Balzac’s characterization of Sand in an 1838 letter, James maintains, “lets into the whole question of his hostess’s character and relations … air and light and truth; it fixes points and re-establishes proportions” (“George Sand: The New Life” 772). Self-styled as Balzac’s “grateful critic,” James says that Balzac “comes nearest straightening the question” of Sand in his observation that she “has in character all the leading marks of the man and as few as possible those of his counterpart.” Indeed, she “hangs together perfectly if judged as a man.” She is a man, Balzac says, because “she wants to be … she has sunk the woman … she isn’t one. Women attract, and she repels; and, as I am much of a man, if this is the effect she produces on me she must produce it on men who are like me—so that she will always be unhappy” (“George Sand: The New Life” 772). Not only does James rely on Balzac’s authority, he relies on Balzac’s experience and even on Balzac’s subjective estimate of Sand’s gender identity. Women attract Balzac, Sand repels him (anomalously, given the number of her male lovers). Since Balzac is “much of a man” and repelled by Sand, Sand must also be a man and thus destined to be unhappy because unattractive to Balzac and to men like him. The self-serving “logic” of Balzac’s syllogism is obvious enough to require no explanation, but where does this remarkable passage leave James? Is he, like Balzac, “much of a man”? That means being repelled by Sand, since Balzac elides the issue of feeling desire for another man—even a female “man” such as Sand. If he is not repelled by her (his essays, indeed, attest his attraction to her), what does that make James? A woman? A man given to unions “against nature,” as he had characterized Sand’s union with Alfred de Musset (“She and He” 748)? Here, in what James might call the “final nutshell,” is the suspense of gender with a bit of a vengeance. In this context—in the context of desire and its distribution across ambiguous gender identities—what kind of man can James be?
With the “distinctive” hanging thus in suspense, James moves quickly in the final pages of the 1902 essay to clarify the question that Sand poses. He admits, in fact, that the “copious” data in Karénine’s biography “makes Madame Sand so much of a riddle that we grasp at Balzac’s authoritative word as at an approach to a solution.” And it is, “strange to say, by reading another complexity into her image that we finally simplify it” (Review of George Sand 773). This riddle, he says, “consists in the irreconcilability of her distinction and her vulgarity. Vulgar somehow in spite of everything is the record of so much taking and tasting and leaving, so much publicity and palpability of ‘heart,’ so much experience reduced only to the terms of so many more or less greasy males” (773). By invoking Balzac’s “authoritative word” to solve the “riddle” of what he would later call Sand’s “annexation” of male identity, James was invoking a special kind of masculine muse—a phallic, male masculinity to diminish Sand’s female masculinity. Whereas James repeatedly praises Sand’s writing for its fluidity, looseness, and improvisation, Balzac’s is “always extraordinarily firm and hard,” possessing a “metallic rigidity” (“Honoré de Balzac” [1875] 38).18 Balzac has the power of “penetrating into a subject”; he is “always astride of his imagination, always charging, with his heavy, his heroic lance in rest” (“Lesson of Balzac” 127, 123). Even more than Sand, Balzac serves James as an omni-masculine figure who also possesses the improvisational power to be a man in the plural term. Balzac has the rare ability to get “into the very skin of his jeunes mariées.” Balzac “bears children with Madame de l’Estorade, and knows intimately how she suffers for them, and not less intimately how her correspondent suffers, as well as enjoys, without them.” Besides being both mother and father, Balzac also plays the son. Besides “penetrating” subjects and sitting “astride” his imagination, phallocentrically empowered in hyperbolic terms, Balzac can play other male roles. “Big as he is he makes himself small to be handled by her [Madame de l’Estorade] with young maternal passion and positively to handle her in turn with infantile innocence.” Such multiple male role-playing comprises “the very flourishes,” James concludes, “the little technical amusements of [Balzac’s] penetrating power” (“Honoré de Balzac, 1902” 114). Conceiving male authority in obvious phallogocentric terms, James posits a versatile, performative phallus—big or small depending upon the role the writer is called upon to play.
Yet, however deeply Balzac could penetrate the very skin of women, neither he nor his art depended on them. Unlike Sand, who converted transgendered heterosexual experience into art, James’s Balzac sounds remarkably like James himself in substituting art for experience. He was “always fencing himself in against the personal adventure, the personal experience,” James remarks, “in order to preserve himself for converting it into history” (“Lesson of Balzac” 124). While James regards Balzac as both an omni-masculine ideal who exercised a “lusty energy of fancy” (“Honoré de Balzac” [1875] 53) and a man whose art did not require “personal adventures” with women, he attributes Balzac’s special authority to a knowledge of women. Writing in 1875, James observes that Balzac “is supposed to have understood the feminine organism as no one had done before him—to have had the feminine heart, the feminine temperament, feminine nerves, at his fingers’ ends—to have turned the feminine puppet, as it were, completely inside out” (“Honoré de Balzac” 61). Even though James could admit in 1902 that Sand’s great service to women is that her “approximation” of a man was at least to the “extraordinary” (“George Sand: The New Life” 775), Balzac’s masculine authority clearly offered James an alternative to Sand and thus a way of killing the suspense into which she had cast his own gender identification. Balzac was able to keep the “feminine organism” at his “fingers’ ends”—just across the line that might have portended transgendering—but still understand women from the inside out. Whereas Sand figures as the precursor of the increasingly masculine women James saw around him in the early twentieth century, as early as 1875 he observes that Balzac did “not take that view of the sex that would commend him to the ‘female sympathizers’ of the day. There is not a line in him that would not be received with hisses at any convention for giving women the suffrage, for introducing them into Harvard College, or for trimming the exuberances of their apparel” (“Honoré de Balzac” 61). Balzac, in other words, provides James with an authorial ideal even more masculine than Sand’s.
Much like Basil Ransom in The Bostonians or earlier characters such as George Fenton in Watch and Ward, Christopher Newman in The American, and Caspar Goodwood in The Portrait of a Lady, James’s Balzac “takes the old-fashioned view” and “recognizes none but the old-fashioned categories. Woman is the female of man and in all respects his subordinate” (“Honoré de Balzac” [1875] 61). Suspended between Balzac and Sand and thus between male and female masculinity, much as Verena Tarrant is suspended between Ransom and Olive Chancellor, James remasculinizes himself by invoking Balzac’s authoritative word and transmuting Sand not into a feminine woman but into a repellent female man. Whereas Sand’s masculinity originally threatens James’s, drawing it toward the feminine type, James finally creates a “new-fashioned” category—a homophobically constructed category of female manhood—to solve the riddle Sand poses for him. That is, James seems finally to project upon Sand the gendered and sexual qualities with which he did not want to identify Even though Sand’s ability to eat her cake and have it at the same time—to exercise her sexuality and “use” it in her writing—align her with the masculine position, she performs the masculine with men who, like Musset, are less than “real” men.19 Swallowing Sand, then, forces James not only to interrogate his own masculinity but to improvise a new double-gendered masculinity that could accommodate both Sand and himself. Then, by establishing Sand as a female man, James can feel more comfortable with his own identity, confident that masculinity can accommodate both female and male men: Sand and Balzac—and, of course, Henry James, who positively bristles between the two as a man in the plural term.
Laurence