his imagination and creative desire, if given a free hand, might “naturally” project onto the painted child. “For little Reggie, you see, I had my model,” he tells the Archdeans. “He was exquisite, but he was definite—he lighted my steps. The question is what will light them in such a case as you propose. You know, as you say, what you want, but how exactly am I to know it?” As a male artist, Merrow must worry most, during the creative process, about suspending his masculinity. He must worry that a “naturally” gendered (or perhaps ungendered) self will subvert the socially masculine self that empowers his art. Insofar as an artist’s creative products proceed from desire, furthermore, Merrow may worry that, without a model to warrant his production, he may produce something that reveals too much about what comes “naturally” to him. It is no wonder that he tells the Archdeans, “There’s such a drawback as having too free a hand” (594).14
Merrow’s anxiety of improvisation, it seems to me, is also James’s. Whereas Merrow worries about not having a model to light his steps in the creation of gender, James seems to worry about the effect an ambiguously gendered model (Sand) will have on the “gender” of his own art. As James later points out, George Sand finds that “the free mind and the free hand were ever at her service” (Review of George Sand 788). As a woman who improvises a masculine identity, furthermore, Sand raises questions for James about the relation between gender and sexuality. If gender becomes a variable term in Sand’s case—subject to performance—does sexuality also become variable? If gender and sexuality both float free of their biological sites, do they also float free of each other? One of the things to which “queer” can refer, according to Eve Sedgwick, is “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.” Unlike “gay” and “lesbian,” she goes on, the very concept of “queer” “seems to hinge much more radically and explicitly on a person’s undertaking particular, performative acts of experimental self-perception and filiation” (Tendencies 8, 9). Sexual and gender categories began to proliferate at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, as sexology came into its own as a social or behavioral science, and I think James exploited the taxonomic confusion in order to experiment with various sexual and gender identities. Gordene Olga MacKenzie notes that cases that would be defined as “transsexual” today were “originally classified under the categories of homosexuality, sexual perversions, Eonism, androgyny, psychic hermaphroditism and transvestism. Each of these categories contained sub-categories such as cross-dressing, effeminateness, congenital sex inversion, antipathic sexual instinct, uranism, transmutatio sexus, transformation of sex and metamorphosis sexualis” (35).15 Today, “queer” subsumes these and other categories of gender and sexual difference. Sedgwick hypothesizes that not only masculinity and femininity, but “effeminacy, butchness, femmeness, and probably some other superficially related terms, might equally turn out instead to represent independent variables—or at least, unpredictably dependent ones” (“‘Gosh, Boy George’” 16). To consider James a “queer” or any other kind of “deviant” writer does not mean ascribing contemporary terms of gender and sexual identity to him, but using contemporary queer theory to approximate and illuminate qualities in James’s writing that, had he translated them into a metadiscourse, would have assumed some other form. Indeed, it means looking closely at James’s own richly metaphorical language as a metadiscourse on questions of gender and sexuality.
I want to return at this point to James’s vexed attempts to come to terms with George Sand, for they