Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Henry James and the languages of sex
- 2 Gender and representation in The Wings of the Dove
- 3 Sexuality and the aesthetic in The Golden Bowl
- 4 The eroticism of prohibition: masochism and the law in Roderick Hudson
- 5 Queer plotting: The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima
- 6 James's late short fiction and the spectacle of modern homosexuality
- 7 Suicide and blackmail: James's ‘poor sensitive gentlemen’
- Conclusion: ‘that queer monster the artist’
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Queer plotting: The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Henry James and the languages of sex
- 2 Gender and representation in The Wings of the Dove
- 3 Sexuality and the aesthetic in The Golden Bowl
- 4 The eroticism of prohibition: masochism and the law in Roderick Hudson
- 5 Queer plotting: The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima
- 6 James's late short fiction and the spectacle of modern homosexuality
- 7 Suicide and blackmail: James's ‘poor sensitive gentlemen’
- Conclusion: ‘that queer monster the artist’
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Instead of the old, familiar predicament of one heroine and two heroes, one of whom must get and one lose the prize, the two heroes are a man and woman, but the struggle is of the same general character. Who is to have Verena? Shall it be Olive or Basil? That is the question which is asked with great particularity and at great length.
Horace E. Scudder, review of The Bostonians, Atlantic Monthly, 18861 QUEER RIVALRIES
The standard Jamesian queer plot – a plot to which James returns again and again – involves a struggle for possession, and ends in a tragic, violent dénouement. Rivalry is of course one of fiction's core ingredients, but James consistently turns the screw of the classic rivalry plot, involving a struggle between two men for a woman. In James's first (disowned) novel, Watch and Ward, of 1870, the male rivals, Roger and Hubert Lawrence, are cousins, and the woman for whom they compete, Nora Lambert, is a young girl, the ‘ward’ of one of the rivals. Here James already anticipates The Bostonians. The Bostonians also puts two cousins in competition with one another for a young girl who is one cousin's protégée. In the later novel the two rivals are a woman and a man, so the struggle is one in which the privileging of heterosexual bonds over homosexual bonds plays a crucial role. In James's queer plots, it is frequently this privileging which precipitates the tragedy.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Henry James and Sexuality , pp. 90 - 116Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998