Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity. Leland S. Person
androgynous double. Because as a writer she was “both man and woman,” she caused James to falter “again and again” in attempting to describe her (Heilbrun 35, 36). Coming to terms with what he called the riddle or mystery or question of Sand meant researching his own gender identity and the gender of his literary authority. Sand shook James to the very foundation of his gendered and sexual selfhood, prompting him simultaneously to effusive accolades and to a series of discursive gymnastics. She finally induced a bizarre gender reversal in which she became a dubious masculine ideal that placed James in a subject position he experienced simultaneously as male and female, hetero- and homoerotic. Sand compelled James to suspend his conventional male identity and the authorial self he was trying to construct. Insofar as he could not recognize himself and his artistic profile in the masculine Sand, James seemed to feel his identity as a male writer was indeterminate or in suspense.
In the end it is precisely the intersection of Sand’s gender and her creative power that poses the greatest problem for James, and the primary way for him to swallow Sand is to transmute her into a man. She was a “woman quite by accident,” he maintains in his review of She and He; she possessed “the true male inwardness”—indeed, “more of the inward and outward of the other sex than of her own” (748, 750). Her masculinity resided in her “inward impunity,” her ability to get “off from paying” for her repeated surrenders to “unconsecrated passion.” The history of her “personal passions reads singularly like the chronicle of the ravages of some male celebrity,” James claims, because it represents the “same story of free appropriation and consumption” (751, 750). Whereas a “feminine” woman could not have maintained enough presence of mind to have the use of her experience, Sand had, “as liberty, all the adventures of which the dots are so put on the i’s by the documents lately published, and then she had, as law, as honour and serenity, all her fine reflections on them and all her splendid literary use of them. Nothing perhaps gives more relief to her masculine stamp,” he concludes, than the “rare art and success with which she cultivated an equilibrium.” In short, Sand gave off a “peculiar air of having eaten her cake and had it” (752).
The power of Sand’s masculinity to disturb James’s authorial equilibrium stands even clearer in his 1914 review of Wladamir Karénine’s George Sand. The main difference between this final essay on Sand and the previous ones is a new cultural perspective in which Sand figures as standard-bearer for the feminist revolution. However, because, for James, feminism seemed to mean both the masculinization of women and women’s appropriation of the masculine, it impugned his conception of his own male identity. He claims that the “answer of [Sand’s] life to the question of what an effective annexation of the male identity may amount to” leaves “nothing to be desired for completeness” (Review of George Sand 781). Transmuting George Sand into a transpersonal masculine ideal was tricky, because Sand’s “equilibrium” of masculine and feminine qualities—her female masculinity—threatened to make her more robustiy masculine than James himself, who could be left to identify himself with a male femininity. In other words, he would be one of these “who at the present hour ‘feel the change,’ as the phrase is, in the computation of the feminine range, with the fullest sense of what it may portend” (Review of George Sand 779). What Sand’s example may portend is a change in men and, more ominously, a change in James’s conception of himself as a man.
In admitting that he most recognizes in Sand’s “tale,” not “the extension she gives to the feminine nature, but the richness that she adds to the masculine,” James does not mean that Sand merely affected masculinity or, usurping male prerogatives, acted “like a man” and thus made it possible for a man to act “like a woman.” Whereas Sandra Corse says that James “saw in Sand not a person who appropriated men, but who appropriated masculinity itself’ (68), I think that James saw Sand’s masculinity as going beyond her behavior and thus beyond the “masculine” to the “male.” Her performance of masculinity challenged the very idea of gendered identity. “It is not simply that she could don a disguise that gaped at the seams, that she could figure as a man of the mere carnival or pantomime variety,” James writes, “but that she made so virile, so efficient and homogeneous a one” (Review of George Sand 781). Not only has Sand’s gender floated free of her biological nature, but it has also exceeded her performance. She is not in male drag. She is transsexual and transgendered—and “homogeneous” as a man. Her maleness seems to occupy some ontological realm between the essential and the constructed—or is constructed so impeccably (with no “gape” at the “seams”) that constructedness and essentialism come to mean the same “real thing.” Sand also foreshadowed something more than androgyny, more than a union of opposed gender constructs. She suggested new constructs, new categories—the pluralization of genders. As James observes,
Nothing could well be more interesting thus than the extraordinary union of the pair of opposites in her philosophy of the relation of the sexes—than the manner in which her immense imagination, the imagination of a man for range and abundance, intervened in the whole matter for the benefit, absolutely, of the so-called stronger party, or to liberate her sisters up to the point at which men may most gain and least lose by the liberation. She read the relation essentially in the plural term. (Review of George Sand 781)
Although James begins with the traditional notion that Sand androgynously united masculine and feminine characteristics, he ends more complexly by noting that she read the relation between men and women not as a union of discrete or singular genders but “in the plural term.” He emphasizes how, in liberating women from traditional femininity, Sand enables men to “most gain and least lose”—that is, to “pluralize” their manhood. Her “philosophy” thus portends the dissolution not only of gender categories (of behavioral characteristics) but of gender identities. The resulting emergence of a plurality of gender and sexual identities occupying the same subject position would require men to suspend traditional masculinity, as Hugh Merrow is forced to do, in favor of the improvisational freedom to construct a masculine self from a range of possibilities that would include George Sand’s female masculinity.16
In his 1914 essay James magnifies Sand’s personal influence and projects it on the culture at large. The “force of George Sand’s exhibition,” he says, is
that effective repudiation of the distinctive, as to function and opportunity, as to working and playing activity, for which the definite removal of immemorial disabilities is but another name. We are in presence already of a practical shrinkage of the distinctive, at the rapidest rate, and that it must shrink till nothing of it worth mentioning be left, what is this but a war-cry? … Unless the suppression of the distinctive, however, is to work to the prejudice, as we may fairly call it, of men, drawing them over to the feminine type rather than drawing women over to theirs—which is not what seems most probable—the course of the business will be a virtual undertaking on the part of the half of humanity acting ostensibly for the first time in freedom to annex the male identity, that of the other half, so far as may be at all contrivable, to its own cluster of elements. (Review of George Sand 780)
James’s extravagant imagery in this difficult passage resorts to conventionally masculine language (“war-cry,” “business,” “annex”) to proclaim its lack in the culture at large. Noting that the difference between men and women “must shrink till nothing of it worth mentioning be left,” James reveals continued anxiety about what “swallowing” the masculine Sand portends for his own masculinity and even suggests a fear of castration. However, by emphasizing what Sand means for men and women in the early twentieth century, rather than simply for himself, James makes the “shrinkage” work to his advantage—bringing cultural masculinity more into line with his own, which has been “drawn over” to the “feminine type.”
The change in James’s view of Sand between 1897 and 1914 can be located in his 1902 essay, “George Sand: The New Life,” as well as in The Ambassadors, which was published the same year. Confronting Sand, James resembles Lambert Strether, whose categories are all “taken by surprise” by Marie de Vionnet (NY 21: 271).17 Because Sand’s “annexation of the male identity” could also presage the feminization of James’s identity—his “drawing over to the feminine type”—he tries to find a way to accommodate her fulfillment