In his preface to volume 12 of the New York Edition James explores the attractions and dangers of “improvisation” in one of his notoriously extended metaphors. “Nothing is so easy as improvisation,” he remarks, “the running on and on of invention; it is sadly compromised, however, from the moment its stream breaks bounds and gets into flood” (Art of the Novel 171–72). The metaphor in this iteration bears no gender inflection, but the passage articulates a double-edged attitude toward improvisation that can help us appreciate those instances when James does experiment with gender and sexual improvisation. “To improvise with extreme freedom and yet at the same time without the possibility of ravage, without the hint of a flood,” he cautions himself; “to keep the stream, in a word, on something like ideal terms with itself; that was here my definite business. The thing was to aim at absolute singleness, clearness and roundness, and yet to depend on an imagination working freely, working (call it) with extravagance; by which law it wouldn’t be thinkable except as free and wouldn’t be amusing except as controlled” (172). The tensions between free play and control, the danger that play will exceed control and “flood” or “ravage” the improviser, register obviously enough. James wants to give his imagination free rein, to let it “work” with “extravagance.” Not every reader will construe James’s language in gendered or sexual terms—forging connections between his writerly imagination, so intensely placed on display, and his efforts to construct a male identity as a writer. James credited George Sand with extraordinary powers of “improvisation,” however, and the issues she raised for him as both a writer and a man provide a touchstone for a gendered interpretation of a passage in which he feels his way toward an improvisational power of his own. Whatever the attractions of improvisation—the freedom and extravagance—James emphasizes the need for control. He worries most about being ravaged and flooded—presumably by his own imagination, which bursts its bounds and subjects him to improvisational freedom that threatens his very sense of identity. That fear of ravage, experienced as a loss of self-control, is precisely what Sand portended for James: a gendered and sexual identity, transgendered and transsexualized, improvised past any point of control.
Although James’s fascination with Sand reached a climax during his late period, his interest in her and in questions she raised spanned his career. Those questions appear as early as 1877, with the publication of both his Galaxy magazine article “George Sand” and his novel The American, in which the hero, Christopher Newman, plays a “new man” who rejects a cutthroat business ethos in favor of self-improvement and feminization in France. In Notes of a Son and Brother James fondly recalled that the “sense of the salmon-coloured distinctive of Madame Sand was even to come back to me long years after” (Autobiography 404). While James notes something “very masculine” in Sand’s “genius,” his “final impression of her” is that “she is a woman and a Frenchwoman,” and women, he says, “do not value the truth for its own sake, but only for some personal use they make of it” (“George Sand” 712). He not only establishes binary terms (personal-impersonal) for his evolving aesthetic, but also aligns those terms with gender. Yet, despite her personal use of truth (especially the “truth” of her erotic adventures), Sand was “very masculine.” James was a man who clearly valued truth for its own sake, but since Sand had already appropriated the very masculine for herself as a woman and as a writer, what of the masculine was left for him? By opening up masculinity to women, Sand obviously complicated it for a man such as James, either by suggesting that femininity was similarly open to men or by simply leaving men suspended, like Hugh Merrow, between genders, neither masculine nor feminine. On the one hand, his later essays make clear, James felt that Sand’s example (as the more “masculine” writer) robbed him of his masculinity and even feminized him. On the other hand, Sand forced him to suspend his idea of the masculine: to disassociate “masculine” from “male” and thus from himself—in other words, to interrogate a monolithic masculinity and to accept the possibility of a plurality of masculinities from which he might continually improvise his own. Writing with “all one’s manhood” at “one’s side” becomes a double-edged sword for James—suggesting a splitting of manhood from James’s writing self that enables improvisational freedom from conventional gender constructs but also the possibility of ending up in a no man’s land of no manly identity at all.
Feminist criticism of the 1970s and 1980s found James an ambiguous figure, partly because so many of his fictions feature female protagonists whose stories seem rendered from their own points of view. James’s attitude toward those characters, of course, could be and was construed negatively, as well as positively. Nan Bauer Maglin scored James for the “disgust and mockery” he felt toward “independent women, the women’s movement, and women in general” (219). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar held him up as one of many “embattled” turn-of-the-century males who “struck out against the women whom they saw as both the sources and the witnesses of their emasculation” (36).1 In contrast, Judith Fetterley praised him for his “ability to place himself on the side of women and in line with their point of view” (116), and John Carlos Rowe cited his “uncanny ability to represent the complex psychologies of women” (Theoretical 90). Joyce W. Warren congratulated him for his “detachment” from American “individualism” and credited him with an ability to create women who are “real persons” (244). Elizabeth Allen added that James’s women are not simply “signs for an observant consciousness,” but subjects “mystifying and controlling the signifying process” (10). Carren Kaston even wrote to “reclaim James from currently hostile feminist criticism,” praising him for his “profound sensitivity to what it was and very often still is like to be a woman” (40).
When biographers and critics turned to questions about James’s own gender and sexuality, however, they usually found him lacking. Leon Edel concluded that he suffered from a confused, weak masculinity and “troubled sexuality” (Henry James 87). Richard Hall termed him the “golden capon of world literature” and an “old-fashioned masturbating Victorian gentleman who led a narcissistic sexual life” (49, 51). Georges-Michel Sarotte called him “passive and feminine,” a “prototypical ‘sissy’” (198), while Alfred Habegger considered him a “boy who could not become a man” (Gender 256). William Veeder even situated James in an unusual position in a “bizarre version of Freud’s family romance” as a feminine orphan (“Feminine Orphan” 20).2 Perhaps it need no longer be pointed out the implicit biases of these accounts—in favor of a very limited notion of manhood and masculinity that, to be sure, these critics share with many people in the nineteenth century. That limited definition, for example, precludes being both a sissy and a man or, more complexly, experimenting with the many configurations or constructs of manhood that recent men’s studies scholars have noted. That is not to say that Henry James found his way easily to nontraditional constructions of gender and sexuality. In fact, James’s characterization of himself in gendered terms often warrants such critical disparagement—at least as he constructs, or reconstructs, himself in his autobiographical writings. James plays the weak younger brother, particularly in relation to William, and he emphasizes his failure to measure up to his father’s ideals of manhood and achievement. “I never dreamed of competing—a business having in it at the best, for my temper, if not for my total failure of temper, a displeasing ferocity” (Autobiography 101). Recalling William’s attempts to state the case for an artistic career, James recalls that the “‘career of art’ has again and again been deprecated and denounced, on the lips of anxiety or authority, as a departure from the career of business, of industry and respectability, the so-called regular life” (268). Even though William seems an early ally, however, James compares himself invidiously to his brother. Had William pursued a “career of art,” he implies, he would have done so in a manlier fashion. “‘I play with boys who curse and swear!’” he famously recalls his brother as bragging. “I had sadly to recognize that I didn’t,” James himself confesses, “that I couldn’t pretend to have come