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Hydraulics and Heroics: William James and Stephen Crane

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

William Wasserstrom
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Extract

Unquestioning faith in an equilibrium of stasis: it is this flaw of temperament, this European fault of social and moral intelligence that separates European women from their American counterparts in nineteenth-century literature. Particularly in Henry James's fiction women of distinctively New World bearing, young women bred to combine stamina with delicacy of spirit, stubbornness with flexibility, reared to disavow perfectly held balances in favor of riskier angles of poise—James's exemplary women conduct their lives along lines of equilibrium more flowing than European, less stiff by far, lines and angles that parallel the mode and style and history of the society they embody, a society shaped at hazard and given to gamble. It is indeed in his masterwork, The Golden Bowl, a fatidic text anticipating which myth of order would shape American high style during the industrial age, that James devised a program intended to discredit stasis and extol movement without forswearing form. In descent as well as dissent from a Swedenborgian father, both Henry James and his brother William endorsed a creed of “vital equilibrium.” And this American ideology presupposed the existence or cultivation of a self galvanized by “balance/imbalance,” a dynamics of tension which provides a constant feature of motive in our classic literature.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 4 , October 1979 , pp. 215 - 235
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

NOTES

1. James, Henry, The Golden Bowl (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1904), pp. 477–78.Google Scholar

2. The James Family, ed. Matthiessen, F. O. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), p. 106.Google Scholar

3. The Letters of Henry James, ed. Lubbock, Percy (2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920), II, p. 43.Google Scholar

4. Russett, Cynthia Eagle, The Concept of Equilibrium in American Social Thought (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), p. 19Google Scholar. Relying mainly on Russett's account, Martin Green—in his splendid and strange book on D. H. Lawrence and Max Weber—mistakenly, to my mind, presents a Germanic, Weberesque setting for, and stimulus to, the sociology of dynamic equilibrium in America. Green's analysis does accurately associate the doctrine of homeostasis with a politics of conservatism, with a view of order that does not welcome destabilizing change. See Green, 's The Von Richthofen Sisters (New York: Basic Books, 1975), pp. 322–23.Google Scholar

5. Russett, , Concept of Equilibrium, pp. 43–54 passim.Google Scholar

6. Cannon, Walter B., The Wisdom of the Body (New York: W. W. Norton, 1939; 1963), p. 323Google Scholar. “It seems not impossible that the means employed by the more highly evolved animals … for preserving homeostasis may present some general principles for the establishment, regulation and control of steady states that would be suggestive … even [for] social and industrial” organizations. Ibid., pp. 24–25.

7. Buckley, Walter, Sociology and Modern Systems Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), pp. 10–15 passimGoogle Scholar. Buckley mentions some additional proponents of theory but refers chiefly to those invoked by Russett and Green, that is, Henderson, Cannon, Talcott Parsons, and more recent others.

8. James, William, On Vital Reserves (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), pp. 5–6.Google Scholar

9. Noyes, John Humphrey, History of American Socialisms (New York: Hilary House, 1961). pp. 628–35 passim.Google Scholar

10. Matthiessen, , ed., “Socialism and Civilization,” The James Family, p. 53.Google Scholar

11. James, , On Vital Reserves, p. 8Google Scholar. What we need, James observed in anticipation of the thesis of his later essay on a moral equivalent for war, is a study of “the different ways in which [human] energy-reserves may be appealed to and set loose.” Ibid., p. 39.

12. Santayana, George, Character and Opinion in the United States (London: Constable, 1924), pp. 82–83.Google Scholar

13. Crane, Stephen, The Red Badge of Courage and Other Writings, ed. Chase, Richard (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. xv.Google Scholar

14. Ziff, Larzer, The American 1890s (New York: Viking Press, 1966), p. 198.Google Scholar

15. Solomon, Eric, Stephen Crane in England (Columbus: Ohio Univ. Press, 1964).Google Scholar

16. Linson, Corwin K., My Stephen Crane (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1958), p. 43.Google Scholar

17. Stephen Crane: Letters, ed. Stallman, Robert W. and Gilkes, Lillian (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1960), p. 105.Google Scholar

18. Quoted in Cady, E. H., Stephen Crane (New York: Twayne, 1962), p. 91.Google Scholar

19. Fitzgerald, F. Scott, This Side of Paradise (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920), p. 282.Google Scholar

20. Quoted in Hale, Nathan F. Jr., Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876–1917 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), p. 110Google Scholar. Despite the archaism of James's diction there is apparently long-lived power in his thought; for it has enough vitality to warrant more than ornamental use by Saul Bellow in Humboldfs Gift. To be “a thriving energy system,” Citrine (Bellow's persona) says, “was part of my American training.” And it is this training and system, adds Von Humboldt Fleisher (Delmore Schwartz's impersonator), that “by a damn peculiar arrangement” are especially pronounced in lunatics who “always have energy to burn. And if old William James was right, and happiness is living at the energetic top and we are here to pursue happiness, then madness is pure bliss and also has political sanction.” Humboldt's Gift (New York: Viking Press, 1975), pp. 395, 327.Google Scholar

21. “Stephen Crane at Syracuse University,” in Stephen Crane's Love Letters to Nellie Crouse, ed. Cady, E. H. and Wells, L. G. (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1954), p. 65.Google Scholar

22. “Just like the great classics of literature, The Red Badge of Courage speaks of different things to different minds. However, only an oversimplified interpretation could see in Henry's final charge the proof that he has become as he himself thinks, ‘a man.’” Cazemajou, Jean, Stephen Crane (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1969), p. 19.Google Scholar

23. Quoted in Solomon, , Stephen Crane in England, p. 41.Google Scholar

24. Matthiessen, , ed., “The Moral Equivalent of War,” The James Family, pp. 636–46.Google Scholar

25. Not only was Futurist theory “committed totally to the notion of the machine as the material basis of modern industrial life,” but, startlingly, Futurists in the early 1920s proclaimed themselves given to hope that “man would become like the machine, not the machine like man.” Cohen, Ronny H., “Italian Futurist Typography,” The Print Collector's Newsletter, 8 (01–02, 1978), p. 168Google Scholar. See also Cohen, Arthur A., “Marinetti and Futurism,”Google Scholaribid., pp. 170–72.