The double-stranded love plot, or hetero-text, that James creates necessarily complicates the more important male-to-male relationship—in effect, covering or repressing the homosocial and homoerotic subtext of the novel. Mallet’s desire for and efforts to identify with another male are blocked by Roderick’s relationship with two women, both of whom Rowland himself at least in some sense desires. Put another way, Mallet faces the challenge of reconciling his idealized image of the artist with the distressing image of the artist-with-a-woman, while his own relationship to the male artist figure is doubly mediated. Although Sofer argues that Roderick Hudson displays “profound pessimism about heterosexuality”—indeed, that “heterosexual obsession” in the novel “has the power to destroy men’s lives” (186)—I think the four-sided configuration of characters enables James to experiment with several alternative relationships and their implications for male identity, even as the relationship between a male center of consciousness and a “doubled” love object comprised of male artist and female subject remains at the center of his attention. My goal, therefore, is to examine James’s two male characters and the interplay and negotiation between homosocial and homosexual, heterosocial and heterosexual discourses, out of which their male identities are constructed.
In moving his two male characters from Northampton to Rome—from the “centre of Christendom” to the “mere margin,” as Mrs. Hudson suggestively puts it—James paradoxically can center his attention more intensively on alternative relationships between and among his major characters. I “approve of a certain tension of one’s being,” Rowland tells his cousin Cecilia. “It’s what a man is meant for” (1: 50). And that tension inheres for Rowland, it seems to me, in the dispersion of desire along various lines of gender and sexuality. By situating his male center of consciousness within a complex configuration of relationships, furthermore, James explores several potential male identities and roles. With Mary Garland, for example, Rowland feels encouraged to be the sort of “soft,” genteel male—an “athlete of continence” (Rosenberg 139)—stereotyped by social historians as the Christian Gentleman. Christina Light in contrast demands a more aggressive male type—a “big” man of the sort James would create in Christopher Newman, Caspar Goodwood, and Basil Ransom. None of those characters is simply reducible to type, but each of them does outwardly conform in many ways to the instrumental Masculine Achiever. Rowland’s relationship with Roderick, on the other hand, promises a more comprehensive type of masculinity—the sort of intimate brotherhood, or comradeship, that Melville illustrated in the Ishmael-Queequeg marriage and Whitman described in Leaves of Grass. Liberated from a competitive, dominant-submissive posture, such relationships can be founded on principles of mutual benevolence and the breakdown of hard ego boundaries.
Early reviewers of Roderick Hudson found neither Rowland Mallet nor Roderick Hudson particularly good examples of manhood. Roderick lacks “true manliness,” one reviewer complained (Hayes 5), while Rowland “fails to produce an impression of vital individuality.” He remains “almost a lay figure, a stiff model of oppressive excellence and wisdom, always saying and doing exactly the right thing at the right time,” and, as noted above, might even be regarded as a “male Mary Garland” (Hayes 6, 7). Another reviewer, terming Rowland a “fairy godmother” to Roderick (Hayes 9), considers Roderick himself a “weakling” and labels his conduct “unmanly and unbearable.” “He was not meant for a finished product,” that reviewer concludes. “Only a butterfly existence could suit such a character” (Hayes 10). Such snide remarks derive, I think, from the reviewers’ unease with the relationship between Rowland and Roderick—their intuition that gender and sexuality are linked for men. Gender identity—manliness or virility—depends upon heterocentric identification. What we would now call homosexual identification portends gender inversion. Thus, another reviewer, noting the “anomalous relation of these two young men,” recognized somewhat euphemistically that they were “sometimes comrades on the footing of good fellowship” and, with considerable relief, “sometimes separated into a modest and most conscientious and responsible patron, and a ward now wholly self-surrendering and endearing” (Hayes 14)—in other words purified of any whiff of “good fellowship.” The reviewer who complained that Roderick lacked “true manliness” also noted the “perplexing little triangular arrangement of personages” in the novel (Hayes 4) and explained Roderick’s lack by his inability to inspire sufficient desire in Christina Light. “The virile force to which her feminine nature longs to render due submission,” this reviewer reasoned, “she does not find in his brilliant but unstable, untrustworthy nature” (Hayes 5). From our perspective, of course, the idea of an “unstable, untrustworthy nature” reigsters more positively than negatively—suggesting the liberation of individual identity from prescribed gender and sexual roles and opening up the possibility of “brilliant” alternative performances. I would not argue that James and his readers easily found their way to such a reading, but I do think James was working toward alternative configurations of male gender and sexual identity—that he deliberately and experimentally wanted to create “unstable” male characters that destabilized conventional male roles and identities.
Twentieth-century critics have tended to discuss the male characters in Roderick Hudson by opposing Roderick and Rowland in order to identify unresolved conflicts either in James’s own male identity or in his conception of male character. Leon Edel suggested, for example, that James had “abstracted the incandescence of his genius and placed beside it his decorous, cautious, restrained self, or his mother’s warnings beside his own desires” (170).2 More usefully for my purposes, several critics break free of such binary approaches and seem to recognize the inherent instability in the complex relationships James configured. As Oscar Cargill puts it, relationships in Roderick Hudson result in “Christina’s vague yearning for Rowland, who yearns for Mary, who will not have him but is passionately devoted to Roderick, who, ultimately bored by her, burns for a casually responsive Christina” (26). Ronald Emerick expands the range further by analyzing Christina’s love for Rowland: “To ‘Rowland loves Mary Garland loves Roderick loves Christina’ must be added ‘loves Rowland’ to complete the rectangle of romantic relationships” (353). And Robert K. Martin has added “Rowland loves Roderick” and read the novel as “the story of a man who fell in love with a handsome young artist, adopted him as his protégé and took him to Italy” (“‘High Felicity’” 101).3
Martin makes what now seems an obvious case for the homoerotic dimension of Rowland’s attraction to Roderick, for there is little question that Roderick and Rowland excite one another. Roderick’s “face flushed,” and he “stammered,” “panted,” and got “greatly excited” when Rowland offers to take him to Rome. His arm trembles in his benefactor’s (1: 34, 35). When Rowland admires Roderick’s work in his studio, the “light of admiration was in Rowland’s eyes, and it caused the young man’s handsome watching face to shine out in response” (1: 37). Hugh Stevens also argues that the novel “makes homoerotic affection more than a casual aspect of Rowland Mallet’s character. In its foregrounding of questions of legal status, and its exploration of Rowland’s melancholic resignation, the novel specifically explores the cost of relinquishing same-sex attraction” (67). Indeed, Stevens sees Roderick Hudson as inaugurating the tragic homosexual paradigm in James’s fiction, arguing that the novel portrays a “‘masochistic economy,’ an economy in which desire is never gratified and always punished, but in which a certain pleasure derives from that very punishment” (83).
“Outing” Rowland Mallet, however, represents only a necessary first step in exploring James’s construction of male identities in the novel. Roderick Hudson does not simply reflect the closeting or frustration of male desire but the distribution of desire within a vexing economy of male-male and male-female relationships. The mutually creative, as well as conflicted, nature of the male-to-male bond becomes complexly entangled with male-female relationships. As Stevens puts it, the “radical masochistic economy of Roderick Hudson derives from complex and multiple movements of ungratified desire and unstable identifications. For Rowland’s desire for Roderick, and Roderick’s desire for Christina, comes full circle (or full triangle) in Christina’s desire for Rowland” (80). Before sexology and legal definitions