When Hugh Merrow asks what will “light” his steps in choosing the gender of his subject, Mrs. Archdean suggests that his interest in the “artistic question itself’ will determine his decision (Complete Notebooks 595). Although we cannot know how James might have resolved Merrow’s dilemma, The Ambassadors and his essays on Sand all show him allowing his imagination to be “lighted”—bifocally at least—in the masculine. Not that Merrow would simply have painted a boy, for the essays and the novel make clear that being masculine and being male are not always easily compatible. When Merrow tells Captain Archdean that Mrs. Archdean “dreams of a little girl in your likeness, while you dream of a little boy in hers,” the Captain advises him to paint a figure resembling them both (Complete Notebooks 595–96). But Merrow is skeptical about this possibility. Feminizing the male or masculinizing the female in an androgynous union—all three options seem dubious solutions to James’s problems with Sand.
Even more than “Hugh Merrow” and The Ambassadors, James’s essays on Sand not only open but hold open questions about gender and sexuality. Most important, they show James interrogating the notion that a male artist’s gender simply engenders his writing. They suggest, rather, that the artist constructs a gendered and sexual identity in the act of engendering the work of art—indeed, that he knows his own gendered and sexual self only in retrospect, by reading or viewing what he has created. But if gender, and particularly masculinity, is that fluid—something to be read, or “swallowed”—then the artist will always be in a state of suspense about himself. Merrow’s anxiety about “having too free a hand” thus mirrors James’s anxiety about what it means to “swallow” a writer like Sand and thereby have her “pass into” his life. Swallowing Sand, a masculine female writer, suggests a complex—inverted—homoerotic identification. That is, the inverted gender identity that Sand seems to embody for James forces a vexed desire and sexual identification upon the desiring subject and writer—James himself—who would have to swallow a writerly power he identified simultaneously as masculine and female, heterosexual and homosexual.
The Ambassadors and the essays on Sand show James reconstructing a masculine identity by putting women in their places within a newly expanded masculinity. As he reads and writes about Sand, James offers himself up as a blank space on which Sand inscribes herself, but in the process of inscription Sand also subjects herself to revision. In a similar fashion, the self that his encounter with Sand constitutes for James also becomes subject to revision, most significantly through the incorporation—a transcription—of a superior male authority. In this complex rhetorical staging of gender complications, Sand and the Jamesian self she recreates are written over like a palimpsest by Balzac, a bachelor type complete in himself and able to play male and female roles. James does not simply identify with Balzac, however, and thereby disinvest himself in Sand; rather, he finds himself suspended between the possibilities represented by these two precursors—in the masculine, to be sure, but masculine in the plural term.
James’s explorations of what it means to be masculine “in the plural term” and to write with all one’s manhood at one’s side result, I think, in a state of suspense in which male identity, configured in terms of gender and sexuality, remains fluid. “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere,” James wrote in the preface to Roderick Hudson, “and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so” (Art of the Novel 5). This book examines James’s effort to keep male gender and sexuality in such a state of suspense, even as he experiments with various “geometries” of relationship that “appear” to stabilize them. Chapter 1 examines Roderick Hudson as an early experiment in exploring multiple male identities in a context of relations that “stop nowhere”—or at least offer sufficient variety to compel various male identifications. Setting up a rectangle of character relations (Rowland Mallet, Roderick Hudson, Christina Light, Mary Garland), James distributes desire along each axis, reflexively constructing multiple male identities. Brook Thomas argues that for James “no essential self exists outside of exchanges, and yet precisely for that reason all exchanges are interpersonal and thus affect the very nature of the self. This is because … a self cannot achieve definition without a ‘space between’ that only interpersonal relations can provide, while, at the same time, interpersonal relations are impossible without an emptiness within the self, an emptiness making one vulnerable to penetrations—and dominations—by another” (736). In the Mallet-Hudson relationship James employs his protégé theme to test the power of homoerotic desire to reconstruct a male self. That man-making process is complicated by the presence of female characters, especially Christina Light, who engender other, heterosexual, male selves.
Chapter 2 examines The American as an experiment in constructing a new manhood by reconstructing a particular male character type, the self-made businessman Christopher Newman. Newman might seem one of the least likely candidates in James’s fiction for such a reconstruction project, but I think James is bent on both satirizing such a self-made man and genuinely exploring the possibilities for alternative manhood that such a character affords. Turning to Gilbert Osmond (The Portrait of a Lady) in Chapter 3, I examine one of James’s subtlest portraits of a gentleman—the flip side, so to speak, of Christopher Newman. In fact, James pointedly characterizes Osmond by virtue of what he is not, and on the face of it Osmond seems most not like Newman—a kind of anti-Newman, or “newer new man.” Chapter 4 focuses on The Bostonians and James’s unreconstructed southerner, Basil Ransom. With glances at cross-dressing in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots, as well as in northern caricatures of the captured Jefferson Davis in drag, this chapter argues that James repeatedly subverts Ransom’s masculinist reconstruction project by blurring the boundaries between racial and gender identities and between heterosexual and homosexual desires. Each power position that Ransom imagines reverses upon itself, implicating him in heterosexual and homosexual economies of exchange and subjecting him to socially constructed feminine as well as masculine identifications that often carry racial implications.
In Dandies and Desert Saints James Eli Adams characterizes masculinity as a “rhetorical transaction” (11) and speaks of male “rhetorical self-fashioning” (15). By positing a transactional model of masculine construction, Adams adds an important dimension to any discussion of literary representations of gender issues. James, too, recognizes the importance of rhetorical situations—the way that subject-object relations configure and reconfigure male subjectivity, which subjects itself as it were to interpretation, to being read through the desire of another subject. In chapter 5 I discuss four of James’s stories about writers and artists (“The Author of Beltraffio,” “The Lesson of the Master,” “The Middle Years,” and “The Death of the Lion”) and his deployment of what I call “homo-aesthetic” desire in acts of writing and reading between men. Homoerotic desire emerges in these stories as the product of intersubjective transactions—as a function of a male reader response. In Eric Savoy’s terms, male writing “cruises” its male readers, whose erotic responses to these “homotexts” establish temporary, homo-aesthetic relationships to the writers themselves (“Hypocrite Lecteur” 20). Through the medium of writing, in other words, James ascribes a homoerotically charged male subjectivity to the writer-reader transaction. As he does in the novels, James mediates these male-male relationships by dispersing male desire among several gendered objects and thereby diversifies the male subjectivity that different object choices reflect.
Scholars such as David McWhirter and Hugh Stevens have discovered an underlying masochism in James’s writing, and in the final chapter I examine Prince Amerigo in The Golden Bowl and the sadomasochistic economy of relations