Ian F. A. Bell

The Personal, the Private and the Public

There is a term missing from the chapter title. It is ‘publicity’: the world of spectacle, promotion, advertisement, calculation and construction of desire, which may be taken as characteristic of the industrial and marketing shifts graphing the consumer culture that began to structure American ways of seeing in the 1870s. The terms the title does contain are those which are most threatened by ‘publicity’, and some of the ways in which that threat is manifested in The Bostonians will be suggested.1

Divine Patterns: Louis Agassiz and American Men of Letters. Some Preliminary Explorations

To arrive at Pounds Canto XXIII from Poes ‘ Sonnet to Science ’ is a problematic task for more and less obvious reasons. Part of the way in which we may make the approach is through the resonances of certain figures prominent in the history of ideas; in particular to Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born geologist and natural historian who was a central personality in Cambridge circles from his arrival in America in 1846 until his death in 1873. Apart from Edward Luries excellent biography, Louis Agassiz, A Life in Science (Chicago, 1960), the twentieth century bears only scattered reference to him, whereas the latter half of the nineteenth century celebrated his work enthusiastically and prolifically. Part of the reason for his diminished presence after the turn of the century lies undoubtedly in his position outside the mainstream of contemporary biological thinking, particularly as a result of his quarrel with Asa Gray during the 1850s; Agassiz was the only scientist of influential standing to oppose himself to the doctrine of Evolution. Consequently, he occupies a far less prominent place in the history of biology than he did in his own era.

Henry James, in Parenthesis

My cue is taken from Ezra Pound’s interview with Donald Hall for The Paris Review in 1962: I’ll tell you a thing that I think is an American form, and that is the Jamesian parenthesis. You realize that the person you are talking to hasn’t got the different steps, and you go back over them […] The struggle that one has when one meets another man who has had a lot of experience to find the point where the two experiences touch, so that he really knows what you are talking about. (Quoted in Dick 1972: 95) Pound, as one of the earliest and most astute sustained readers of James,2 has him as ‘weaving an endless sentence’ in Canto VII (1973: 24), and James’s biographer, Leon Edel, makes the point more expansively in his account of the novelist’s habit of dictating his later works, ‘filled with qualifications and parentheses; he seemed often, in a letter, to begin a sentence without knowing what its end would be, and he allowed it to meander into surprising twists and turns’ (Edel 1977, 2: 231). To meander, as we shall see, is an important form of digression, encouraging a new voice ‘in his use of colloquialisms, and in a more extravagant play of fancy, a greater indulgence in expanding metaphors, and great proliferating similes’ (Edel 1977, 2: 231).

Sincerity and Performance

‘It is impossible you should be sincere; you live in the latter part of the nineteenth century’, complains Wilfred Athel to Beatrice Redwing in Gissing’s A Life’s Morning. The complaint is expanded: Look at the position in which you stand. One moment you are a woman of the world, the next you run frantic with religious zeal, another turn and you are almost an artist, at your piano; when you are tired of all these, you become, or try to become a sort of ingenue. In the name of consistency, be one thing or another.1 Caught here is the shadow of a major nineteenth-century debate about sincerity of feeling and behaviour, authenticity of representation, the self and its presentations. This debate had engaged James half a decade earlier in The Europeans, in the presentation of Eugenia: its occurrence in Gissing’s novel provides several of the main terms and strategies we need for an analysis of James’s treatment. Gissing locates the debate as an issue of gender, opposing male singularity against female variousness. Athel continually narrows things down.

Introduction: The Jamesian Balloon

This is Wells’s Reginald Boon, reading James in 1915. We would not expect either Wells or Boon to be entirely sympathetic towards the Jamesian enterprise, but Boon’s reading turns out to be a useful misreading which raises one of the main issues we shall pursue: that is, his opposition of ‘penetration’ to ‘surface’. Boon clearly has a notion of novelistic realism lurking behind this judgement, a realism that will prove to be entirely inappropriate to a fiction which demonstrates above all the insufficiency of Boon’s oppositional terms within the changing history witnessed by the final quarter of the nineteenth century. This history records the shifts in manners and modes of social and commercial intercourse within the development of the marketplace and the rise of consumer culture, a history charted vividly in James’s early novels by his female characters (notably Catherine Sloper, the Baroness Munster, Madame Merle, Verena Tarrant and Miriam Rooth). Here, ‘surface’ takes on a new resonance as the reconstructed ‘real’ of social contact for the purposes of display and exchange, and its major strategy of performativeness is also picked up by Boon: The only living human motives left in the novels of Henry James are a certain avidity and an entirely superficial curiosity. Even when relations are irregular or when sins are hinted at, you feel that these are merely attitudes taken up, gambits before the game of attainment and over-perception begins.1

Language, Setting and Self

The discourses deployed by Basil Ransom in his appropriation of Verena are drawn from the vocabulary of the theatre and, especially, the vocabulary of the arcadian and the pastoral. By draining Verena of any substantive content, they maintain her as a creature of his own imagining, a ‘private’ figure to be shored against the intrusions of publicity. Paradoxically, such a draining is precisely the tactic of publicity itself in its promotion of the spectacular: instead of ‘saving’ Verena in any way, Ransom’s manipulative language succeeds in substituting one form of publicity, although admittedly on a minor scale, for another; his designs, in short, share all the features of the system they aim to subvert. Let us begin by tracking the main line of Ransom’s arcadian language and its support for the schismatic perception whereby he attempts to rigidify the world that is, again, a feature of publicity’s vision. Then let us see how the disposition of this language belongs to the wider concern of James’s interest in the realist setting within the architecture of consumption and, finally, to the inflation of self which he regards as one of consumption’s most insidious infections.

Publicity and Emptiness

The Bostonians is about ‘publicity’; about the issues of ‘personal’, ‘private’, ‘public’ relationships (almost obsessively highlighted as the novel’s key terms) and their re-alignments at the onset of consumer culture in America during the 1870s and 1880s;1 that moment in economic history when, within the practices of industrial capitalism, forms of accumulation began to give way to the imperatives of reproduction.2 It is through these re-alignments as a function of such history that we may detect the ‘very national, very typical’ features of a novel which aimed insistently to be ‘very characteristic of our social conditions’,3 features given insufficient weight even by those rare modern Jamesian critics who are properly concerned to register his historicism.4 The subject of the novel — and the source of its typicality — is precisely James’s anxieties about the reconstitutions of these terms ‘publicity’, ‘public’, ‘personal’, and ‘private’, about the reconstitutions of ideas concerning the self and its possibilities for relationships under the impact of the new world of consumerism. Publicity, the agency whereby the world advertises and perpetuates itself, becomes James’s synecdoche for the changing culture in which all his characters are caught up.

Money, History and Writing

James’s project in Washington Square marks an interest in certain forms of abstraction and human paralysis detectable in the onset of corporate industry in America during the 1830s and 1840s. His concern takes shape in the very structure of the novel, its extraordinary specificity concerning time and place in the opening three chapters becoming progressively dissolved as the action of the story unfolds from Chapter 4 onwards. The Square itself, conceived as an ‘ideal of quiet and genteel retirement’1 against the commercial turbulence of lower Manhattan, loses its relational context within the city and inhabits a kind of timelessness. Both of these are defining features of the industrial production of commodities. They are equally features of the bourgeois temperament that James is concerned to diagnose in the balanced, rational discourse of Dr Sloper and the vacuous jangle of Mrs Penniman’s impoverished imagination.2 It is these styles, in company with the problematically ‘natural’ style of the socially indefinable Townsend, which compete for the commodified Catherine, worth ‘eighty thousand a year’ (pp. 27 and 29) within the frozen world of market practice.

The Peculiarity of Social Life: Reform and Gender

James’s choice of reform as the substantial subject of publicity in The Bostonians bears strongly in mind the properly civic resonance of the dissociations discoverable in Emerson. For the wider issue of James’s historicism, we should remember that Emerson’s handling of the equation between private and public occurs in the context of that earlier period of radical commercial change during the 1830s and 1840s. This period had already provided a focus for James’s attention at the end of the 1870s when he chose it as the setting for the action of Washington Square and The Europeans, texts where (especially in the latter) again we find Emerson’s informative presence. The concerns with the changing nature of ideas about the self and with the fiscal instability that engage the main preoccupations of these novels are concerns which characterise the major shifts in the American economic history of the nineteenth century — the shifts from the sphere of accumulation to the sphere of reproduction where the latter begins its visible ascendancy towards the end of Reconstruction.

Commodity and Style

It is not insignificant that Washington Square is the only novel for which James chose a specific locale as a title; historical time and geographical place are the issues which overtly confront the reader, to an extent (excepting The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima) insisted upon as nowhere else in James’s works. The time is, predominantly, the difficult period of the late 1830s and early 1840s,1 and the place is that area of lower Manhattan which awkwardly defends itself against contemporary turbulence.