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
1 - Henry James and the languages of sex
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
While reading in Henry James's fiction a critique of modern notions of sexuality, this book examines the privileged role sexuality plays in the constitution of the self, or of ‘character’, in James's writing. It argues that sexuality is an important component in James's conception of identity, even if his fiction might be seen to critique a social formation in which the sexual has a founding, ontological status for the human subject. James's fiction is read in a context in which two questions are being addressed with increasing urgency. Can the ‘political’ be founded on the notion of an individuated, autonomous subjectivity, and can ‘subjectivity’ be located according to notions of sexual and gendered identity? It will be argued that ‘sexuality’ (or the ‘erotic’) both constitutes the Jamesian character in a crucial sense, yet also that for James sexuality marks a space in which the very possibility of selfhood is questioned. For James there is no ‘being’ or ‘essence’ of sexuality which precedes the existence of sexuality; nor can sexuality be understood in terms of stable categories. Sexuality is rather a dynamic process, a performance, a story, a narrative, in which the unstable play of desire and identifications can erode the boundaries of the perceived self.
Judith Butler writes in her influential Gender Trouble (1990) that ‘the gendered body is performative’, and ‘has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Henry James and Sexuality , pp. 1 - 19Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998