Portrait of Henry James, by John Singer Sargent (1913)
Henry James is one of the great masters of the Anglo-American novel, whose work marked the crucial transition between 19th century psychological realism and 20th century modernism. He was born in 1843 in a wealthy New York family that led a cosmopolitan life, travelling around Europe and the east coast of the United States: his father, Henry Sr. was an important intellectual at the time, and his elder brother, William, would become one of the most respected psychologists and philosophers in the United States, the leading voice in the highly influential school of pragmatism.
An admirer of Nathaniel Hawthorne, but most of all of European literature, young Henry attended Harvard Law School, but soon dropped out so as to focus on what would prove to be a prolific literary career: 22 novels, more than a hundred short stories, as well as dozens of books of travel and essays, biographies, and more a dozen plays (which were unsuccessful and rarely went on stage, though).
Influenced by the cosmopolitan lifestyle of his parents, James spent most of his life as an expatriate in Europe – in Switzerland, France, Italy and England – where he made friends with the greatest writers, intellectuals and artists of his time (Ruskin, Dickens, Stevenson, William Morris, Zola, Maupassant, Daudet). In fact, he did not set foot in the U.S. between 1880 and 1905, and eventually became a British subject in 1915, one year before his death, as a declaration of loyalty to his adopted country and in protest against America’s refusal to enter World War One.
His sense of deracination is more than palpable in his novels, a number of which focus on the ‘Transatlantic theme,’ that is to say that they narrate the discovery of Europe by Americans, their attempt to define and understand themselves and American culture through the prism of European culture, and vice versa. Though these novels often betray the disenchantment that James felt about the evolution of the United States, they are far from offering an idyllic view of the Old World either: many of them are coming of age stories confronting American characters, who tend to come out as naive, and sometimes vulgar, to Europeans (or Europeanized Americans), embodying a civilization that is refined, alluring, but often cynical and corrupt.
James’s Main Works
Three main periods can be distinguished in James’s career:
– the first period (1871-1890) consists of a series of long serialised novels culminating with The Portrait of a Lady (see below), using the Transatlantic theme and romantic themes, with a predominantly omniscient point of view but also James’s first forays into limited focalization;
– James’s second period (1890-1897) was mostly dedicated to writing short stories and plays;
– in the third period (1897-1916), James returned to long novels and used more symbolism and more sophisticated techniques, some of them inspired from his experience as a dramatist, including limited points of view and a scenic approach to storytelling.
James’s most important works include:
– Roderick Hudson (1875), James’s first major Künstlerroman, the story of the personal and artistic development of an American sculptor in Europe. James later wrote a number of richly metatextual short stories also on the theme of the artistic calling (i.e., Künstlernovelle), including « The Aspern Papers » (1888), “The Lesson of the Master” (1888), “The Middle Years” (1893) and « The Beast in the Jungle » (1903).
– The American (1877), a Bildungsroman on the misadventures of Christopher Newman, a good-hearted, naive American businessman on his first tour of Europe, who is confronted to the beauty and ruthlessness of the Old World.
– Washington Square (1880), a cruel tragicomedy on the ambivalent relationships between a dull but sweet daughter, courted by a rake, and her domineering father.
– The Portrait of a Lady (1881), the story of a spirited young American heiress, Isabel Archer, who is duped by two Machiavellian American expatriates. The Wings of the Dove (1902) tells a somewhat similar story, but with greater experimental ambition in form and structure.
– The Bostonians (1886), a social satire on American intellectuals, social reformers and feminists.
– « What Maisie Knew » (1897), a remarkably modern story on a dysfunctional family on the brink of divorce, told from the point of view of a preadolescent girl.
– The Ambassadors (1903), the story of Lambert Strether who goes to Europe in pursuit of his fiancée’s wayward son, told exclusively from the point of view of the main character.
– The Golden Bowl (1904), James’s most ambitious work in terms of point of view and the presentation of his characters’ consciousness.
– In the later part of his career, James also wrote fantastic stories, notably the novella The Turn of the Screw (1898), which inspired the eponymous opera by British composer Benjamin Britten (1954).
James’s stylistic innovations and influence cannot be overstated. He has been revered for the elegant sophistication of his prose, and for his innovative approach to focalisation and point of view, making the consciousness of his characters the central problem in the construction of a majority of his books, and creating subtle layers of irony in his narratives. He is also one of the pioneers of the technique of interior monologue, which modernist masters like Joyce and Woolf later developed into the stream-of-consciousness, a concept which was actually coined by James’s elder brother, William James[1]. James was also a highly influential literary critic – an advocate of realism and a theorist of the novel as an art – and his classic essay The Art of Fiction (1884) and the prefaces of his novels are considered milestones in the history of literary theory.
[1] William James coined the phrase « stream of consciousness » in his groundbreaking treaty The Principles of Psychology (1890), to insist that consciousness “does not appear to itself as chopped up in bits (…) it is nothing joined; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let’s call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life.” The term was subsequently applied in literary scholarship to refer to the techniques used by modernist writers to render subjectivity authentically, the multitudinous, tumultuous, flow and random leaps of thoughts and feelings that pass through people’s mind.
The CONDORCET 