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The Body Politic:

Clothing, Subtext, and Sexual Perversion in Henry James

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Fetishism and Obscured Sexuality

Decadence found its expression in Art Nuevo, which arose in the 1880s and remained vital until the outbreak of the Great War. The movement’s obsession with intricate detail and curving, undulating lines, its reference to eastern, middle-eastern, and Celtic arts and crafts, coupled with its choice of often natural, primarily marine subject matter and coloring, and its artists’ credo that one should create “total works of art”, attracted personalities such as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Many of these artists lived unconventional lifestyles, a good number of whom practiced non-normative sexualities. Artists of Art Nuevo did not paint the picturesque, nor did they try to capture the cold fast mechanization of industrialization. The subject matter of the movement shifted the focus to the fluid, the female, the oriental, the other. It is evident within Henry James’ writings, from his first published novel, Roderick Hudson, in 1875, until his death in 1916, that he was acutely aware of this condition of being “othered” and orientalize, aware of who was giving and who receiving the gaze. From the titles he has chosen for many of his novels, to the attention to, and use of clothing descriptions as well as his preoccupation with fingers, hands, gloves, canes, and fans in his intricate weaving of narrative art, his sympathies and greatest attentions are with the “othered”, with the subjects of the portrait, not its observers, with women and men who work against their prescribed and popular societal and gender roles.

To accuse James of being either a closeted homosexual or covert women’s suffragist might be as enlightened as rooting through his metaphorical underwear drawer, but to identify him as being related to, yet apart from a widespread contemporary art movement—after all, he had been trained as an art critic—helps to refocus the reader’s gaze upon James’ work as well as re-contextualizing his characters while they work against popular portrayals of gender delineations and limitations.

Ignoring, for a moment, what might be the social implications of Henry James’ remarkable visual vantage point, he had been trained as an art critic, and had a certain eye for detail, color, and composition. At the same time, he must have been ever-increasingly aware he was looking into a work from the outside, observing a scene he could not enter. He was observing, digesting, and analyzing the paintings, without being able to create such tactile works himself. As a white Christian male of age and some resources, he had a particular access which he continually denied many of his protagonists. James could observe nude paintings without scandal, stroll alone down the streets of Paris, visit the Colosseum at night. And still, in his observations of art and his writings of criticism, travel, and works of fiction, James stations himself as the outsider looking in. This is the way he stations the reader, who is to taken on his novels (even before opening a book, his titles are “othering”: The Portrait of a Lady, The American, The Bostonians, Daisy Miller: A Study), and this is where he places his protagonists, as outsiders, with limited access, awareness, comprehension.

By shifting focus from the painting to frame, from object to viewer, he is, in a sense, perverting gaze. Though James expressed a distaste for the projects of some of his contemporaries, works which represented “perversion” openly and sensationally, his texts, not overtly sexual, use an intricate and curvilinear prose style to displace and frustrate sexuality. Some critics of his time had picked up on these undertones. A contemporary, writing for the Independent, had blasted Turn of the Screw as “a study of infernal human debauchery”. The anonymous critic goes on to say that:

“The study . . . affects the reader with a disgust that is not to be expressed. The feeling after perusal of the horrible story is that one has been assisting in an outrage upon . . . human innocence, and helping to debauch—at least by standing by helplessly—the pure and trusting nature of children. Human imagination can go no further into infamy, literary art could not be used with more refined subtlety of spiritual defilement (Moon, 149, italics mine).

This critic is responding, in part, to what I’d like to call James’s penetralia, which I will define as the subtext—not readily apparent on more superficial readings—composed of a language which has been emeshed (purposefully, I believe) within the metatext to reveal the deepest, most secreted regions of the life—yes, of the characters—but also of the author.

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