Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity
Описание книги
Using insights from feminist studies, men's studies, and gay and queer studies, Leland Person examines Henry James's subversion of male identity and the challenges he poses to conventional constructs of heterosexual masculinity. Sexual and gender categories proliferated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Person argues that James exploited the taxonomic confusion of the times to experiment with alternative sexual and gender identities. In contrast to scholars who have tried to give a single label to James's sexuality, Person argues that establishing James's gender and sexual identity is less important than examining the novelist's shaping of male characters and his richly metaphorical language as an experiment in gender and sexual theorizing. Just as an author's creations can be animated by his or her own sexuality, Person contends, James's sexuality may be most usefully understood as something primarily aesthetic and textual. As Person shows in chapters devoted to some of this author's best-known novels— Roderick Hudson , The American , The Portrait of a Lady , The Bostonians , The Ambassadors , The Golden Bowl —James conducts a series of experiments in gender/sexual construction and deconstruction. He delights in positioning his male characters so that their gender and sexual orientations are reversed, ambiguous, and even multiple. Ultimately, he keeps male identity in suspense by pluralizing male subjectivity.
Отрывок из книги
Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity
LELAND S. PERSON
.....
I want to return at this point to James’s vexed attempts to come to terms with George Sand, for they illustrate the problems and possibilities of his engagement with questions of masculinity. In the three long essays James wrote about Sand in the last two decades of his life (1897, 1902, 1914), she serves him as an artistic doppelgänger, an idealized, complexly 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.
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.
.....