Originally Posted by
Jozanny
The best I can reply to this Brian, off the top of my weary head, and despite all my years of studying James, meaning that I am not going to post anything profound or terribly illuminating, is two-fold, or maybe three:
James was a Victorian American expatriate, and as such, would never explicitly say X meant Y; he wanted his audience to infer on their own *why* Millie Theale was dying of something entirely mysterious, or if the intimacy between The Prince and Charlotte was evil, and how, or why Strether would not marry Maria, or how Masie stayed innocent, or if he hints at lesbianism in The Bostonians. In short, James doesn't like to tell the reader much. He hints, and the reader infers according to how deeply or not the reader wants to.
2. He developed what critics call a "super-attenuation of manner" which pushed Victorian sensibility to extremes, and I am not sure, if, toward the end, he might have been going in his own modernist direction, if he had lived a few years longer, much like Joyce and Proust.
3. He was homosexual, and there is a roaring debate among contemporary scholars whether or not he was actively gay (keeping in mind that erotic homosexual sex was a criminal offense in James' lifetime) or repressed out of both the cultural norms of his era and his own fastidiousness. My friend Dr. Sheldon Novick created an uproar among contemporary academics when he suggests that James had an affair with Oliver Wendell Holmes. I take the fifth on the matter, but cannot help chuckling at the thought.:p
3a. But my intent in pointing this out is James may have not been EM Forster, as Forster coded his sexual orientation in his work outside of Maurice, but it does suggest James had a reason to lean toward obfuscation.
4. One of his best achievements was playing tricks on the reader about the reliability of the narrative voice in the work, re: The Turn of the Screw.
I hope this is somewhat insightful.
