Love, Identity, and Death: James' The Princess Casamassima Reconsidered

It is perhaps unjamesian for a study of a James novel to draw attention to a seemingly self-evident and, by now, a tired modem problem. But at the risk of sounding aphoristic, the significance of the obvious is often slighted in extended analyses because it is supposedly self-explanatory. Thus, despite the continued critical interest that The Princess Casamassima has generated in the last twenty years, what I take to be its central theme—the relation between love and identity—has received curiously abbreviated critical treatment in this important transitional work.1 As a case in point, Lionel Trilling, in what is perhaps the most sensitive essay on the novel in the Fifties, observes in passing that "It is as a child that Hyacinth Robinson dies; that is, he dies of the withdrawal of love."2 The insight is acute, but the major thrust of his essay, hke so many commentaries contemporary with Trilling's, is primarily concerned with the social and political aspects of the novel to the neglect of its central truth. Reduced to its essence, the novel emerges as a study of how love galvanizes Hyacinth's identity into being and how lovdessness destroys it. As a form of thematic counterpoint, James explores the personal desperation of the Princess Casamassima and Lady Aurora, women whose futility and pointlessness lend perspective to the problems of his protagonist. Among recent critics, John L. Kimmey argues convincingly that there "is no more ambiguous [and bewildered] figure in all James," but unconvincingly that Hyacinth is tragic.8 While enlarging our understanding of