1 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.