Animadversion: biographical criticism

[truepenny]

I am moved to animadvert.

For context, this requires a (VERY) long passage from Leon Edel's Henry James: A Life.


Quoth Edel:

     The Awkward Age was James's last novel in a remarkable sequence dealing with female children, juveniles and adolescents, written between 1895 and 1900. His precocious little females grow a little older in each book, as if they were a single child whose life experience is being traced from the cradle to coming-of-age--as if indeed these books were the single book of little Harry James of Washington Square and 14th Street, of Paris, Geneva, Bolougne and Newport. Taking them in sequence as he wrote them, we begin in the cradle with Effie, who is murdered at four (The Other House, 1896); she is resurrected at five (What Maisie Knew, 1897) and we leave her at seven or eight, or perhaps a bit older. Flora is eight ("The Turn of the Screw," 1898) and the sole boy in the series, Miles, is ten. (And here we also have a young adult, the governess.) Then we arrive at adolesence, the adolescence of an unnamed girl in a branch post office ("In the Cate," 1898). Little Aggie, the Anglo-Italian girl in the next novel, is sixteen, and Nanda Brookenham, eighteen when the story begins (The Awkward Age, 1899).
     It is sufficiently clear from James's notes and prefaces that he did not deliberately set out to create a sequence. And yet the sequence is there--in his imagination he moved from infancy to childhood, from childhood to adolescence and then to young adulthood. Moreover we can discern within the total record an extensive personal allegory of the growing-up of Henry James. Beyond the conscious intellectual exploration of states of childhood, James was intuitively questioning his own unconscious experience, reliving the long ago "education" of his emotions. The murder of little Effie in The Other House, which inaugurates the series, can be read as the age at which the little Henry, within the mature artist, felt himself annihilated by the brutality of the audience at Guy Domville. His selective imagination chose for Effie the form of death he himself had described at the Archbishop's when he had spoken of having been under water--"subaqueous"--at the time of his débâcle. Maisie is a careful presentation of the Henry James of the late autobiography, A Small Boy and Others: she possesses his curiosity, she is engaged in a systematic study of her elders, she searches determinedly for her identity amid her absent and estranged parents and governesses. Her "vivacity of intelligence" and her "small vibrations" are those of a storyteller in the making. She might have been "rather coarsened, blurred, sterilized, by ignorance and pain." Art saves her and protects her innocence, as it had saved Henry. In his late preface he describes the "exquisite interest" he found in his study of this little girl, for in reality she is a study of himself; unwittingly he has treated her as a kind of psychological "case study."
     After Maisie we arrive at the latency period, represented by little Miles, his boy in the series. The consequences of Miles's self-assertion was death, as we have seen; after that James reverted in his stories to the disguise of female adolescence. His remembrance of himself as an observant little outsider, in his autobiography, seems to parallel the adolescent girl who, from her cage, tissues together the society around her. Then, in Nanda and little Aggie of The Awkward Age, we may see a projection of the Henry of late adolescence--that part of him which was continentalized and ranged freely in the forbidden fruit of French novels, and the other side of him, the serious young literary novice who had to make what he could out of the New England environment to which he was brought--the life of Newport--when he was Nanda's age.
     Some such history of the psychical "growing-up" of Henry James is traced in the depths of these stories. It was more than an intricate reflection of the biography of James's psyche. In resuming, after the trauma of Guy Domville, the disguise of a female child, the protective disguise of his early years, James performed unconscious self-therapy. As his old feelings and imaginings had defended him long ago against the brutal world, they now served as aid against the new brutalities.
(Edel 480-81)

I hate this reading so much I don't even know where to begin.

Let's start with a fact. Effie's murder by drowning, though only brought into a completed and published story in 1896, is present in James's notebooks--as Edel tells us (!)--much earlier (I cannot, of course, find the single page I want out of the mass aggregate of 717 pp., and Edel's index is singularly unhelpful, but it's at the beginning of James's playwriting endeavors, i.e, 1890 or thereabouts). So this elaborate theory is undermined by factual evidence presented by its own proponent.

Secondly, Edel is, I think, dramatically overemphasizing the "traumas" and "brutalities" of Henry James's life. Yes, he got booed at the premiere of Guy Domville, and yes, it seems to have thrown him for a loop. (Although, I have to say there was a certain amount of grim satisfaction in watching him discover that audiences notice when the author is slumming and don't appreciate it.) But he had a privileged, sheltered life, remarkably free of the kind of distressing incidents that plague Effie, Maisie, Miles & Flora. He was not drowned as a child; his parents did not get divorced; he was not caught between his crazed governess and the specter of his father's valet. (Okay, I'm not being fair, but I do think Edel is romanticizing the biographical facts to fit his theory.)

Thirdly, Edel's theory makes no sense. He makes no attempt to explain why James is "disguising" himself as a little girl rather than a little boy, and if you're going to hang so much emphasis on a series of little girl, it behooves you to admit that the presence of a boy smack-dab in the middle throws a bit of a spanner into your clockwork. If it matters that Effie and Maisie are girls, then it matters that Miles is a boy. And the experience of female adolesence is very different from the experience of male adolesence, and was even more so in the second half of the nineteenth century. Just ask Henry's sister Alice James.

And, finally, I hate hate hate this smug, condescending critical assumption that James didn't know what he was doing. Edel can see it, from his godlike vantage point, but Henry James, arguably one of the most intellectually brilliant writers of his or any other century, somehow just missed it? If there's one thing to be said for James, it is that he was an extremely self-aware author--and, moreover, passionately interested in the darker workings of the human mind. His prose style doesn't happen by accident, and it doesn't emerge from a psyche that is as blindly naïve to its own working as Edel's argument requires it to be, and The Turn of the Screw, all by itself, demonstrates that there wasn't much he didn't know about self-delusion and repression.

I think genius always knows what it's doing. It has suited artists from the Romantics onward to pretend otherwise, but that's a stance, a pose. Charlotte Brontë grabbed at that as a way to spin the PR on Wuthering Heights, but reading WH shows as plain as daylight that Emily Brontë knew exactly and always what she was doing. And I would argue that the same goes for Henry James.

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WORKS CITED
Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1985.