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Chapter 1

Configuring Male Desire and Identity in Roderick Hudson

Before launching into a largely favorable review of Roderick Hudson (1875) for the New York Times, the anonymous critic summarized James’s career—citing first the “Jr.” that connected him to his better-known father and then his esoteric appeal to the “more cultivated and thoughtful part of the reading public.” “He has shown no indications,” the reviewer complained, “of qualities of a robust natural growth” (Hayes 3). James’s lack of writerly virility hampers his ability to distinguish male and female characters from one another, and the critic cites his stylistic inability to differentiate between genders. Complaining that the characters in Roderick Hudson all talk “pretty much in the same way, the way of Mr. Henry James, Jr.,” the reviewer archly observed that Rowland Mallet “might be a male Mary Garland, and Mary Garland a female Rowland Mallet, Esquire” (Hayes 7). In effect, the Times reviewer places James in a position that anticipates Hugh Merrow’s in his later, unfinished story—in the position of having his own gendered identity inferred from the objects, or characters, he creates. Failing to find the right gendered voices for his male and female characters undermines his claim to a “robust” gender identity of his own. Although the reviewer hoped that James would develop more masculine features—that is, more “original traits,” as he “attains conscious strength and wins confidence in his powers by their exercise” (Hayes 3)—the jury, so to speak, seems to remain out. He finally praises Roderick Hudson as “one of the best novels produced in America,” but he also notes the “conscious primness” of James’s style, which he finds “too often apparent” (Hayes 7). James himself, of course, recognized that Roderick Hudson tested his writerly and manly power. Suppressing acknowledgement of Watch and Ward, he considered Roderick Hudson his “first attempt” at a “long fiction with a ‘complicated’ subject” (NY1: vi), and certainly his representation of gender and sexuality, distributed provocatively among male and female characters, figures prominently among those complications. “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere,” he would write in the New York Edition 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” (1: vii). If in fact relations “stop nowhere,” the individuals involved in those relations find themselves continually challenged to redefine or re-identify themselves “in relation.”

Roderick Hudson offers the best early example of James’s “protégé theme” (Martin, ‘“High Felicity’” 101) and his earliest extended effort to plot the narrative trajectory of male homoerotic desire—how men identify themselves in relation to each other. Rowland Mallet recognizes that his “genius is altogether imitative,” even though he has not yet “encountered any very striking models of grandeur” (1: 4), but in Roderick Hudson he obviously finds a “model of grandeur” in whom he can invest considerable energy—playing patron, living vicariously through the other man’s achievement, and testing his own attraction to his protégé.¹ In addition to experimenting with paths of desire and identification, the narrative also illustrates James’s early effort to explore a range of masculine behavior and masculine roles, because the male-to-male relationship is doubly complicated by the presence of two women: Christina Light and Mary Garland. In an excellent recent essay on homosocial bonds in the novel, Nomi Sofer argues that James was “acutely aware” that the “homosocial cannot exist outside of the compulsory heterosexuality of patriarchal society and realistic fiction” (192), but I think the relational and identificatory possibilities he explores in Roderick Hudson are more supple and versatile. They certainly include the homoerotic, not just the homosocial, but in exploring the potential of mutually fulfilling homoerotic relationships, James does explore their many complications. Rowland Mallet, for example, finds the male object of his desire—his “model of grandeur”—entangled in a romantic and sexual relationship with a woman (Christina Light), while he himself at least considers the “possibility of a throb” with another woman (Mary Garland) to whom his protégé is formally engaged. Relations in Roderick Hudson, as well as the identifications they engender, may not stop “nowhere,” but their various configurations do enable James to experiment with multiple gender and sexual performances.

The double-stranded love plot, or hetero-text, that James creates necessarily complicates the more important male-to-male relationship—in effect, covering or repressing the homosocial and homoerotic subtext of the novel. Mallet’s desire for and efforts to identify with another male are blocked by Roderick’s relationship with two women, both of whom Rowland himself at least in some sense desires. Put another way, Mallet faces the challenge of reconciling his idealized image of the artist with the distressing image of the artist-with-a-woman, while his own relationship to the male artist figure is doubly mediated. Although Sofer argues that Roderick Hudson displays “profound pessimism about heterosexuality”—indeed, that “heterosexual obsession” in the novel “has the power to destroy men’s lives” (186)—I think the four-sided configuration of characters enables James to experiment with several alternative relationships and their implications for male identity, even as the relationship between a male center of consciousness and a “doubled” love object comprised of male artist and female subject remains at the center of his attention. My goal, therefore, is to examine James’s two male characters and the interplay and negotiation between homosocial and homosexual, heterosocial and heterosexual discourses, out of which their male identities are constructed.

In moving his two male characters from Northampton to Rome—from the “centre of Christendom” to the “mere margin,” as Mrs. Hudson suggestively puts it—James paradoxically can center his attention more intensively on alternative relationships between and among his major characters. I “approve of a certain tension of one’s being,” Rowland tells his cousin Cecilia. “It’s what a man is meant for” (1: 50). And that tension inheres for Rowland, it seems to me, in the dispersion of desire along various lines of gender and sexuality. By situating his male center of consciousness within a complex configuration of relationships, furthermore, James explores several potential male identities and roles. With Mary Garland, for example, Rowland feels encouraged to be the sort of “soft,” genteel male—an “athlete of continence” (Rosenberg 139)—stereotyped by social historians as the Christian Gentleman. Christina Light in contrast demands a more aggressive male type—a “big” man of the sort James would create in Christopher Newman, Caspar Goodwood, and Basil Ransom. None of those characters is simply reducible to type, but each of them does outwardly conform in many ways to the instrumental Masculine Achiever. Rowland’s relationship with Roderick, on the other hand, promises a more comprehensive type of masculinity—the sort of intimate brotherhood, or comradeship, that Melville illustrated in the Ishmael-Queequeg marriage and Whitman described in Leaves of Grass. Liberated from a competitive, dominant-submissive posture, such relationships can be founded on principles of mutual benevolence and the breakdown of hard ego boundaries.

Early reviewers of Roderick Hudson found neither Rowland Mallet nor Roderick Hudson particularly good examples of manhood. Roderick lacks “true manliness,” one reviewer complained (Hayes 5), while Rowland “fails to produce an impression of vital individuality.” He remains “almost a lay figure, a stiff model of oppressive excellence and wisdom, always saying and doing exactly the right thing at the right time,” and, as noted above, might even be regarded as a “male Mary Garland” (Hayes 6, 7). Another reviewer, terming Rowland a “fairy godmother” to Roderick (Hayes 9), considers Roderick himself a “weakling” and labels his conduct “unmanly and unbearable.” “He was not meant for a finished product,” that reviewer concludes. “Only a butterfly existence could suit such a character” (Hayes 10). Such snide remarks derive, I think, from the reviewers’ unease with the relationship between Rowland and Roderick—their intuition that gender and sexuality are linked for men. Gender identity—manliness or virility—depends upon heterocentric identification. What we would now call homosexual identification portends gender inversion. Thus, another reviewer, noting the “anomalous relation of these two young men,” recognized somewhat euphemistically that they were “sometimes comrades on the footing of good fellowship” and, with considerable relief, “sometimes separated into a modest and most conscientious and responsible patron, and a ward now wholly self-surrendering and endearing” (Hayes 14)—in other words purified of any whiff of “good fellowship.” The reviewer who complained that Roderick lacked “true manliness” also noted the “perplexing little triangular arrangement of personages” in the novel (Hayes 4) and explained Roderick’s lack by his inability to inspire sufficient desire in Christina Light. “The virile force to which her feminine nature longs to render due submission,” this reviewer reasoned, “she does not find in his brilliant but unstable, untrustworthy nature” (Hayes 5). From our perspective, of course, the idea of an “unstable, untrustworthy nature” reigsters more positively than negatively—suggesting the liberation of individual identity from prescribed gender and sexual roles and opening up the possibility of “brilliant” alternative performances. I would not argue that James and his readers easily found their way to such a reading, but I do think James was working toward alternative configurations of male gender and sexual identity—that he deliberately and experimentally wanted to create “unstable” male characters that destabilized conventional male roles and identities.

Twentieth-century critics have tended to discuss the male characters in Roderick Hudson by opposing Roderick and Rowland in order to identify unresolved conflicts either in James’s own male identity or in his conception of male character. Leon Edel suggested, for example, that James had “abstracted the incandescence of his genius and placed beside it his decorous, cautious, restrained self, or his mother’s warnings beside his own desires” (170).² More usefully for my purposes, several critics break free of such binary approaches and seem to recognize the inherent instability in the complex relationships James configured. As Oscar Cargill puts it, relationships in Roderick Hudson result in “Christina’s vague yearning for Rowland, who yearns for Mary, who will not have him but is passionately devoted to Roderick, who, ultimately bored by her, burns for a casually responsive Christina” (26). Ronald Emerick expands the range further by analyzing Christina’s love for Rowland: “To ‘Rowland loves Mary Garland loves Roderick loves Christina’ must be added ‘loves Rowland’ to complete the rectangle of romantic relationships” (353). And Robert K. Martin has added “Rowland loves Roderick” and read the novel as “the story of a man who fell in love with a handsome young artist, adopted him as his protégé and took him to Italy” (“‘High Felicity’” 101).³

Martin makes what now seems an obvious case for the homoerotic dimension of Rowland’s attraction to Roderick, for there is little question that Roderick and Rowland excite one another. Roderick’s “face flushed,” and he “stammered,” “panted,” and got “greatly excited” when Rowland offers to take him to Rome. His arm trembles in his benefactor’s (1: 34, 35). When Rowland admires Roderick’s work in his studio, the “light of admiration was in Rowland’s eyes, and it caused the young man’s handsome watching face to shine out in response” (1: 37). Hugh Stevens also argues that the novel “makes homoerotic affection more than a casual aspect of Rowland Mallet’s character. In its foregrounding of questions of legal status, and its exploration of Rowland’s melancholic resignation, the novel specifically explores the cost of relinquishing same-sex attraction” (67). Indeed, Stevens sees Roderick Hudson as inaugurating the tragic homosexual paradigm in James’s fiction, arguing that the novel portrays a “‘masochistic economy,’ an economy in which desire is never gratified and always punished, but in which a certain pleasure derives from that very punishment” (83).

“Outing” Rowland Mallet, however, represents only a necessary first step in exploring James’s construction of male identities in the novel. Roderick Hudson does not simply reflect the closeting or frustration of male desire but the distribution of desire within a vexing economy of male-male and male-female relationships. The mutually creative, as well as conflicted, nature of the male-to-male bond becomes complexly entangled with male-female relationships. As Stevens puts it, the “radical masochistic economy of Roderick Hudson derives from complex and multiple movements of ungratified desire and unstable identifications. For Rowland’s desire for Roderick, and Roderick’s desire for Christina, comes full circle (or full triangle) in Christina’s desire for Rowland” (80). Before sexology and legal definitions of sexual identity exerted their coercive force, James experiments in Roderick Hudson with the identificatory, or reflexive, power of male desire—the power of object choice to engender a male self. Moving his characters to the liberatory climate of Italy, James enables himself to play with various possibilities for gender and sexual identification.

Rowland Mallet serves James not only as a center of consciousness, but also as a “center of manliness”—a subject position, if you will, through which various constructs of manhood can circulate. Although Kelly Cannon rightly claims that Rowland “fails to meet the masculine norm because he cannot muster sufficient heterosexual passion for Mary Garland” (9), such a view of Rowland’s limitations and of the norms and alternatives with which James works is itself much too limited. Not content to represent Rowland’s masculine sensibility within any simple binary, James attempts to educate it, first through relationship with Roderick, and then through the challenges posed by Christina and Mary. Roderick in effect mediates Rowland’s relationship with each of the women, placing himself “between women,” while the women mediate Rowland’s relationship with Roderick, placing themselves “between men.”

As James initially characterizes him, Mallet appears waiting for some outside force to change his life. Identified as he is with his money and with conventionally masculine systems of business exchange, he feels ready to invest self and money in some alternative speculation. He is “waiting till something takes [his] fancy irresistibly.” “I’m holding myself ready for inspiration,” he tells his cousin Cecilia in reporting his intention to visit Europe, but he worries that if “inspiration comes at forty it will be a hundred pities to have tied up my money-bag at thirty” (1: 4). Claims such as Poirier’s that Rowland is simply an “observer who, like Ralph Touchett, must subsidize the kind of life he cannot lead” seem short-sighted, given the open field for investment that James initially posits for his central character (20). For in Mallet (and in the “drama” of his consciousness) James depicts a male character whose intellectual and emotional energy, while narcissistically invested in an enclosed self, nonetheless awaits something to stimulate an opening and presumably an outpouring of the “moneybag” of hoarded emotion. Jonathan Freedman considers the “neurasthenic” Mallet to represent the “conflict between a Calvinist insistence on a life of vigorous activity and the aestheticist privileging of a life of pure contemplation” (138). Mallet himself seems to recognize that conflict and to seek a means of reconciling those two impulses.⁴ He certainly recognizes the vacuity of his present life and feels the need to channel suppressed energy into self-expression. He pointedly tells Cecilia that he is tired of narcissistic self-enclosure: “tired of myself, my own thoughts, my own affairs, my own eternal company.” “True happiness,” he recognizes, “consists in getting out of one’s self’ and, moreover, being able to “stay out” (1: 7). Although he could simply be rationalizing his inactivity and covertly expressing a desire to uncloset himself (anticipating a character such as John Marcher in “The Beast in the Jungle”), he explains that his problem has simply been the lack of an “absorbing errand”: “I want to care for something or for somebody. And I want to care, don’t you see? with a certain intensity; even, if you can believe it, with a certain passion.” Although Cecilia interprets this to mean that he simply wants to “fall in love” (1: 7), the issue is more complicated, because love is only one of several bases for relationship in Roderick Hudson. The terms of desire that Mallet uses, furthermore, clearly suggest an alternative to a strict “moneybag” economy of investment and profit at the expense of others. Whether oriented heterosocially or homosocially, caring for something or somebody suggests selflessness more than selfishness and a basis for human relationship that James pointedly distinguishes from the economic basis of American business society.

As he looks in the mirror, Mallet characterizes himself half-facetiously as a “man of genius half-finished. The genius has been left out, the faculty of expression is wanting; but the need for expression remains, and I spend my days groping for the latch of a closed door” (1: 8). He does in fact spend the rest of the novel seeking ways to invest and to “open” himself to experience by getting and staying outside the closed door, or closet, behind which he has secreted himself. In this regard, he registers a typical male scenario in post-Civil War America. Feeling cultural pressure to achieve business success and to fall in love and marry, he wants some other definition of maleness, some other male self that can serve as a “model of grandeur.” He accepts the idea that “true happiness” requires investment of energy in “something or someone,” but he seeks an alternative to the two choices most readily available and encouraged by his culture: a woman or a business career. “Roderick will repay me,” he tells Mary. “It’s a speculation” (1: 77). Indeed, Rowland is in some sense as much a sculptor as Roderick—a “fairy godmother,” in one reviewer’s arch terms (Hayes 9), with the power to transform Roderick’s Cinderella into a princely sculptor. Mallet feels bored to have his “hands always so empty,” so he “embraced the idea that something considerable might be made of Roderick” (1: 48), even though his cousin Cecilia warns him that he will have his “hands rather full” with the younger man. The challenge for Mallet inheres in the terms—the discourse of aesthetic capitalism—he uses to express his desire. Can he keep his “speculation” in Roderick as free as possible from the dominant-subordinate, potentially exploitative temptations of profiteering capitalism? To speculate in another man is risky in all sorts of ways—even before the criminalization of homosexuality—and James seems specially interested in the ethical and psychological challenge of such male-male investment.⁵ What effects can such male-to-male desire have on both relationships and individual identities? Can male desire be compatible with self-achievement? In effect, can Rowland care enough about Roderick to keep his hands off and allow his protégé to develop freely—to own his own labor? Roderick will later declaim to the Italian sculptor Gloriani that he wants to “produce the sacred terror; a Hera that will make you turn blue, an Aphrodite that will make you turn—well, faint” (1:117), so freeing him from patronizing control could quickly turn the tables on Rowland’s project—placing him in a masochistic position, as Wendy Graham notes, in relation to a sculptural male sadist. In her view Roderick “intends for his ‘divine forms’ to replicate the experience of being shattered into sexuality; his bravura manner belies a hidden identification with the viewer’s frisson, the sublime thrill of aesthetically induced pain and fright” (129–30).

Although Mallet and Hudson are very different from one another, each represents an alternative to conventional masculinity. Having never been “accused of anything more material than a manly stoutness” and with hair the “fairest shade of yellow” and a “complexion absurdly rosy” (1:13), Mallet is a kind of Fair Gentleman. Although he served, like the later Christopher Newman and Basil Ransom, as an officer during the Civil War, “if not with glory, at least with a noted propriety,” he feels none of those later characters’ hunger for “driving a lucrative trade” (1: 15). In fact, he considered his post-college stint in his father’s counting-house to be “small drudgery” (1: 14). Hudson, of course, seems very different. Active and energetic, he does “everything too fast,” according to Cecilia, and he himself feels “something inside” that “drives” him—some “demon of unrest!” (1: 20). Neil Schmitz considers Roderick a typical Jacksonian male; his “aesthetic tall talk” is the “dangerous hyperbole of the male hysteric” (155).⁶ At the same time, Hudson is no conventional Masculine Achiever in the manner of Newman or Goodwood. Indeed, this “remarkably pretty boy” (1:17), with his “soft and not altogether masculine” voice (1: 21) and “extraordinary beauty” (1: 23), reminds Rowland of “some beautiful, supple, restless, bright-eyed animal, whose motions should have no deeper warrant than the tremulous delicacy of its structure” (1: 31). In these physical terms, he is as much an alternative to conventional masculinity as Mallet, and like his patron he rejects the “repulsive routine” of the business world (1: 24). He experiences exasperation at having to fill a “double place” for his mother ever since his brother Stephen, a model of the “useful man,” was killed in the war. “It’s a good deal to ask of a man,” he complains, “especially when he has so little talent as I for being what he’s not.” From his mother’s point of view and from his culture’s, he recognizes, his brother was “much more the right thing” (1: 41). His mother demands that he “must be to her everything that [his brother] would have been”—in short, someone who “would have made fifty thousand dollars and had the parlour done up” (1: 42). In putting the matter so bluntly, James obviously represents the conflict he himself felt between business and an artistic career, but he has also diagnosed in remarkably stark terms the tensions experienced by many late-nineteenth-century American men.

James does more, however, than simply represent a simple choice between business and art for his two unconventional male characters, because in putting them together in a homosocial and erotically charged relationship, he explores the possibility of dynamic male identities that develop through the vehicle of male-male relationship. In this complementary relationship between men, Rowland provides the “voice of taste and authority,” while Roderick offers an “indefinable attraction—the something tender and divine of unspotted, exuberant, confident youth” (1: 30). In fact, Hudson seems to require of Mallet what Mallet requires of “something or someone”—a goad to self-expression, a form for self-expression and self-expenditure to take. Whereas Mallet hoards his energy, however, Hudson expends energy like Walt Whitman in bursts of exaggerated utterance, as when he announces his intention to become “the typical, original, aboriginal American artist” (1: 33). Furthermore, while Mary Garland confidently announces that sculpture is “Work for men” (1: 346), given the “row” with his mother that follows Roderick’s decision to accompany Rowland to Rome, James appears to be signaling the emergence of a male figure at odds with women—an artist empowered homoerotically and phallocentrically in the masculine by another male. Roderick wants to “strike out hard” and “do something violent and indecent and impossible—to let off steam” (1: 71)—but he rejects conventional masculinity and conventional masculine models.⁷ He commits himself to high art, becoming an “aesthete gloriosus” in Richard Ellman’s felicitous term (214). Roderick is an artist to “his fingers’ ends,” James observes (1: 29), and during his apprenticeship he has used his sculptural “fingertips” to form male rather than female figures. Disengaging Roderick from women (despite his engagement to Mary), James explores the possibility of a homo-aesthetic creativity—empowered by the investment of male subjectivity (and Rowland’s speculative desire) and focused on male subjects. In volunteering himself to be Roderick’s patron, Rowland ensures that he will possess and become the privileged viewer of Roderick’s productions. Investing his own desires in Roderick’s art, he enables male desire to circulate through sculpted objects to the male subjects triangulated with them—a “speculation” indeed—and thus to configure homoerotic desire reflexively.

Roderick’s first sculpture, a bronze statuette called Thirst, represents a “youth of ancient fable—Hylas or Narcissus, Paris or Endymion”—whose beauty is the “beauty of natural movement” (1:17). Robert Martin, noting the mention of Hylas (beloved of Hercules), argues that the sculpture’s function is to “make the reader aware of a homosexual (or homoerotic) relationship between the two men” (“‘High Felicity’” 103).⁸ Mallet immediately takes Thirst into his possession—as if simultaneously introjecting homo-aesthetic desire and slaking his own “thirst” for Roderick by incorporating, or swallowing, an object Roderick has created. The four mythological figures to which James compares the statue, moreover, all represent an ephebic ideal that he would have known both from experience and from his reading.⁹ James knew that body type, and his use of it early in the novel emphasizes Roderick’s position as both a male subject and object: creator of desirable male bodies through his sculpture, object in his own right of Rowland Mallet’s attention and desire.

James would have found in Walter Pater’s account of German art historian Johann Wincklemann’s interest in Greek sculpture authorization for admiring beautiful male bodies and seeking intimate male friendships—a model for the homo-aesthetic friendship of critic and sculptor he represented in Roderick Hudson and belatedly discovered when he met Hendrik Andersen. That Wincklemann’s “affinity with Hellenism was not merely intellectual, that the subtler threads of temperament were inwoven in it,” Pater avows, “is proved by his romantic, fervent friendships with young men. He has known, he says, many young men more beautiful than Guido’s archangel. These friendships, bringing him into contact with the pride of the human form, perfected his reconciliation to the spirit of Greek sculpture” (191).¹⁰ Roderick’s sculptural relationship with Rowland uncannily anticipates James’s relationship with Andersen, the American-born sculptor he met in Rome in May 1899. “The moment James climbed the stairs into Andersen’s sun-filled Roman studio,” observes Fred Kaplan, “he began a memorable relationship that was to clutch at his heart for the next five years” (447). As if replicating the behavior of his own protagonist, James immediately became Andersen’s patron; he insisted upon purchasing Andersen’s portrait bust of a young boy, Count Alberto Bevilacqua, which looked much like Andersen himself (Kaplan 447).¹¹ In his letters James pointedly used Andersen’s sculptures to mediate his own desire for the sculptor himself. Before closing his 9 May 1906 letter with the tender “goodnight, dearest Hendrik. I draw you close and hold you long and am ever tenderly yours” (Henry James Amato Ragazzo 160), James offers Andersen extended advice about sculpting nudity:

I should go down on my knees to you, for instance, to individualize and detail the faces, the types ever so much more—to study, ardently, the question of doing that—the whole face-question. I should cheekily warn you against a tendency to neglect elegance—to emphasize too much the thickness and stoutness of limb, at the risk of making certain legs, especially from the knee down, seem too short etc.—and arms also too “stocky” and stony. The faces too blank and stony—the hair, for me, always too merely symbolic—and not living and felt. These offensive things I should say to you—in such a fashion that you would but love me better and our friendship would be but the tenderer and closer. (158–60)

In this remarkable passage James overtly negotiates an ardent verbal relationship with Andersen through his sculptural criticism. Down on his knees before the sculptor, James examines the sculpted bodies and encourages Andersen to forego the symbolic register for the fully and individually embodied. James designs this “offensive” advice, moreover, to have a similar—more “living and felf” effect on his own relationship with Andersen.

In his ability to sculpt an ideal male nude Roderick proves more successful than Hendrik Andersen, whom James would criticize for his inability to differentiate his nude figures by gender in terms uncannily similar to those used by one critic of Roderick Hudson. “I sometimes find your sexes (putting the indispensable sign apart!) not quite intensely enough differentiated—I mean through the ladies resembling a shade too much the gentlemen.” Divesting the penis of its phallocentric signifying power, James expands the coverage of his critical gaze to encompass other body parts. Citing the figure of a ballerina, James criticizes Andersen’s failure to allow her “sufficient luxury” of hip, “or, to speak plainly, Bottom.” “She hasn’t much more of that than her husband, and I should like her to have a good deal more” (162). Focusing though he does on a female figure and her “Bottom,” James closes his letter by expressing his desire to “take” Andersen to his “heart” and to “feel” his arms around him—making it clear that here too he uses sculptural criticism to express his desire for Andersen himself. James had established a similarly mediated relationship between Roderick Hudson and Rowland Mallet, but that relationship founders when Roderick turns from sculpting male to sculpting female figures.