Reversed positions : Henry James, realism, and sexual passion

R. Ingelbien

Recent work on James confirms that sexuality is a popular topic with contemporary critics, but the place of sexuality in James has long been one of the most disturbing and contentious aspects of his work. Early comments often insisted on what was perceived to be a damaging flaw in James's fiction. E. M. Forster observed that James's characters were "incapable ...of carnality" and that "their clothes w[ould] not take off'. André Gide's objection was similar: for him, James's characters were "only winged busts; all the weight of the flesh is absent, and all the shaggy, tangled undergrowth, all the wild darkness". Oscar Wilde, much as he liked the perversity of The Turn of the Screw, also feared that James would "never arrive at passion". Biography has always been at hand to explain the absence lamented by Forster, Gide, and Wilde: James's New England Puritan background, personal inhibition, repressed homosexuality, or the nature of his famous "obscure hurt" can all be made to account for a lack of interest in human passions. Those early complaints also recall Charlotte Brontë's attack on Jane Austen, the old maid who looks like aperfect match for James's bachelor: Austen, Brontë wrote, ignored the human heart, "what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of Life": "the Passions areperfectly unknown to her".