The Literature Network - Watch and Ward: James's fantasy of Omnipotence. (Henry James)

Watch and Ward: James's fantasy of Omnipotence. (Henry James)

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From: Style
Date: 19950922
Author:Nelson, Michelle D.

In James's first novel, Watch and Ward (1871), the protagonist Roger Lawrence, whose recent marriage proposal to Miss Morton has just been rejected, meets and adopts an orphan, Nora Lambert, and raises her with the hopes of making her his ideal wife. James seems unaware of the sexual displacement he sets up in his plot. While Leon Edel, in his introduction to the 1959 Grove Press edition, notes James's apparent obliviousness to the text's eroticism, he views both the obliviousness and the eroticism as "harmless": "Watch and Ward contains a peculiar sexuality of its own. I refer to ...

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