"Who Could say now with What Passion?": Reimagining Henry James and "The Beast in the Jungle"

Abstract

"Who Could say now with What Passion?"Reimagining Henry James and "The Beast in the Jungle" Christopher Stuart In her widely influential book Epistemology of the Closet (1990) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick imagines Henry James as a thoroughly repressed, self-blind Edwardian bachelor whose unconscious efforts to disguise his homosexual desires are precisely what reveal them in his fiction, at least to the contemporary reader willing to look beyond the dominant culture's pervasive homophobia. Examining one of James's best-known stories, "The Beast in the Jungle" (1903), Sedgwick discovers a meaningful pattern of "perephrasis and preterition" necessitated, she claims, by an Edwardian culture so universally and suffocatingly homophobic as to render same-sex desire "Unspeakable."1 Where most earlier interpreters accepted the story's ending as sincere––John Marcher collapsing in despair over his discovery that he should have loved May Bartram––Sedgwick interprets the final paragraphs' emphatic rhetoric as the starkest example of James's capitulation to compulsory heterosexuality. This interpretation has gained such wide acceptance that, as Michael Anesko recently put it, the story has come to seem "a virtual parable about closeted queer identity."2 Of course, Sedgwick's work did much more to redirect the current of James studies than merely establish a new standard reading of a single canonical story. Her deconstructive method for revealing taboo desires within the gaps and ellipses of James's works unleashed a torrent of critical reevaluation, ensuring that James studies would never again be contained within the conventional channels carved out by mid-20th-century scholars. As readers of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi (1883) know, however, such powerful streams are unpredictable and treacherous creatures. They erode and reshape their own banks, hide deadly snags, and, in the case of tidal bores, they can even reverse course suddenly and flow upstream. This last is something like what has happened with Sedgwick's account of James and the "The [End Page 827] Beast in the Jungle." Although her argument relied upon little biographical evidence beyond the broad assertion that James "made erotic choices that were complicated enough" to make him "an emboldening figure for a literary discussion of male homosexual panic," the critical outpouring her thesis unleashed developed a natural tributary of biographical investigation exploring the precise nature of James's relationships with other men.3 The work of James biographers like Paul Fisher and Michael Gorra, and especially the continued archival investigations of Anesko, have provided James scholars with a more detailed and nuanced picture of James and his queer milieu at the turn of the century. The portrait that emerges from their work points back to what Leon Edel already more than implied in his revised 1985 biography, which is that by the time James composed "The Beast in the Jungle" in the autumn of 1902 he was likely conscious of his homosexual leanings and was well on his way to establishing a place for himself within a network of queer men. This network included some who lived openly with their partners and others whose queerness was no secret to anyone who knew them as James did. It was in these years, too, that James pursued a largely unrequited relationship with Hendrik C. Andersen, an American sculptor thirty years his junior and similarly ambiguous in his sexual orientation. Although their relationship appears not to have been actively sexual, the epistolary evidence indicates that it was nonetheless romantic and passionate, especially for James. For those interpreters who accepted Sedgwick's thesis, James's entire oeuvre was transformed at a stroke into a vast unharvested textual field awaiting queer decoding. The portrait of a more sexually self-aware James emerging in recent scholarship likewise promises to provide new interpretive fields in the later work. Harvesting it, however, will require more selectivity and more careful historical and biographical research, for while any James work might be claimed as the product of his subconscious mind, to suggest that he consciously represented aspects of his homoromantic attachments in a story or novel requires the establishment of a plausible link between the fiction and the biographical record. There is good reason, however, for thinking that such investigations will bear fruit. As...