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
2 - Gender and representation in The Wings of the Dove
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
Belwood The essential, latent antagonism of the sexes – the armed opposed array of men and women, founded on irreconcilable interests. Hitherto we have judged these interests reconcilable, and even practically identical. But all that is changing because women are changing, and their necessary hostility to men – or that of men to them, I don't care how you put it – is rising by an inexorable logic to the surface. It is deeper – ah, far deeper, than our need of each other, deep as we have always held that to be; and some day it will break out on a scale that will make us all turn pale.
Belinda The Armageddon of the future, quoi!
‘An Animated Conversation’1 REALISM AND SILENCE
In the dialogue from which I take my epigraph, first published in Scribner's Magazine in 1889, Belwood argues that the novel – and, in Belinda's view, ‘[t]he book today is the novel’ – ‘will contribute in its degree to the great evolution which … will certainly become the huge “issue” of the future’, namely the ‘essential, latent antagonism of the sexes’. What contribution does The Wings of the Dove make to such an ‘issue’? And how does The Wings of the Dove interrogate the very terms with which the ‘issue’ might be articulated? Perhaps the consummate aesthetic structure in the entire Jamesian edifice, The Wings of the Dove nevertheless shows a considered response to those ‘issues’ most prominent in this ‘antagonism’ at the turn of the century: namely, a crisis in the very manner in which ‘femininity’, or ‘woman’, might be represented, and, in turn, the consequences for ‘masculinity’ of such a crisis.
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- Information
- Henry James and Sexuality , pp. 20 - 44Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998