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Introduction: Henry James and the Plural Terms of Masculinity

Here I sit: impatient to work: only wanting to concentrate myself, to keep at it: full of ideas, full of ambition, full of capacity—as I believe. Sometimes the discouragements, however, seem greater than anything else—the delays, the interruptions, the éparpillement, etc. But courage, courage, and forward, forward. If one must generalize, that is the only generalization. There is an immensity to be done, and, without vain presumption—I shall at the worst do a part of it. But all one’s manhood must be at one’s side.

—James, Complete Notebooks 44

In the unfinished story “Hugh Merrow,” Henry James recounts a conversation between the eponymous artist and a young couple, the Archdeans, who want him to paint the portrait of a child. A surrogate rather than a replica, the portrait would serve as the child the husband and wife have been unable to conceive. Although in his first note for the story James had imagined the couple requesting that the child be a girl (Complete Notebooks 192), in the version James eventually wrote they ask the artist to make the decision himself, because they disagree about whether they want a boy or a girl. James did not finish the story, but it nevertheless reaches a logical conclusion, ending at the moment when Merrow agrees to paint the portrait. What remains open—in a state of suspense—is the question of the child’s gender.

As a story that ends with the creative process about to begin and the artist suspended, as it were, between genders, “Hugh Merrow” offers an appropriate point of entry for a study of James’s representation of masculinity and male subjectivity. As Leon Edel notes, James was working on the story, which he called “The Beautiful Child,” during the summer of 1902, at virtually the same time that The Ambassadors was moving toward publication and he was writing a series of essays on French novelists (Edel, Master 128–29). Connections among these various works, especially as they foreground questions about masculinity, can be illuminated in the context of James’s concerns at the turn of the century, but they can also highlight the vexed question of masculinity that he pursued from the beginning to the end of his career. In reviewing his responses to French novelists, James was trying not only to create and promote a public authorial self but also to research his private self. Through the intimate process of his reading, he recognized, these writers had inscribed themselves in him. As he writes at the beginning of his 1902 essay on Balzac,

these particular agents exist for us, with the lapse of time, as the substance itself of knowledge: they have been intellectually so swallowed, digested and assimilated that we take their general use and suggestion for granted, cease to be aware of them because they have passed out of sight. But they have passed out of sight simply by having passed into our lives. They have become a part of our personal history, a part of ourselves, very often, so far as we may have succeeded in best expressing ourselves. (90)

In his essays on the French novelists James repeatedly measured his own “best” writing against the standard offered by such male writers as Flaubert, Zola, and especially Balzac, whom he considered the “father of us all” (“Lesson of Balzac” 120). George Sand, however, forced him to test himself against a much more enigmatic model of gender. Reading and writing about Sand compelled James to reexamine gender questions he had swallowed, digested and assimilated—to bring to the surface of his discourse a complicated gender identity, as well as complex questions about sexual desires, that had passed “out of sight” and into his own life.

In James’s late work, Leo Bersani argues, there is an insistence that “fictional invention” actually “constitutes the self.” Although James’s primary subject is freedom, the novels

dramatize the difficulties of living by improvisation: the incompatibilities among different ways of composing life, the absence of determined values by which to discriminate morally among various compositions, the need to develop persuasive strategies capable of imposing personal ingenuities on the life of a community, and finally, the nostalgia for an enslaving truth which would rescue us from the strenuous responsibilities of inventive freedom. (132)

Coincidentally, the quality that most captivated James in Sand’s writing was her power of improvisation—the “force of her ability to act herself out” (Review of George Sand 783). She was an “improvisaterice, raised to a very high power,” he maintained (“Letter from Paris” 705)—indeed, “the great improvisatrice of literature” (“George Sand,” Galaxy 712). What Bersani calls the strenuous responsibilities of inventive freedom has special relevance for James’s view of Sand, for the improvisational freedom that James marked in her writing confused him in much the same way that the Archdeans’ demands confused Hugh Merrow. As a woman who impersonated a man and was often taken for one, she suggested the possibility that gender and sexuality are fluid—in suspense—subject not only to deconstruction but also to improvisation. She demonstrated the ease of living by improvisation—most compellingly, the ease of reconstructing one’s gender. That improvisational ability, however, makes James anxious about “swallowing” her or, having swallowed her, confronting the self that he has improvised and succeeded in best expressing.

In his preface to volume 12 of the New York Edition James explores the attractions and dangers of “improvisation” in one of his notoriously extended metaphors. “Nothing is so easy as improvisation,” he remarks, “the running on and on of invention; it is sadly compromised, however, from the moment its stream breaks bounds and gets into flood” (Art of the Novel 171–72). The metaphor in this iteration bears no gender inflection, but the passage articulates a double-edged attitude toward improvisation that can help us appreciate those instances when James does experiment with gender and sexual improvisation. “To improvise with extreme freedom and yet at the same time without the possibility of ravage, without the hint of a flood,” he cautions himself; “to keep the stream, in a word, on something like ideal terms with itself; that was here my definite business. The thing was to aim at absolute singleness, clearness and roundness, and yet to depend on an imagination working freely, working (call it) with extravagance; by which law it wouldn’t be thinkable except as free and wouldn’t be amusing except as controlled” (172). The tensions between free play and control, the danger that play will exceed control and “flood” or “ravage” the improviser, register obviously enough. James wants to give his imagination free rein, to let it “work” with “extravagance.” Not every reader will construe James’s language in gendered or sexual terms—forging connections between his writerly imagination, so intensely placed on display, and his efforts to construct a male identity as a writer. James credited George Sand with extraordinary powers of “improvisation,” however, and the issues she raised for him as both a writer and a man provide a touchstone for a gendered interpretation of a passage in which he feels his way toward an improvisational power of his own. Whatever the attractions of improvisation—the freedom and extravagance—James emphasizes the need for control. He worries most about being ravaged and flooded—presumably by his own imagination, which bursts its bounds and subjects him to improvisational freedom that threatens his very sense of identity. That fear of ravage, experienced as a loss of self-control, is precisely what Sand portended for James: a gendered and sexual identity, transgendered and transsexualized, improvised past any point of control.

Although James’s fascination with Sand reached a climax during his late period, his interest in her and in questions she raised spanned his career. Those questions appear as early as 1877, with the publication of both his Galaxy magazine article “George Sand” and his novel The American, in which the hero, Christopher Newman, plays a “new man” who rejects a cutthroat business ethos in favor of self-improvement and feminization in France. In Notes of a Son and Brother James fondly recalled that the “sense of the salmon-coloured distinctive of Madame Sand was even to come back to me long years after” (Autobiography 404). While James notes something “very masculine” in Sand’s “genius,” his “final impression of her” is that “she is a woman and a Frenchwoman,” and women, he says, “do not value the truth for its own sake, but only for some personal use they make of it” (“George Sand” 712). He not only establishes binary terms (personal-impersonal) for his evolving aesthetic, but also aligns those terms with gender. Yet, despite her personal use of truth (especially the “truth” of her erotic adventures), Sand was “very masculine.” James was a man who clearly valued truth for its own sake, but since Sand had already appropriated the very masculine for herself as a woman and as a writer, what of the masculine was left for him? By opening up masculinity to women, Sand obviously complicated it for a man such as James, either by suggesting that femininity was similarly open to men or by simply leaving men suspended, like Hugh Merrow, between genders, neither masculine nor feminine. On the one hand, his later essays make clear, James felt that Sand’s example (as the more “masculine” writer) robbed him of his masculinity and even feminized him. On the other hand, Sand forced him to suspend his idea of the masculine: to disassociate “masculine” from “male” and thus from himself—in other words, to interrogate a monolithic masculinity and to accept the possibility of a plurality of masculinities from which he might continually improvise his own. Writing with “all one’s manhood” at “one’s side” becomes a double-edged sword for James—suggesting a splitting of manhood from James’s writing self that enables improvisational freedom from conventional gender constructs but also the possibility of ending up in a no man’s land of no manly identity at all.

Feminist criticism of the 1970s and 1980s found James an ambiguous figure, partly because so many of his fictions feature female protagonists whose stories seem rendered from their own points of view. James’s attitude toward those characters, of course, could be and was construed negatively, as well as positively. Nan Bauer Maglin scored James for the “disgust and mockery” he felt toward “independent women, the women’s movement, and women in general” (219). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar held him up as one of many “embattled” turn-of-the-century males who “struck out against the women whom they saw as both the sources and the witnesses of their emasculation” (36).¹ In contrast, Judith Fetterley praised him for his “ability to place himself on the side of women and in line with their point of view” (116), and John Carlos Rowe cited his “uncanny ability to represent the complex psychologies of women” (Theoretical 90). Joyce W. Warren congratulated him for his “detachment” from American “individualism” and credited him with an ability to create women who are “real persons” (244). Elizabeth Allen added that James’s women are not simply “signs for an observant consciousness,” but subjects “mystifying and controlling the signifying process” (10). Carren Kaston even wrote to “reclaim James from currently hostile feminist criticism,” praising him for his “profound sensitivity to what it was and very often still is like to be a woman” (40).

When biographers and critics turned to questions about James’s own gender and sexuality, however, they usually found him lacking. Leon Edel concluded that he suffered from a confused, weak masculinity and “troubled sexuality” (Henry James 87). Richard Hall termed him the “golden capon of world literature” and an “old-fashioned masturbating Victorian gentleman who led a narcissistic sexual life” (49, 51). Georges-Michel Sarotte called him “passive and feminine,” a “prototypical ‘sissy’” (198), while Alfred Habegger considered him a “boy who could not become a man” (Gender 256). William Veeder even situated James in an unusual position in a “bizarre version of Freud’s family romance” as a feminine orphan (“Feminine Orphan” 20).² Perhaps it need no longer be pointed out the implicit biases of these accounts—in favor of a very limited notion of manhood and masculinity that, to be sure, these critics share with many people in the nineteenth century. That limited definition, for example, precludes being both a sissy and a man or, more complexly, experimenting with the many configurations or constructs of manhood that recent men’s studies scholars have noted. That is not to say that Henry James found his way easily to nontraditional constructions of gender and sexuality. In fact, James’s characterization of himself in gendered terms often warrants such critical disparagement—at least as he constructs, or reconstructs, himself in his autobiographical writings. James plays the weak younger brother, particularly in relation to William, and he emphasizes his failure to measure up to his father’s ideals of manhood and achievement. “I never dreamed of competing—a business having in it at the best, for my temper, if not for my total failure of temper, a displeasing ferocity” (Autobiography 101). Recalling William’s attempts to state the case for an artistic career, James recalls that the “‘career of art’ has again and again been deprecated and denounced, on the lips of anxiety or authority, as a departure from the career of business, of industry and respectability, the so-called regular life” (268). Even though William seems an early ally, however, James compares himself invidiously to his brother. Had William pursued a “career of art,” he implies, he would have done so in a manlier fashion. “‘I play with boys who curse and swear!’” he famously recalls his brother as bragging. “I had sadly to recognize that I didn’t,” James himself confesses, “that I couldn’t pretend to have come to that yet” (147). In front of his cousins, he remembers, he couldn’t help “feeling that as a boy I showed more poorly than girls” (217).³

Taken together, these critical and self-critical assessments paint a portrait of James as an artist whose gender identification is confused and contradictory. Most of these assessments—including James’s own—work a variation on the nineteenth-century model of inversion and depend upon some form of binarism (male-female, masculine-feminine, normal-inverted, heterosexual-homosexual) with James either assigned one position (from which to be “embattled” with the other), or considered the battleground between the two. They also depend on some notion of normative male identity from which James, even to his own perception, can only deviate. James, in short, fails to measure up. Kaja Silverman concludes that, despite the “ostensible gender of the biographical Henry James, the author ‘inside’ his texts is never unequivocally male; situated at a complex intersection of the negative and positive Oedipus complexes, that author is definitively foreclosed from the scene of passion except through identifications which challenge the binarisms of sexual difference” (180). Silverman helps to open up the question of gender identification in James’s writing, while separating that question from James’s biographical selfhood, but her psychoanalytic approach to the question seems too limiting because it does not account for the playfulness and slipperiness—the verbal performance—of James’s language.⁴ In fact, the multiple characterizations of James’s manliness or lack of manliness suggest that the gender and sexuality to be inferred from his writing are less singular than plural, that his writing is not simply the site of colliding gender monoliths. Indeed, I argue that establishing James’s gender and sexual identity is less important than attending to his own interrogation of gender and sexuality.

H. G. Dwight’s assertion in 1907 that James was a “woman’s writer; no man was able to read him” (438), while intended to signify James’s effeminacy, may also suggest the way James unsettled male readers by destabilizing conventional nineteenth-century constructs of male subjectivity. David Halperin notes that the “conceptual isolation of sexuality per se from questions of masculinity and femininity made possible a new taxonomy of sexual behaviors and psychologies based entirely on the anatomical sex of the persons engaged in a sexual act (same sex versus different sex).” The result was that “a number of distinctions that had traditionally operated within earlier discourses pertaining to same-sex sexual contacts and that had radically differentiated active from passive sexual partners, normal from abnormal (or conventional from unconventional) sexual roles, masculine from feminine styles, and pederasty from lesbianism: all such behaviors were now to be classed alike and placed under the same heading” (39). Writing during this period of transition, James illustrates the ambiguities and confusions—the multivalence—of gender and sexuality, and his fiction it seems to me conducts a series of experiments in gender/sexual construction and deconstruction. Repeatedly, James demonstrates the instability of gender identities, largely through what I am tempted to call a game of musical subject positions, in which male characters are redefined—re-identified—in relation to “other,” male and female, characters. Triangulating and even quadrangulating male characters such as Rowland Mallet and Prince Amerigo (the bookends, so to speak, in the gallery whose portraits concern me here), James destabilizes male identity by pluralizing male subjectivity.

Within his own person James may have felt insecure in his gender and sexual identification, but as a writer I find him playful and experimental. Recalling the “flowers of perverse appreciation” that he gathered during his brief sojourn as a law student at Harvard, for example, James remembers his preoccupation, as a budding young writer, with the “degree and exact shade to which the blest figures in the School array, each quite for himself, might settle and fix the weight, the interest, the function, as it were, of his Americanism” (Autobiography 449). As he tries to settle questions of American male typology—what he campily calls “pearls of differentiation”—he remains coyly unaware, “not dreaming of the stiff law by which, on the whole American ground, division of type, in the light of opposition and contrast, was more and more to break down for me and fail” (449–50). This failure of American men to settle themselves neatly into types provides James an opportunity to play with his “pearls” according to the stiff law of his own imagination. The “young appearances” could be “pleasingly, or at least robustly homogeneous,” he notes, “and yet, for livelier appeal to fancy, flower here and there into special cases of elegant deviation—’sports,’ of exotic complexion, one enjoyed denominating these (or would have enjoyed had the happy figure then flourished) thrown off from the thick stem that was rooted under our feet” (450). This remarkable extended metaphor suggests James’s campy playfulness, as well as his awareness of contemporaneous gender and sexual theorizing—and its limitations. He feels some constraints on his imaginative play because some “happy figures” are not yet flourishing, but he seems much more interested than many of his readers in keeping the questions of gender and sexuality open to “elegant deviation”—that is, to improvisation, or performance—especially to deviations that “flower” from the “thick stem” of his own fanciful imagination. He adroitly mixes gendered metaphors in this passage, conflating flower and phallic imagery. The “stiff law” he dimly perceives causes American men to break down—that is, their types to break down, and thus to flower for him. American men, especially those who seem most homogeneously robust, in effect become “pansies.” Masculine homogeneity converts rather easily—almost homophonically—into homosexuality. But the power in this passage is James’s own—the phallic power of his imagination to convert robust young men into flowers. “Everything’s coming up roses,” in the words of the old song. James enjoys the sport of playing with the “sports.”

Michel Foucault considers the nineteenth and twentieth centuries “the age of multiplication,” featuring a “dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of ‘perversions,’” and he concludes that our “epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities” (37). Although Judith Butler points out some of the contradictions and unresolved tensions in Foucault’s theory of sexuality, her performative theory of gender identity represents the best attempt during the past decade to destabilize gender categories, although applying her theory to men carries certain risks.⁵ Calling gender a “kind of persistent impersonation that passes as the real” (vii), Butler’s feminist project works to destabilize “woman” and “women” as useful categories. “Rather than a stable signifier that commands the assent of those whom it purports to describe and represent, women, even in the plural, has become a troublesome term, a site of contest, a cause for anxiety” (3). Butler destabilizes gender by disassociating it from sexuality, as well as from sexual practice and from desire. “Intelligible genders are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among, sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire” (17). These four quadrants suggest the variables that any identification of sex or gender or sexual practice or desire must take into account. That is, sexual practice is not necessarily a function of sexual or gender identity or even of desire. Gender and sexual identities can be consistent or inconsistent with one another. Gender, Butler asserts, “is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed” (25). I want to try to avoid the sort of psychic determinism that even this transgressive paradigm entails and to keep sex, gender, and desire in play as cross-relational categories. Butler’s feminist project does not translate seamlessly to a study of masculinity, but her suggestive terms seem appropriate to the queer subject, Henry James. Although he does not refer to Butler or apply the idea comprehensively to questions of gender and sexuality, Ross Posnock advances a useful theory of theatricality to describe James’s representation of selfhood. Comparing James to Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, Posnock argues that James “converts the bourgeois self of control into a more supple mode that eludes social categories and is open to the play of the fundamental passions” (5). “As James grew into manhood,” Posnock concludes, “the gaping and the vagueness of his mimetic behavior found its most ‘workable’ public mode in theatricality, self-representation that mitigates the reification of identity by letting the contingencies of social interaction continually shape and reshape it” (185). Posnock’s provocative theory of James’s theatrical, or mimetic, selfhood resembles Buder’s theory of performativity, and the subject positions that James distributes to his male characters certainly represent contested sites at which “sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire,” to use Buder’s terms, come together in a state of dynamic tension.

I want to be careful here. In her brilliant analysis of the narcissistic foundations of The Golden Bowl, Beth Sharon Ash cautions us about accepting a “radically heterogenous” concept of sexuality by reemphasizing the importance 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 call particular erotic desires and acts play a big role in the shaping of sexuality in an era” (11). In this study I am especially interested in identifying the “names” James employs for “particular erotic desires and acts” and in understanding those names in James’s own terms—with connections inevitably to James’s own complex sexuality and gender identifications but also with connections to the discursive systems of identification prevalent in British and American culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

James’s thousands of letters are only now being catalogued, but many of his letters to young men are newly available and form the basis for our new understanding of James’s homosexuality.⁸ Rosella Mamoli Zorzi has recently published seventy-seven of James’s letters to the young sculptor Hendrik Andersen, and Susan Gunter and Steven Jobe have edited a collection of James’s letters to Jocelyn Persse, Howard Sturgis, Hugh Walpole, as well as Andersen. That James desired emotional and physical intimacy with men and expressed that in vivid, often achingly sensual terms has become indisputable. His letters to young men from the 1890s and early years of the twentieth century offer poignant, sometimes heartrending examples of Jamesian desire and his frequent worry that his desire was not reciprocated. What it meant to his self-image or for our reconstitution of his self-image to feel and express himself in these terms is a trickier matter. Consoling Andersen upon the death of his brother Andreas, for example, James famously casts himself in the role of “a brother and a lover” (Henry James Amato Ragazzo 88).

Your news fills me with horror and pity; and how can I express the tenderness with which it makes me think of you and the aching wish to be near you and put my arms round you? My heart fairly bleeds and breaks at the vision of you alone, in your wicked and indifferent old far-off Rome, with this haunting, blighting, unbearable sorrow. The sense that I can’t help you, see you, talk to you, touch you, hold you close and long, or do anything to make you rest on me, and feel my deep participation—this torments me, dearest boy, makes me ache for you, and for myself; makes me gnash my teeth and groan at the bitterness of things. (86)

When James wrote that passage in 1902, he was already feeling anxious about Andersen’s feelings for him, and he felt some frustration that Andersen did not write and visit more often. James takes advantage of the occasion, however, to express desire for Andersen in the form of consolation. In offering to take Andreas’s place in Hendrik’s life, to be “like a brother,” James extends an invitation to more than brotherly love—to a relationship in which playing the brother arguably represents the form that playing the lover will take. Conflating two roles and forms of love, James was playing upon one of the most acceptable forms that homoerotic love could take at the turn of the century—a version of “Greek love,” which James knew from John Addington Symonds’s “A Problem in Modern Ethics.”⁹ This is not to desexualize James’s feelings, for Symonds explicitly celebrates the sexual dimensions of Greek same-sex desire.

Consistently in his letters to young men James expresses his desire for emotional and physical intimacy, but he does so theatrically by dramatizing himself in various ways. Effusive and melodramatic, he wants to hug them, to throw his arms around them and welcome them into his arms, and again and again he signals his readiness to respond to any indication of reciprocated interest. “The least sign or word from you, or intimated wish,” he tells Jocelyn Persse, “makes me vibrate with response & readiness—so attached am I to your ineffaceable image” (Dearly Beloved 95). As lovers on the make will do, James ups the emotional ante in his letters, representing his own desire as always excessive. “Keep a-wanting of me all you can,” he ends a letter to Howard Sturgis, “you won’t exceed the responsive desire of yours, dearest Howard, ever so constantly Henry James’ (149). “I am yours, yours, yours, dearest Hugh, yours!” he signs himself to Hugh Walpole (187). Despite the genuine yearning, the heartfelt desperation, in some of these love letters, James also indulges himself in campy metaphorical play that resembles the archness we enjoy in his fiction. “Irresistible to me always any tug on your part at the fine & firm silver cord that stretches between us,” he opens a letter to Persse; “at any twitch of it by your hand, the machine, within me, enters into vibration & I respond ever so eagerly and amply! (My image sounds rather like the rattle of the telephone under the effect of a ‘call’; but I mean it well, & I mean it, above all, my dear Jocelyn, affectionately!)” (96). The image of James with a cord penetrating his body, attached to a machine that responds to “calls” from Persse almost defies interpretation because the figure is so over the top, but James can top himself, especially when he compares himself to animals.¹⁰ “I have shown you often enough, I think,” he writes to Howard Sturgis, “how much more I have in me of the polar bear than of the salamander—& in fine at the time I last heard from you pen, ink & paper had dropped from my perspiring grasp (though while in the grasp they had never felt more adhesively sticky,) & I had become a mere prostrate, panting, liquefying mass, waiting to be removed” (158). Playing the literary polar bear with sweaty fingers for Sturgis, James becomes an old elephant for Hugh Walpole. “Beautiful & admirable of you to have threshed through the tropic jungle of your 30 waiting letters to get at this elephant,” he tells the young man, “who accordingly winds round you, in a stricture of gratitude & affection all but fatal, his well-meaning old trunk. I abominably miss you—having so extravagantly enjoyed you; but it’s a great enrichment of consciousness, all the while, that we are in such beautiful, such exquisite relation” (193). I am less interested in using these passages from James’s letters as evidence for his homosexuality than in pointing out the various poses within a homoerotic discourse that James assumes. This is not quite to say that, where his sexuality was concerned, James was in a state of suspense. He clearly felt desire for other men, although he expressed that desire more openly toward the end of his life. But it would be counterproductive from a literary standpoint to reduce James’s sexuality to simple terms when it is the terms themselves that are so provocative. After all, posing himself as a man with a cord penetrating his body for Jocelyn Persse to “twitch” places James in a very different subject-object position than his self-dramatization as an old elephant who will wind his “well-meaning old trunk” so affectionately around Hugh Walpole. James obviously takes pleasure in both poses. Both seem obviously homoerotic, but taken together they reflect a complex, not a simple, eroticized self. And they hardly represent the only poses James enjoyed striking.

James delights in positioning his male characters in such ways that their gender and sexual orientations are reversed, ambiguous, and even multiple. It is important to track both gender and sexuality in James’s writing because gender deviance is so often the form that sexual deviance takes during a period in which the theory of inversion offered the dominant paradigm for understanding homosexuality. As Hubert Kennedy has pointed out, the “third sex” theory promoted by Karl Ulrichs in the 1860s and revised by other theorists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and John Addington Symonds did not last long (103), but variations of it have had a significant influence. Although Ellis explicitly rejected Ulrich’s female-soul-in-male-body theory as “unintelligible” (183), for example, he retained a more sophisticated version of that theory. Beginning with the observation of a “latent organic bisexuality in each sex” (184), Ellis theorizes that sexual differentiation occurs later—and sometimes imperfectly:

Putting the matter in a purely speculative shape, it may be said that at conception the organism is provided with about 50 per cent. of male germs and about 50 percent, of female germs, and that, as development proceeds, either the male or the female germs assume the upper hand, killing out those of the other sex, until in the maturely developed individual only a few aborted germs of the opposite sex are left. In the homosexual person, however, and in the psychosexual hermaphrodite, we may imagine that the process has not proceeded normally, on account of some peculiarity in the number or character of either the original male germs or female germs, or both, the result being that we have a person who is organically twisted into a shape that is more fitted for the exercise of the inverted than of the normal sexual impulse, or else equally fitted for both. (184)

Even as they promote a binary theory of inversion, Ulrichs and Ellis find themselves identifying subgroups within their primary groups and thus multiple homosexualities. Interestingly, gender becomes the variable. Deviations within homosexuality are marked with gender characteristics. Even the largely binary taxonomy that Ulrich and Ellis employ, however, has room for multiple homosexualities. In an appendix to Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Ellis summarizes Ulrich’s subcategories of homosexual men, or “Urnings”:

Among urnings, those who prefer effeminate males are christened 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 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.

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 of a masculine ideal without jeopardizing his different masculine authority. It is not surprising, therefore, that he should try to solve Sand’s riddle by restoring his own sense of male identity. To do that in his 1902 essay, he invokes a masculine muse, the quintessential male writer, Honoré de Balzac, the “father of us all.” James incorporates Balzac’s masculine authority—what he later terms the “big Balzac authority” (Autobiography 251)—and even interpolates Balzac’s words to put Sand in her place and thus reestablish his own gender equilibrium. In effect, James uses one masculine authority (Balzac) to countermand another (Sand) and improvises a position for himself in between—suspended in the masculine.

Balzac’s characterization of Sand in an 1838 letter, James maintains, “lets into the whole question of his hostess’s character and relations … air and light and truth; it fixes points and re-establishes proportions” (“George Sand: The New Life” 772). Self-styled as Balzac’s “grateful critic,” James says that Balzac “comes nearest straightening the question” of Sand in his observation that she “has in character all the leading marks of the man and as few as possible those of his counterpart.” Indeed, she “hangs together perfectly if judged as a man.” She is a man, Balzac says, because “she wants to be … she has sunk the woman … she isn’t one. Women attract, and she repels; and, as I am much of a man, if this is the effect she produces on me she must produce it on men who are like me—so that she will always be unhappy” (“George Sand: The New Life” 772). Not only does James rely on Balzac’s authority, he relies on Balzac’s experience and even on Balzac’s subjective estimate of Sand’s gender identity. Women attract Balzac, Sand repels him (anomalously, given the number of her male lovers). Since Balzac is “much of a man” and repelled by Sand, Sand must also be a man and thus destined to be unhappy because unattractive to Balzac and to men like him. The self-serving “logic” of Balzac’s syllogism is obvious enough to require no explanation, but where does this remarkable passage leave James? Is he, like Balzac, “much of a man”? That means being repelled by Sand, since Balzac elides the issue of feeling desire for another man—even a female “man” such as Sand. If he is not repelled by her (his essays, indeed, attest his attraction to her), what does that make James? A woman? A man given to unions “against nature,” as he had characterized Sand’s union with Alfred de Musset (“She and He” 748)? Here, in what James might call the “final nutshell,” is the suspense of gender with a bit of a vengeance. In this context—in the context of desire and its distribution across ambiguous gender identities—what kind of man can James be?

With the “distinctive” hanging thus in suspense, James moves quickly in the final pages of the 1902 essay to clarify the question that Sand poses. He admits, in fact, that the “copious” data in Karénine’s biography “makes Madame Sand so much of a riddle that we grasp at Balzac’s authoritative word as at an approach to a solution.” And it is, “strange to say, by reading another complexity into her image that we finally simplify it” (Review of George Sand 773). This riddle, he says, “consists in the irreconcilability of her distinction and her vulgarity. Vulgar somehow in spite of everything is the record of so much taking and tasting and leaving, so much publicity and palpability of ‘heart,’ so much experience reduced only to the terms of so many more or less greasy males” (773). By invoking Balzac’s “authoritative word” to solve the “riddle” of what he would later call Sand’s “annexation” of male identity, James was invoking a special kind of masculine muse—a phallic, male masculinity to diminish Sand’s female masculinity. Whereas James repeatedly praises Sand’s writing for its fluidity, looseness, and improvisation, Balzac’s is “always extraordinarily firm and hard,” possessing a “metallic rigidity” (“Honoré de Balzac” [1875] 38).¹⁸ Balzac has the power of “penetrating into a subject”; he is “always astride of his imagination, always charging, with his heavy, his heroic lance in rest” (“Lesson of Balzac” 127, 123). Even more than Sand, Balzac serves James as an omni-masculine figure who also possesses the improvisational power to be a man in the plural term. Balzac has the rare ability to get “into the very skin of his jeunes mariées.” Balzac “bears children with Madame de l’Estorade, and knows intimately how she suffers for them, and not less intimately how her correspondent suffers, as well as enjoys, without them.” Besides being both mother and father, Balzac also plays the son. Besides “penetrating” subjects and sitting “astride” his imagination, phallocentrically empowered in hyperbolic terms, Balzac can play other male roles. “Big as he is he makes himself small to be handled by her [Madame de l’Estorade] with young maternal passion and positively to handle her in turn with infantile innocence.” Such multiple male role-playing comprises “the very flourishes,” James concludes, “the little technical amusements of [Balzac’s] penetrating power” (“Honoré de Balzac, 1902” 114). Conceiving male authority in obvious phallogocentric terms, James posits a versatile, performative phallus—big or small depending upon the role the writer is called upon to play.

Yet, however deeply Balzac could penetrate the very skin of women, neither he nor his art depended on them. Unlike Sand, who converted transgendered heterosexual experience into art, James’s Balzac sounds remarkably like James himself in substituting art for experience. He was “always fencing himself in against the personal adventure, the personal experience,” James remarks, “in order to preserve himself for converting it into history” (“Lesson of Balzac” 124). While James regards Balzac as both an omni-masculine ideal who exercised a “lusty energy of fancy” (“Honoré de Balzac” [1875] 53) and a man whose art did not require “personal adventures” with women, he attributes Balzac’s special authority to a knowledge of women. Writing in 1875, James observes that Balzac “is supposed to have understood the feminine organism as no one had done before him—to have had the feminine heart, the feminine temperament, feminine nerves, at his fingers’ ends—to have turned the feminine puppet, as it were, completely inside out” (“Honoré de Balzac” 61). Even though James could admit in 1902 that Sand’s great service to women is that her “approximation” of a man was at least to the “extraordinary” (“George Sand: The New Life” 775), Balzac’s masculine authority clearly offered James an alternative to Sand and thus a way of killing the suspense into which she had cast his own gender identification. Balzac was able to keep the “feminine organism” at his “fingers’ ends”—just across the line that might have portended transgendering—but still understand women from the inside out. Whereas Sand figures as the precursor of the increasingly masculine women James saw around him in the early twentieth century, as early as 1875 he observes that Balzac did “not take that view of the sex that would commend him to the ‘female sympathizers’ of the day. There is not a line in him that would not be received with hisses at any convention for giving women the suffrage, for introducing them into Harvard College, or for trimming the exuberances of their apparel” (“Honoré de Balzac” 61). Balzac, in other words, provides James with an authorial ideal even more masculine than Sand’s.

Much like Basil Ransom in The Bostonians or earlier characters such as George Fenton in Watch and Ward, Christopher Newman in The American, and Caspar Goodwood in The Portrait of a Lady, James’s Balzac “takes the old-fashioned view” and “recognizes none but the old-fashioned categories. Woman is the female of man and in all respects his subordinate” (“Honoré de Balzac” [1875] 61). Suspended between Balzac and Sand and thus between male and female masculinity, much as Verena Tarrant is suspended between Ransom and Olive Chancellor, James remasculinizes himself by invoking Balzac’s authoritative word and transmuting Sand not into a feminine woman but into a repellent female man. Whereas Sand’s masculinity originally threatens James’s, drawing it toward the feminine type, James finally creates a “new-fashioned” category—a homophobically constructed category of female manhood—to solve the riddle Sand poses for him. That is, James seems finally to project upon Sand the gendered and sexual qualities with which he did not want to identify Even though Sand’s ability to eat her cake and have it at the same time—to exercise her sexuality and “use” it in her writing—align her with the masculine position, she performs the masculine with men who, like Musset, are less than “real” men.¹⁹ Swallowing Sand, then, forces James not only to interrogate his own masculinity but to improvise a new double-gendered masculinity that could accommodate both Sand and himself. Then, by establishing Sand as a female man, James can feel more comfortable with his own identity, confident that masculinity can accommodate both female and male men: Sand and Balzac—and, of course, Henry James, who positively bristles between the two as a man in the plural term.

Laurence B. Holland considers George Sand’s affair with Alfred de Musset “the one episode of her career that most fascinated and appalled James” and regards it the source of another Venetian affair—that between Jeffrey Aspern and Juliana Bordereau in “The Aspern Papers” (132). The 1833–34 relationship between the thirty-year-old Sand and a man six years her junior must have had an additional resonance for James between 1897 and 1902, when his first two long essays on Sand appeared, because he was basing a novel, The Ambassadors, on an analogous situation. Marie de Vionnet’s romance with Chad Newsome forms both the pretext for Lambert Strether’s return to France and the context for whatever “treasures of imagination” Strether gleans from his experience (NY 22: 224). Similarly, Sand’s romance with Musset provides James with the pretext for confronting issues of sexuality and writing and with the context for his own treasure hunting. Convinced that the Sand-Musset affair is the most “suggestive” in the “annals of ‘passion,’” James regards as “treasures of the human imagination” the “poems, the letters, the diaries, the novels, the unextinguished accents and lingering echoes that commemorate” that passion (“George Sand: The New Life” 769).

In turning to The Ambassadors, I wish not to argue for Sand’s influence on the novel or on the character of Marie de Vionnet but to demonstrate how James’s three Sand essays and The Ambassadors engage one another in a conversation about the suspense of masculinity suggested in “Hugh Merrow.” Both the essays and the novel represent a masculinity that must be reconstructed in the aftermath of a woman’s challenge, and when Strether finally realizes that Marie de Vionnet and Chad are lovers, he finds himself—like James in the essays on Sand—facing questions about his own gender and sexuality.²⁰ James took Strether’s first and middle names from Balzac’s novel Lewis Lambert, and his solution to Strether’s suspense resembles Balzac’s solution to his own—putting a woman in her place in order to reestablish the masculine identity she has put in jeopardy. As with most of James’s ostensible solutions to subjective problems, however, Strether’s male identity does not rest easily in any single configuration.

Patricia Thomson has cited several parallels between Sand and The Ambassadors, arguing for example that Sand’s Stephen Morin in Mademoiselle Merquem serves as a model for Strether and as a source of his famous “Live all you can” speech to Little Bilham, and connecting Chad’s affair with the older Marie de Vionnet and Sand’s affair with Alfred de Musset (235, 242). James’s own description of Sand in 1914 as the “supreme case of the successful practice of life itself” (Review of George Sand 778) suggests that, like Madame de Vionnet for Chad and potentially for Strether, Sand served a paradigmatic function for James. One early reviewer for the Literary World complained that “no business men could find the time” to read The Ambassadors (Hayes 406), but the failure of Strether’s ambassadorial mission to retrieve Chad for the family manufacturing business and thus for conventional masculinity opens other possibilities for Chad and himself. Those possibilities center upon Marie de Vionnet. Strether’s desire to learn the “art of taking things as they came” (21: 83) means learning the very lesson that James had attempted to learn from Sand, for in James’s view, “making acquaintance with life at first hand” was the “great thing” that Sand achieved (“George Sand” [Galaxy] 716). In both cases, furthermore, the anxiety generated by the lesson is projected upon the woman responsible. James’s characterization of Marie de Vionnet as the “party responsible” for the “miracle almost monstrous” of Chad’s transformation (21: 167) echoes the “monstrous vitality” that James described in Sand in the same year (“George Sand: The New Life” 774). Both metaphors register the anxiety and the thrill that James felt as he contemplated the metamorphic effect that these women portended for men. As the “fate that waits for one, the dark doom that rides” (21: 167), Madame de Vionnet also suggests James’s ominous characterization of Sand as the “rather sorry ghost that beckons [him] on furthest” (“She and He” 746). Although Marie de Vionnet, like the earlier Claire de Cintré in The American, seems to epitomize French femininity and thus the fulfillment for men of rather conventional masculine ideals (within a heterosexual register), James still confronts Strether with unstable possibilities of gender and sexual identification as he worries over the riddle of what relation Chad enjoys with her.

Eric Haralson notes that Strether’s very lack of conventional masculine attributes makes him the “perfect bearer of the novel’s argument, its necessarily gentle dissent from uniform masculinity and compulsory sexuality” (“Lambert Strether’s” 182). As early as his third night in London, Strether’s sense of gender differences faces a significant test that places his ability to fulfill his manly reclamation project in serious jeopardy. To fulfill that mission without being wholly hypocritical or purely mercenary, Strether would have to find Chad himself in need of reclamation—that is, deformed or corrupted. As Strether gives himself over to “uncontrolled perceptions” (21: 50) and lets his “imagination roam” (21: 51) at the theater, however, he recognizes how difficult any such diagnosis will be. He comes face to face with a “world of types” and with a “connexion above all in which the figures and faces in the stalls were interchangeable with those on the stage” (21: 53). In short, he enters a carnivalesque world of performance that “penetrated” him as if with the “naked elbow of his neighbour” (21: 53):

Those before him and around him were not as the types of Woollett, where, for that matter, it had begun to seem to him that there must only have been the male and the female. These made two exactly, even with the individual varieties. Here, on the other hand, apart from the personal and the sexual range—which might be greater or less—a series of strong stamps had been applied, as it were, from without; stamps that his observation played with as, before a glass case on a table, it might have passed from medal to medal and from copper to gold. (21: 53)

Eerily, in view of the blurring between stage and stalls, when Strether turns his attention to the play, he discovers a “bad woman in a yellow frock” making a “pleasant weak good-looking young man in perpetual evening dress do the most dreadful things” (21: 53). Finding himself secretly sympathizing with the victim (whom he identifies with Chad), Strether indicates his own conflicted identification and desire. In analyzing this passage, Hugh Stevens concludes that the “spectacle of the London theatre creates for Strether a breakdown in certainty of sexual meanings, and this instability is experienced by him as not only intimidating, but also creative and exhilarating” (18).²¹ Despite its seeming conventionality, the play Strether watches places him in at least two subject positions. In identifying with the “good-looking young man” (Chad) and the position he occupies, Strether seems to acknowledge his own masochistic position in relation to Mrs. Newsome.²² Insofar as Strether differentiates himself from Chad in this scene, however, he occupies a female subject position as a “bad woman”—indicating, I think, the safest way he can imagine making Chad do “dreadful things” and placing him in a position uncannily similar to the one George Sand occupied for James in her relationship with Alfred de Musset. Marie de Vionnet, of course, plays the role of bad woman in the conventional melodramatic plot that Mrs. Newsome has projected upon her son, while Mrs. Newsome herself, in Strether’s imagination, plays that role for him. Strether’s imagination proves more subtle, however, as he imagines himself (gender) switching between roles in the play, and risking inversion as even a bad woman seems preferable to jeopardizing the heterosexual terms of subject-object relationship within the male imaginary that he embodies at this early point in the novel.

When he finally sees Chad in Paris, of course, Strether’s resolve proves weak indeed. James famously emphasizes Chad’s “sharp rupture” (21: 137) of identity and the “emotion of bewilderment” (21: 136) that Strether experiences as a result. “You could deal with a man as himself,” Strether thinks; “you couldn’t deal with him as somebody else” (21: 136). Paul Armstrong argues that “Chad’s difference from himself compels Strether to reconsider the whole issue of the stability and dependability of the world” (67), but the transformation James describes reflects more particular issues, because it pertains explicitly to the question of male identity and the relation between men. If Chad is no longer Chad, is Strether still Strether? Can one truly undergo what James later calls an “alteration of the entire man” (21: 167)? If so, than that potential alteration would include one’s gender and sexuality. As several critics have noted, moreover, Strether’s response to the first sight of Chad suggests a spontaneous eruption of desire that inverts his ambassadorial relation to the young man and forces him to confront the appropriate gender identity from which that desire can be expressed. Mark Mitchell and David Leavitt, for example, claim that Chad’s presence “evokes an intense, if subconscious, desire for the boy” (220). Citing the language through which James represents Strether’s response to this encounter and to the excruciating experience of sitting “close to Chad” while the play goes on (21: 136), they conclude that James’s prose “chokes an erotic response that the use of words such as ‘rush,’ ‘flush,’ ‘strained’ and ‘pressure’ only serves to underscore—so much so that the carnal implications of the phrase ‘the long tension of the act’ ring out loud and clear, despite (or perhaps because of) James’s efforts to suppress them” (221). I don’t think James tries to suppress anything in this scene, however. Indeed, he goes out of his way to intensify the pressure that Strether experiences by making him sit through the first act of the play after he sees Chad. The proprieties of the theater prevent his reacting except inwardly to the “sharp rupture” his own subjectivity has suffered. James, in other words, keeps Strether, his gender and his sexuality, in suspense.

In one respect, the famous scene in the French countryside, in which Strether learns the sexual truth about Chad’s adulterous relationship with Marie de Vionnet, ends some of the suspense that the earlier scene with Chad has created. It constitutes the climactic “rupture” for his ambassadorial mission to France, because it prevents further suppression of the erotic and the destabilizing effect that diversified desire can have on male identity. As “queer as fiction” (22: 257), the scene also transports Strether into the world that the French novel richly evoked for James—that is, the world of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and especially George Sand. Marie de Vionnet’s switch to French when the question of her true relationship with Chad cannot help invoking Sand’s erotized masculine discourse about Musset. Kaja Silverman, furthermore, argues that this scene “encourages identifications which are in excess of sexual difference.” As a “primal scene fantasy,” it “opens onto both the positive or heterosexual, and the negative or homosexual versions of the Oedipus complex,” promoting “desire for the father and identification with the mother, as well as desire for the mother and identification with the father” (165). Strether’s gender alignment and sexual identifications, she implies, are paradigmatically dual—female as well as male, homosexual as well as heterosexual.

My concern, however, is less with the gender confusion implicit in this scene than with the possibilities of masculinity the scene opens up (and closes off). Kelly Cannon argues that Chad and Marie de Vionnet “represent the heterosexual union to which the sexually marginalized male comes unprepared physically and emotionally” (19), but he begs the question in that simple, either-or formulation of what responses Strether has available. If Strether identifies with both Chad and Marie, as Silverman points out, he identifies with a feminized masculinity and a masculinized femininity. The scene thus introduces the notion of masculinity “in the plural term.” To complicate matters further, Strether himself experiences a gender reversal as he reconstructs the scene. When he finally faces the “deep, deep truth of the intimacy” between Chad and Marie, he sees his former self as female: “he almost blushed, in the dark, for the way he had dressed the possibility in vagueness, as a little girl might have dressed her doll (22: 266).” Strether’s figure for himself, which seems (pro) created by the primal scene in which he has participated, raises several issues. Resorting to such infantilizing gender inversion reflects a masochistic selfrecognition that he does not measure up to turn-of-the-century ideals of heterosexually empowered manhood. But Strether’s figure also has a campy side and enables James to play with his character and his reader across lines of gender and gendered desire. The choice of figures—little girl rather than little boy—prolongs the negative identification of the primal scene, for example. If Strether performs the “little girl,” he may attract Chad, as Jeanne de Vionnet ultimately does. Such fantasmatic cross-gendering empowers a heterosexualized play of desire—a classic example of inversion in which desire for a man feminizes the male who desires. The doll-playing fantasy, however, in which Chad and Marie figure as a turn-of-the-century Ken and Barbie, suggests other fantasmatic possibilities. Having “dressed” them, as it were, in the euphemisms of repression, Strether now presumably undresses them as he imagines their sexual intimacy, playing with them separately and together and supposing, as James remarks, “innumerable and wonderful things” (22: 266). Those “things” surely allow Strether to imagine multiple roles and to experiment with a pluralized masculinity and sexual identity. Imagining the “wonderful” things that go on between Chad and Marie de Vionnet certainly involves Strether in the heterosexual imaginary, but in a scene “as queer as fiction” Strether can also occupy Marie’s subject and object position—desiring Chad and being desired by him. Perhaps the things that this “bad woman” has done to Chad or made him do to her are not so “dreadful” after all—and truly “innumerable and wonderful” when Strether cross-genders himself to imagine doing them.

In the early scene in which Strether and Waymarsh prepare for bed in a London hotel James stages another campy scene of flirtation or cruising that brings closer to the surface the question of what things—dreadful or wonderful—men might do to other men. Although Strether’s mission on Mrs. Newsome’s behalf seems designed to enforce a compulsory heterosexuality, Strether flirts with the possibility of homosexual desire and consummation when he puts Waymarsh to bed. “I want to go back,” Waymarsh coyly whines, as he keeps his eyes “all attached to Strether’s.” This direct gaze “enabled his friend to look at him hard and immediately appear to the higher advantage in his eyes by doing so” (21: 30). This direct look between men contrasts with the sort of indirection that cruising relies upon, but it still enables the two men to test their attraction, or “attachment,” to each other. “That’s a genial thing to say to a fellow who has come out on purpose to meet you!” Strether responds (21: 30). Waymarsh and Strether play with one another across the subject and object of Strether’s desire—what he calls “my desire to be with you” (21: 30)—but Strether postpones full disclosure of his desire (whether for Waymarsh or for Mrs. Newsome). “Oh you shall have the whole thing,” he teases. “But not tonight” (21: 31). However, when Strether assists Waymarsh to a “consummation” by helping him into bed, pleasuring himself with the “smaller touches of lowering the lamp and seeing to a sufficiency of blanket” (21: 31), he deflects the homoerotic possibilities with which he himself has flirted. Waymarsh appears to him both “unnaturally big and black in bed” and “as much tucked in as a patient in a hospital and, with his covering up to his chin, as much simplified by it” (21: 31).²³ Indeed, despite the gender inversion that seems to accompany this hospital metaphor, Strether enjoys the “feeling” of playing a “nurse who had earned personal rest by having made everything straight” (21: 32). James’s metaphors both avow and disavow the homoerotic possibilities with which he and Strether have toyed. As he had at the theater, Strether seems to prefer cross-gendering himself to crossing another boundary, but James surely enjoys playing with possibilities of crossing both gender and sexual lines. From Strether’s cross-gendered position as a nurse, he will keep everything “covered up to the chin” and “straight”—causing “straight” to take on meanings that suggest deviations from conventional lines and making Strether seem like a male version of George Sand, inverting himself in reverse.²⁴

As we shall see, James frequently opens the possibility of homosocial and homosexual attachment between men but then closes it off in favor of heterocentric plot developments. In this scene James takes pains to keep male-male desire at bay, or to triangulate it through the presence of a woman and Strether’s consciousness of his ambassadorial mission. Despite their intimacy and their flirtatious conversation, the two men deflect attention from their situation by discussing Mrs. Newsome—that is, by inserting a woman (albeit a manly one) into what becomes a heterosexually triangulated relationship. ‘You’re a very attractive man, Strether,” Waymarsh can observe, but he does so by attributing the observation (and the desire that goes with it) to “that lady downstairs” (Maria Gostrey) and to Mrs. Newsome (21: 32). Waymarsh does push Strether for some kind of commitment, asking why he suggests that his ambassadorial mission is also for him. Strether tries to have the dilemma both ways, but Waymarsh’s question obviously causes him some anxiety. James describes him as impatient and “violently” playing “with his latch” before he replies, “It’s for both of you.” Waymarsh turns over “with a groan” at this point and exclaims, “Well, I won’t marry you!” (21: 34). Strether escapes from the room in which he might have been closeted for the night with Waymarsh before he can complete his reply, leaving the matter in a state of some suspense. By the end of the first four chapters, in fact, James has opened Strether’s sense of gender and sexuality in several ways—placing him in this suggestively intimate relation with Waymarsh and, through Maria Gostrey, causing him to notice the relative asexuality of his relationship with Mrs. Newsome.²⁵

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s account of James’s representation of compulsory heterosexuality in “The Beast in the Jungle,” furthermore, bears on Strether’s predicament in the last part of The Ambassadors. In writing his essays on Sand, James wrestles with his own sexuality and returns again and again—compulsively, as it were—to the most striking example of compulsive heterosexuality he has encountered. At the same time, as a woman who was also a man, George Sand could project a special type of both heterosexuality and homosexuality—a woman who transgenders herself not to be with other women, but to be with men. As James writes in his 1897 essay, “to feel as George Sand felt … one had to be, like George Sand, of the true male inwardness; which poor Musset was far from being. This, we surmise, was the case with most of her lovers, and the truth that makes the idea of her liaison with Mérimée, who was of a consistent virility, sound almost like a union against nature” (“She and He” 748). For James the Sand-Musset affair represented gender reversal, with Musset playing a feminine, or at least a less than masculine role. Musset is “unmanly,” in James’s view, because he “cries out when he is hurt; he resorts frequently to tears, and he talks much about his tears” (Review of Biographie 610). James surmises that Sand appropriates the male role and male identity by being more masculine than her male lovers, who, like “poor Musset,” are thereby cast in the female role. But the issue for James is more complicated, for when he does imagine a male with a “consistent virility,” he must also imagine an “unnatural,” or homosexual, union with the masculine Sand. In this respect, then, the Sand-Musset affair does not sound “like a union against nature,” since both lovers are transgendered. Whereas the Sand-Musset relationship suggests an inverted heterosexuality, the Sand-Mérimée affair represents a homoerotic heterosexual union between a masculine woman and a masculine man. Gender and sexual constructs have become fluid indeed, as James’s transgendered George Sand experiences both homosexual and heterosexual desire for men.

James’s dilemma about being feminized or homosexual resembles Strether’s quandary as he confronts the Chad Newsome-Marie de Vionnet relationship, which he, like James, although for different reasons, views as unnatural. It would be a stretch of logic to argue that the fictional lovers’ differences in age and nationality stand in for the reversed gender positions in Sand’s love affairs, but the point is not that Strether must identify himself as one or the other, masculine or feminine. The novel, like James’s essays on Sand, represents more complicated possibilities, suspending male identity between masculine and feminine poles and “cutting,” or intersecting, it with a spectrum of desire. The male body in both cases becomes the site of gender and sexual indeterminacy. Male subjectivity, predicated upon a range of gendered object choices, comes to occupy a “no man’s land” of suspense. Maleness becomes a construct while writing about it presages gender improvisation. In his remarkable characterization of Strether’s state of mind (in his preface to the New York Edition of the novel), James figures his hero’s subjectivity as a “clear green liquid” in a “neat glass phial,” but he goes on to stress the liquid’s changeability and so to establish a protean subjectivity. The liquid, “once poured into the open cup of application, once exposed to the action of another air, had begun to turn from green to red, or whatever, and might, for all he knew, be on its way to purple, to black, to yellow. At the still wilder extremes represented perhaps, for all he could say to the contrary, by a variability so violent, he would at first, naturally, but have gazed in surprise and alarm; whereby the situation clearly would spring from the play of wildness and the development of extremes” (Art of the Novel 314). Strether may seem like an unlikely candidate for such internal violence at the “still wilder extremes,” but many readers would say the same about Henry James and his representation of gender and sexuality.

Although James observes that it would have “sickened” Strether to “feel vindictive” toward Chad (22: 295)—that is, like an angry and punishing father—the scene in the country, which “disagreed” with Strether’s “spiritual stomach” (22: 265), does enable him to restore some gender equilibrium. But an equally important scene, especially in light of James’s essays on Sand, occurs when Strether visits Madame de Vionnet for the final time, because in her presence Strether feels “freshly and consentingly passive” (22: 278)—much like James in Sand’s “presence” before Balzac intervened. While Strether’s reconstruction of the scene in the country has made him feel girlish and demoralized, the scene in Madame de Vionnet’s apartment, like James’s invocation of Balzac in the 1902 essay, restores him to a manly place. There he assuages his need for punishment by imaginatively projecting Madame de Vionnet’s demoralization. His picture of her as “exploited” and “afraid” for her life, as a “maidservant crying for her young man” (22: 284–85), differs radically from James’s depiction of Sand. Marie’s tears and sobs, which remind Strether of sounds that “come from a child,” contrast sharply with Sand’s “inward impunity” even as they recall his own girlish infantilization. “Nothing perhaps gives more relief to [Sand’s] masculine stamp than the rare art and success with which she cultivated an equilibrium,” James observed. “She made from beginning to end a masterly study of composure, absolutely refusing to be upset, closing her door at last against the very approach of irritation and surprise” (“She and He” 752). In his 1914 review James conscripts Sand into the ranks of feminist activists as a woman who dealt with life “exactly as if she had been a man” (Review of George Sand 779–80). In contrast, Madame de Vionnet, Strether thinks repeatedly, is a woman. Indeed, she is a representative of women, and thus, in his view, “to deal with [her] requires the ability to walk on water” and demands that he act the part of a man (22: 285). In constructing himself as Marie’s savior, of course, Strether also switches the object of his ambassadorial desire. His original mission was designed as an intervention in a “monstrous” heterosexual union, the prerequisite for Chad’s deprogramming and installation as head of the family business. Saving Marie from Chad rather than Chad from Marie frees Strether from his obligation to Mrs. Newsome and from the arguably masochistic relationship he enjoys with her, and it reverses his relation to Chad and Marie. Switching sides, however, does not eliminate the double identification or double desire that Strether has experienced. This transposition, Strether’s movement to Marie’s side, simultaneously fulfills and disavows the desire he feels in Chad’s presence. Reversal enables and prevents inversion. That is, Strether identifies with Marie at the very moment when doing so makes him safe from acting upon any desire for Chad. As transposable objects of desire, then, Marie and Chad are really objects of foreclosed desire. Strether’s reversal of loyalty forecloses upon the possibility of any affair of his own—with either of them.

James’s arguably successful effort to solve the riddle that George Sand posed for his masculinity can illuminate the end of The Ambassadors, because the suspense that Strether’s “sharp fantastic crisis” creates for his gender identity ends in much the same way as James’s over the course of the three Sand essays. When Strether turns down Maria Gostrey’s veiled proposal by explaining that he is following a logic of getting nothing for himself out of the “whole affair,” his response is as untrustworthy as Maria’s claim that he returns to America with only his “wonderful impressions” (22: 326). James Gifford considers Strether’s refusal a “renunciation of heterosexuality,” but he also points out that such a renunciation “only makes his self-imposed (homo) sexual exile all the more pitiable” (84). In other respects as well, Strether chooses a modest life as a man, like John Marcher, to whom little is likely to happen. He will return from Paris with “treasures of imagination” (22: 224) and with his masculinity at least tentatively and imaginatively in place—but unchanged. In fact, when he fills the interval between his final meetings with Marie and Chad by escorting Maria Gostrey about Paris, he enjoys this “happy interlude” the more for his being able to play the “kindly uncle” to Maria’s “intelligent niece from the country” (22: 291). He gets for himself, then, what James got from Balzac: an independent, unaffiliated, uncompromised manhood. In contrast to Sand, who follows a policy of “free appropriation and consumption,” of having her cake and eating it too, Strether embraces this logic of renunciation. As James says of Balzac, Strether is “always fencing himself in against the personal adventure, the personal experience, in order to preserve himself for converting it into history” (“Lesson of Balzac” 124). For, in rejecting Maria’s proposal, Strether rejects one masculine role (lover or husband) in order to play another (bachelor uncle)—thus aligning himself, in James’s view, with Balzac rather than with Sand. With the “breach” between himself and Mrs. Newsome apparently “past mending” (22: 324), Strether seems likely to play the bachelor for the rest of his life.

When Hugh Merrow asks what will “light” his steps in choosing the gender of his subject, Mrs. Archdean suggests that his interest in the “artistic question itself’ will determine his decision (Complete Notebooks 595). Although we cannot know how James might have resolved Merrow’s dilemma, The Ambassadors and his essays on Sand all show him allowing his imagination to be “lighted”—bifocally at least—in the masculine. Not that Merrow would simply have painted a boy, for the essays and the novel make clear that being masculine and being male are not always easily compatible. When Merrow tells Captain Archdean that Mrs. Archdean “dreams of a little girl in your likeness, while you dream of a little boy in hers,” the Captain advises him to paint a figure resembling them both (Complete Notebooks 595–96). But Merrow is skeptical about this possibility. Feminizing the male or masculinizing the female in an androgynous union—all three options seem dubious solutions to James’s problems with Sand.

Even more than “Hugh Merrow” and The Ambassadors, James’s essays on Sand not only open but hold open questions about gender and sexuality. Most important, they show James interrogating the notion that a male artist’s gender simply engenders his writing. They suggest, rather, that the artist constructs a gendered and sexual identity in the act of engendering the work of art—indeed, that he knows his own gendered and sexual self only in retrospect, by reading or viewing what he has created. But if gender, and particularly masculinity, is that fluid—something to be read, or “swallowed”—then the artist will always be in a state of suspense about himself. Merrow’s anxiety about “having too free a hand” thus mirrors James’s anxiety about what it means to “swallow” a writer like Sand and thereby have her “pass into” his life. Swallowing Sand, a masculine female writer, suggests a complex—inverted—homoerotic identification. That is, the inverted gender identity that Sand seems to embody for James forces a vexed desire and sexual identification upon the desiring subject and writer—James himself—who would have to swallow a writerly power he identified simultaneously as masculine and female, heterosexual and homosexual.

The Ambassadors and the essays on Sand show James reconstructing a masculine identity by putting women in their places within a newly expanded masculinity. As he reads and writes about Sand, James offers himself up as a blank space on which Sand inscribes herself, but in the process of inscription Sand also subjects herself to revision. In a similar fashion, the self that his encounter with Sand constitutes for James also becomes subject to revision, most significantly through the incorporation—a transcription—of a superior male authority. In this complex rhetorical staging of gender complications, Sand and the Jamesian self she recreates are written over like a palimpsest by Balzac, a bachelor type complete in himself and able to play male and female roles. James does not simply identify with Balzac, however, and thereby disinvest himself in Sand; rather, he finds himself suspended between the possibilities represented by these two precursors—in the masculine, to be sure, but masculine in the plural term.

James’s explorations of what it means to be masculine “in the plural term” and to write with all one’s manhood at one’s side result, I think, in a state of suspense in which male identity, configured in terms of gender and sexuality, remains fluid. “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere,” James wrote in the preface to Roderick Hudson, “and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so” (Art of the Novel 5). This book examines James’s effort to keep male gender and sexuality in such a state of suspense, even as he experiments with various “geometries” of relationship that “appear” to stabilize them. Chapter 1 examines Roderick Hudson as an early experiment in exploring multiple male identities in a context of relations that “stop nowhere”—or at least offer sufficient variety to compel various male identifications. Setting up a rectangle of character relations (Rowland Mallet, Roderick Hudson, Christina Light, Mary Garland), James distributes desire along each axis, reflexively constructing multiple male identities. Brook Thomas argues that for James “no essential self exists outside of exchanges, and yet precisely for that reason all exchanges are interpersonal and thus affect the very nature of the self. This is because … a self cannot achieve definition without a ‘space between’ that only interpersonal relations can provide, while, at the same time, interpersonal relations are impossible without an emptiness within the self, an emptiness making one vulnerable to penetrations—and dominations—by another” (736). In the Mallet-Hudson relationship James employs his protégé theme to test the power of homoerotic desire to reconstruct a male self. That man-making process is complicated by the presence of female characters, especially Christina Light, who engender other, heterosexual, male selves.

Chapter 2 examines The American as an experiment in constructing a new manhood by reconstructing a particular male character type, the self-made businessman Christopher Newman. Newman might seem one of the least likely candidates in James’s fiction for such a reconstruction project, but I think James is bent on both satirizing such a self-made man and genuinely exploring the possibilities for alternative manhood that such a character affords. Turning to Gilbert Osmond (The Portrait of a Lady) in Chapter 3, I examine one of James’s subtlest portraits of a gentleman—the flip side, so to speak, of Christopher Newman. In fact, James pointedly characterizes Osmond by virtue of what he is not, and on the face of it Osmond seems most not like Newman—a kind of anti-Newman, or “newer new man.” Chapter 4 focuses on The Bostonians and James’s unreconstructed southerner, Basil Ransom. With glances at cross-dressing in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots, as well as in northern caricatures of the captured Jefferson Davis in drag, this chapter argues that James repeatedly subverts Ransom’s masculinist reconstruction project by blurring the boundaries between racial and gender identities and between heterosexual and homosexual desires. Each power position that Ransom imagines reverses upon itself, implicating him in heterosexual and homosexual economies of exchange and subjecting him to socially constructed feminine as well as masculine identifications that often carry racial implications.

In Dandies and Desert Saints James Eli Adams characterizes masculinity as a “rhetorical transaction” (11) and speaks of male “rhetorical self-fashioning” (15). By positing a transactional model of masculine construction, Adams adds an important dimension to any discussion of literary representations of gender issues. James, too, recognizes the importance of rhetorical situations—the way that subject-object relations configure and reconfigure male subjectivity, which subjects itself as it were to interpretation, to being read through the desire of another subject. In chapter 5 I discuss four of James’s stories about writers and artists (“The Author of Beltraffio,” “The Lesson of the Master,” “The Middle Years,” and “The Death of the Lion”) and his deployment of what I call “homo-aesthetic” desire in acts of writing and reading between men. Homoerotic desire emerges in these stories as the product of intersubjective transactions—as a function of a male reader response. In Eric Savoy’s terms, male writing “cruises” its male readers, whose erotic responses to these “homotexts” establish temporary, homo-aesthetic relationships to the writers themselves (“Hypocrite Lecteur” 20). Through the medium of writing, in other words, James ascribes a homoerotically charged male subjectivity to the writer-reader transaction. As he does in the novels, James mediates these male-male relationships by dispersing male desire among several gendered objects and thereby diversifies the male subjectivity that different object choices reflect.

Scholars such as David McWhirter and Hugh Stevens have discovered an underlying masochism in James’s writing, and in the final chapter I examine Prince Amerigo in The Golden Bowl and the sadomasochistic economy of relations in which he finds himself ensnared. Paradoxically, James deploys a masculinity of mastery from the site of an abject manhood. Amerigo performs the sadistic male—masochistically, on demand.

Insofar as James’s autobiographical writings have a plot, the climax of James’s self-representation as a male subject occurs at the beginning of chapter 11 in Notes of a Son and Brother. Although James had written disparagingly of himself, particularly in contrast to his father and brother William, suddenly he writes with some confidence as he rediscovers the governing principle of this “personal history, as it were, of an imagination” (Autobiography 454). He is the “man of imagination, and of an ‘awfully good’ one,” even as he worries that he will not quite be able to “catch” that figure for his use. “He had been with me all the while,” he seems to realize, “and only too obscurely and intimately—I had not found him in the market as an exhibited or offered value.” Although he worried about money throughout his career and certainly recognized the “value”—often a small one—of his writing, he persistently resisted identifying with prevailing models of business manhood. The “man of imagination” James can imagine being, therefore, must find his value and his values elsewhere than in the market, and insofar as business markets comprise the world outside the creative self, the obvious alternative site at which to locate the man of imagination is inside the self. “I had in a word to draw him forth from within rather than meet him in the world before me,” James writes, and “to make him objective, in short, had to turn nothing less than myself inside out” (Autobiography 455). In the context of this study, of course, the image of James turning himself “inside out” resonates in several registers, suggesting romantic inspiration, the contortions involved in identifying against the norm, but also gender and sexual inversion. “What was I thus, within and essentially, what had I ever been and could I ever be,” James concludes, “but a man of imagination at the active pitch?” (Autobiography 455).

In his preface to volume 15 of the New York Edition, a volume containing “The Figure in the Carpet,” James poses a challenge to critics. “I had long found the charming idea of some artist whose characteristic intention, or cluster of intentions, should have taken all vainly for granted the public, or at the worst the not unthinkable private, exercise of penetration” (Art of the Novel 228). “I came to Hugh Vereker,” he says, by way of a “generalisation”—namely, that criticism is “apt to stand off from the intended sense of things,” so he posited a critic, an “intent worker,” “who should find himself to the very end in presence but of the limp curiosity.” The “drama” that Hugh Vereker’s story describes—a drama of criticism, of the “aspiring young analyst whose report we read”—is that “at a given moment the limpness begins vaguely to throb and heave, to become conscious of a comparative tension.” As an “effect” of this “mild convulsion,” James concludes, “acuteness, at several points, struggles to enter the field, and the question that accordingly comes up, the issue of the affair, can be but whether the very secret of perception hasn’t been lost” (Art of the Novel 229). James had fun writing the long passage from which I have quoted these excerpts. Can there be any doubt that he relished the wordplay, that he experienced what Sedgwick calls “exhibitionistic enjoyment” (“Shame and Performativity” 229), in the idea of “embodied” intentions vainly seeking a public readership able to “penetrate” them, the image of the critic’s “limp curiosity” that begins to “throb and heave” and whose “convulsion” imperils the “very secret of perception”? In his brilliant analysis of this passage and James’s tale as a whole, Eric Savoy archly refers to James’s lesson for readers as a “sort of critical Viagra” and an object lesson in camp, the “ludic self-parody that James increasingly turned to in his prefaces to the New York Edition” (“Embarrassments” 231, 230). As much as anything else Savoy honors the writerly pleasures of James’s text—the laughter that must have bubbled inside him in the act of composition. James poses a serious challenge for his readers, especially his male readers, as he indulges in parody and self-parody and the fun and games of unsettling relationships between words and meanings. Reading James for fun demands no “limp curiosity.” Venturing into the funhouse of James’s fiction we run the risk of getting “lost among the genders and the pronouns” (‘The Death of the Lion” 296). We shall need all our manhood at our sides, where of course we face the danger and the opportunity of losing it altogether. I hope I am man of imagination enough for the job—especially in the plural terms that James’s suspense of masculinity requires.