No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The Uses of James's Imagery: Drama Through Metaphor
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
A study such as Wolfgang Clemen's The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1951) indicates that something other than the content of a metaphor, or even its simple recurrence, will prove important for the investigator of images. The skill of the artist may better be revealed in the functioning of his images or the great variety of uses which they are made to serve in different contexts. This suggestion has especial validity when applied to such a craftsman as Henry James. The changing conditions under which he applies certain figures in part explain why James's later fiction becomes more dramatic, at the same time that it remains realistic and more exclusively concerns itself with subjective events.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1954
References
1 That James's interest in symmetric, or non-“realistic,” structure reached a climax in The Golden Bowl's balanced plot and counterpoised points of view is widely recognized. If contrasting uses of the same images produce a similar effect, these can better be defended as approximations to actual processes of growth.
2 “Myth and Dialectic in the Later Novels,” Kenyon Rev., v (1943), 555.
3 James, “Preface to The Ambassadors,” The Art of the Novel (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934), p. 324.
4 Maria sometimes helps Strether to expand the wording of these figures, but rarely herself introduces one or supplies a context foreign to that which his silent rumination has already prepared. That is, she assists Strether's development by producing images for what he has already implied (cf. The Ambassadors, New York: Scribner's, 1909, i, 57-58) and by expanding his own images, but she never forces an interpretation of her own.
5 The Wings of the Dove, New York Edition (Scribner's, 1909), ii, 205.
6 Ibid., ii, 216 (“she might fairly have been dressed tonight in the little black frock … Milly had laid aside”).
7 Ibid., ii, 206. Susan Stringham nervously and, Short thinks, “bathetically” refers to herself as the dwarf. But this need not affect the serious import and use, for Densher, of the total comparison. He here first thinks of Milly as set off by all her circumstances, including persons around her. She begins to command the center of his attention. Cf. R. W. Short, “Henry James's World of Images,” PMLA, lxviii (1953), 946.
8 The Ambassadors, ii, 235-239.