Love in the Time of Capital

A wonderful scene in The Ambassadors is Strether's last conversation with Chad, where despite his denials of being tired of Madame de Vionnet, it becomes apparent that his real character is coming to the fore -- and that he has found his real vocation, for the advertising business! Here capitalism is allowed to raise its ugly head as the enemy -- far more than puritanism -- of all Strether's idealizations and of James's own aesthetic vision. Earlier there had been a very amusing exchange between the scathing Sarah Pocock and a gushing Strether: '"She might have affected you by her exquisite amiability -- a real revelation, it has seemed to myself; her high rarity, her distinction of every sort"... "A 'revelation' -- to me:　I've come to such a woman for a revelation? You talk to me about 'distinction' -- you who've had your privilege -- while the most distinguished woman we shall either of us have seen in this world sits there insulted, in her loneliness, by your incredible comparison!"' (X iii, 278). Then Strether rather fatuously imagined that he could combine his New England values with the newfound Parisian aestheticism, but now Parisian lies and New England materialism have combined to rip the two worlds apart. The lovely French painting Strether composes in the countryside, and into which Chad and Madame de Vionnet glide en bateau, has at its heart a lie, enacted in their elaborate and amusing efforts to cover their traces. There's a crack in this golden bowl too. Maria Gostrey and Little Bilham have lied to him as well. But Strether comes to accept the lie as a beautiful, civilized thing. He can trust Madame de Vionnet 'to make deception right. As she presented things the ugliness -- goodness knew why -- went out of them' (XII i, 318). Paris wins a handsome triumph over puritanism. As a vision, Strether's magical Paris triumphs over capitalism too, and remains a symbol of the ideal in a way that London, which James knew more intimately, could never pretend to be. But the magic is partly tainted at the end of the novel, for the clanking of money concerns has been heard in the French milieu, especially in the way Madame de Vionnet and Chad arrange her daughter's marriage: 'the Paris he renounces for himself contains cruelty, greed, and suffering as well as generosity, courage, and joy' (Joan Bennett in The Ambassadors, Norton ed., 441). Puritanism will play no role in The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl -- no more fuddy-duddy Longdons or Strethers or hysterical Governesses or Sarahs. Milly and Susan are not particularly disturbed by any moral corruptedness of London life. Maggie's reaction to her husband's infidelity is more pragmatic than puritanical, her 'innocence' made of sterner stuff than Fanny Assingham anticipated. Instead, the battle is between 'love', which for much of the time becomes an enigmatic abstract x -- as Densher's love for Kate sinks into a needy lust or as Maggie's love for Adam and Amerigo floats in nebulous good intentions -- and the cruelly defined imperatives of financial need or rapacity. In these two novels James devotes his skills to his most sustained confrontations with the power of money.

　

The Economics of Forgiveness in The Wings of the Dove

　 The Wings of the Dove is surely James's most grandiose novel, with its ambitious echoes of Milton's two epics and of Shakespeare's Venetian plays, Othello and The Merchant of Venice. The action of the novel must be something appropriately august, not the welter of anxieties and ambiguities to which it is reduced in readings that focus on the subtleties at the expense of the grand design. An alternative title for the novel could be 'Guilt and Forgiveness'. The first two books create a Balzacian world of economic necessity that explains how Kate and Densher slip into shameful inauthenticity in their dealings with Milly. We live the inauthenticity from within in Densher's consciousness. From Book IX section ii to Book X section iii we are privy to all the prickly sensations of Densher's self-loathing, sensations that he does not want to recognize. 'The Oratory in short, to make him right, would do' is the last sentence of this, the most powerful, part of the novel. 'To make him right' means to make his lie to Mrs Lowder about going to a Church turn out to be true, but there is also a deeper resonance. The last event of the novel is Milly's forgiveness, as received by Densher; it is this to which the title of the novel refers. Her disposal of her wealth in a bequest to him contradicts the laws of the Balzacian world and indicates an order of grace that lies beyond it. Her stupendous wealth has given her an ambiguous freedom and superiority in life, but her generosity in face of betrayal allows her to use the wealth to make a gesture of authentic charity. She acts like one of Shakespeare's heroines. Or does she? Is even this last gesture recuperated within a subtle capitalist calculation? Is Milly attempting to buy Densher from beyond the grave? But Densher's refusal of the wealth wipes out the last trace of its poisonous potency, and allows Milly's gesture to be a thoroughly gracious one. He matches the freedom of Milly's gesture with the freedom of his own, turning his back on the universe of calculating self-interest.

　 The plot is the stuff of a thousand nineteenth-century sentimental melodramas. James does all he can to anchor the sublime romantic parable in a realistic portrayal of Milly and Densher. He succeeds totally with Densher, but not with Milly, whose love for Densher remains an abstract and implausible proposition. It would have been more convincing if a rich pre-history had been supplied, comparable to the magnificent portrayal of Kate and Densher's clandestine romance in straitened circumstances in the early chapters. To some, Densher is such a pathetic rat that Milly's love for him becomes unintelligible. He does, however, change and grow. His gropings out of his condition of mediocrity make him an Everyman figure. As the novel's central character, whose point of view governs Books 2, 6, 8, 9, 10 (half of the text), he is the bridge between Kate and Milly, his dark angel and his bright one. Milly's triumph over Kate is won on the battlefield of Densher's conscience (and heart). Kate is the most powerfully drawn character, and might risk eclipsing the other two, but unlike them she does not change significantly.

　 William Stowe, following John Carlos Rowe, views the end of the novel as 'calling into question all preexisting categories of meaning, all such "transcendental signifiers" as "grace" and "love", and substituting for them the consciousness of perpetual difference' (Stowe, 195). The writing is constantly erasing simplificatory projections of Milly's virtue or Kate's vice. Ultimate moral realities reveal themselves only in their withdrawal from our grasp; their present is pervasive but elusive, more potent in the realm of possibility than of securely established actuality. 'The consciousness of perpetual difference' is threatening to one's vision of Milly as an angel of forgiveness, which risks becoming as irretrievable as one's first impression of Maggie Verver as a sweet, innocent victim or of the Governess as a bastion of sanity and noble self-sacrifice. James is a master of virtualities, of the spectral: he knows all the stories that can be told about a given situation, and plays with them as elements in what he actually writes, which becomes a kind of lofty meditation on possibilities of meaning. I use 'spectral' in the polyvalent sense of Derrida's Spectres of Marx. Still, I do not want to agree with Elaine Pigeon who writes: 'While Milly hovers as an angelic presence... the underside of her actions is manipulative, an aspect that more or less deconstructs the black and white difference between her and Kate'. Chris Stuart's riposte is apposite: 'I think that Robert Pippin is right in his recent book on James and Modern Moral Life that, however difficult they may be to pin down, there are limits to the moral explorations in James's novels, and that thus in his novels all moral categories are not reduced to mere relativism and "difference"'. This must be so, but many of James's tales seem to be constructed as moral detective stories. It takes many readings to grasp that Winterbourne or the Governess are the villains of their respective adventures, and the true heroes or heroines often advance under unprepossessing appearances. Perhaps we should look for one Virtue which heroes such as Strether, Milly and Maggie embody. Maggie stands for civilized behaviour just as Milly stands for angelic forgiveness. Then about that central virtue James may let all sorts of questionable virtualities play ambiguously.

　 The virtue Milly represents is one of supreme importance in today's world: forgiveness. Densher was a cad, a rotter, a bounder, one lacking in integrity, and his treatment of Milly fell into the category of what is usually considered 'unforgiveable'. But what is the Jamesian thing to do in this situation, the only really distinguished thing? Milly gives the answer: unconditional forgiveness. The terms 'cad', 'bounder' and 'rotter' are categories drawn from the vocabulary of social relationships, the sort of categories that the late Princess Diana applied to her disappointing lovers. If we had to compose a missing chapter in the novel, we might imagine that Milly's first reaction to Lord Mark's revelations was to utter just such words as these. But she is mature enough to rise above these blanket terms of conventional denunciation, to consider Kate and Densher as human beings. And then she may have reflected that her own wilful naivety had played its part in corrupting Kate and Densher -- how carefully she had ignored the warning signs! Forgiveness is of course a very Christian response: 'Father forgive them: for they know not what they do' (Luke 23.34). But what James also shows is the vulgarity, the bad taste, of recrimination and revenge-thinking. He attains a Buddhist depth of vision, insofar as he traces wickedness to the deprivations of ignorance and proposes to overcome it by an educative compassion. Clair Hughes objects that Densher and Kate are not fogiven on grounds of ignorance, for they know quite well what they do. In Buddhism, ignorance is a deluded sense of one's own identity, resulting in clinging and aversion (the Three Poisons). Kate clings to a certain image of herself, and that is the reason why she cannot find the moral courage to resist economic pressure. Densher, in true Adam-and-Eve style, clings to his fixation on Kate, as if his very identity depended on her. The deadly interplay between a strong and a weak character (Kate's and Densher's) unleashes blind passions. A bodhisattva witnessing this would say 'they know not what they do'.

　 If we apply James's ethics of forgiveness to the fraught realm of criminal justice, we can say that he does not deny criminal responsibility in the ordinary sense, any more than Dostoyevsky does. But by putting us inside the criminal's skin he tells us a lot about our own moral ignorance and blinding passions. Casey Abell objects that James did not question the institution of capital punishment. Few did at the time. Goethe, a self-proclaimed liberal, upheld the death penalty for mothers guilty of infanticide (the crime of Margarete in Faust). That does not prevent us from drawing from his writings, too, lessons for a more humane and compassionate approach to issues of crime and punishment. A reader of James is well equipped to see through the tawdry ideology of revenge and closure that is taking our civilisation backward. He speaks obscurely, in The American Scene, of a prison as a place of grim realities against which people defend themselves at the cost of a certain moral blindness: 'this huge house of sorrow affected me as, uncannily, of the City itself, the City of all the cynicisms and impunities against which my friends had, from far back, kept plating, as with the old silver of their sideboards, the armour of their social consciousness' (Penguin edition, 221). He notes the club-like atmosphere of parts of the prison, but adds: 'I almost blush, I fear, for the crude comfort of my prompt conclusion' -- he did not want his conscience cheaply salved. He gives his impression of the prisoners' faces -- 'One would have taken them to consist, without exception, of full-blown basenesses'. But this is also qualified: the effect of moral meanness is produced 'by its being proved upon them' and would not be so impressive 'if they had still been out in the world'. He questions the objectivity of his impressions. James is a moral writer, deeply concerned with virtue and vice, but the tendency of his writing is to undercut black-and-white judgment and to create sympathetic understanding even of behaviour with which we disapprove.

　 Clair Hughes points out that the recent film adaptation 'prettified' Densher and 'gave him an unwarranted social conscience -- presumably to compensate for his lack of conscience in other quarters'. (Linus Roache transferred to Densher the aura of flawed saintliness from his portrayal of Fr Greg in Priest three years earlier.) Hughes notes that 'Milly's Christian forgiveness brings in its own revenges. As a consequence of her dove-like actions and unseen final (one assumes "forgiving") letter, her "after-image" haunts Densher, to the extent that he posthumously falls in love with her. Love in any real, active sense then becomes impossible for him (the love-object being dead). The "bad sex" scene with which that movie concludes is -- I think -- absolutely right: the lovers' love-nest has become befouled and untenable. As a couple they have no more future than Milly does'. It is true that Milly's forgiveness is tinged, paradoxically, with a note of revenge. But this may be called angelic revenge, of the sort counselled by Scripture itself. 'If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be thirsty, give him water to drink: For thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head' (Proverbs 25.22-23). This may allude to an Egyptian penitential ritual; the coals were to induce compunction. The text is quoted by Paul in Romans 12.19-20: 'Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath [New English Bible: 'leave a place for divine retribution']: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head'. The coals of fire may sound bloodthirsty but Ernst Käsemann refers them to 'the remorse and shame of the opponent', claiming this is the majority view among exegetes (Käsemann, 337). That is exactly the tenor of Milly's revenge. We need not blame her for the collapse of Densher's relationship with Kate -- which has been sufficiently poisoned by their betrayal of their own and each other's integrity.

　 Casey Abell objects against Clair Hughes that if Densher were a cad he 'would have felt no scruples about plotting for Milly's money'; 'The conclusion of the book makes no sense if Densher was completely rotten'. But one can have scruples and still be a bounder -- look at the 'Aspern Papers' narrator. The point that is being missed here is that there is not one but three Denshers: Densher before his fall is an innocent; in Venice he is shifty, sneaky, uneasy, and then very guilty; the third Densher is the repentant sinner, touched by the grace of forgiveness bequeathed by Milly. He was a rotter, but never completely rotten. Perhaps Gilbert Osmond is completely rotten, and perhaps that is a melodramatic weakness of the earlier novel. But even if Densher was completely rotten, he is no longer so at the end of the story; his sin (no lesser word will do here) has been forgiven. James's surface is at every point continuously plausible, and we can find no melodramatic leap in his characterization of Densher; but nonetheless he allows the Everyman drama of sin, remorse and forgiveness to transpire en filigrane.

　 Can so edifying a transaction coexist with the 'delectable final touch' (Abell) of a woman's revenge on her cheating lover and the 'other woman'? In the capacious world of Jamesian psychology I think it can. Milly is not a pure saint and Densher is not an entirely exemplary penitent; their ordinary unregenerate psychology continues to the end. James integrates into his reflections the ambiguities latent in Milly's forgiveness and her other generous attitudes. It is just this sense of the complexities of human motivation that make this tale of guilt and forgiveness so extraordinarily convincing. There are countless operatic heroines who forgive the bounder and make him melt with remorse -- Violetta, Norma, Butterfly. Here too we get the combined satisfactions of forgiveness and revenge: Butterfly gently cedes Pinkerton to his sposa americana (just as Violetta prays for Alfredo's happiness with his future wife). But the suicide of Puccini's heroine is followed by the desolate offstage 'Butterfly!' of Pinkerton. We are left with the feeling that she has triumphed over him and had her revenge.

　 Marcia Ian writes: 'The term "passive aggressive" comes to mind here -- and fits Milly rather well'. No doubt. But I have a general question about the application of such categories to fictional characters. A fictional character is part of a work of art. If an author presents a character as a heroine, then his or her work of art is likely to be devalued if our psychological commentary robs the character of any convincing heroic status. I remember how Paul Claudel's extremely beautiful piece L'Annonce faite à Marie was devalued for me by Jacques Pohier's psychological analysis of the heroine as a manipulative tease. There is a risk that such analysis could reduce an entire range of literary classics to the status of artistic failures. The kind of suspicion a Freudian brings to real-life situations may not be applicable to fictional ones, in that it may clash totally with what the author is trying to do. Suspension of disbelief is required by all fictions, and can become impossible if we force literary characters to confess unconscious motives. Freudian questioning of the author's unconscious motives can be even more destructive, e.g. analyses of Shelley's Adonais that see it as motivated by sibling rivalry with Keats. Amateur psychologizing, invariably of a debunking kind, has wrought much havoc on the canon of English literature. Consider, for instance, what becomes of Milton at the hands of critics like Empson. At what point should we hold back from such psychological evaluation out of respect for the integrity of the work of art? I would answer: at the point at which it becomes invalid. That point is established by the work of art itself and by the nature of art. An artless novel may lay itself wide open to psychological explanation, but there will always be something in a real work of art that eludes the clutches of such explanation. An artless novel does not deserve to induce suspension of disbelief, and its psychological falsities may justly be left to the mercies of the psychological critic. Nonetheless, Marcia Ian is right to insist that the play of psychological speculation is inevitably aroused by a strong fictional character and that it will enhance the credibility of the character. The great characters in James can bear the brunt of our ethical and psychological inquisition because James has allowed them to think out so thoroughly the perplexities of their situation that the reader will ultimately meet them there less as an object of judgment than as a fellow subject of ethical and psychological inquiry.

　

Virtues and Virtualities in The Golden Bowl

　 What was the colour of Maggie Verver's hair? Posters advertising the Merchant/Ivory film, The Golden Bowl, showed a fair-haired woman (Uma Thurman) whom readers of the novel will have assumed to be Maggie. In the opening scene Prince Amerigo shows this woman around his Roman palace; again one assumes that she is his future fiancee. It comes as a shock when she reproaches him with his forthcoming marriage, and we realize that she is Charlotte, whom we had thought of as the dark-haired girl of classic legend, the scheming villainess -- Becky Sharp, Kate Croy　--, antagonist to the angelic heroine. But the ingenious scriptwriter, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, has made Charlotte the heroine of James's fable, while her dark-haired Maggie is a peevish nullity, eclipsed even by Nick Nolte's Adam Verver and Anjelica Huston's Fanny Assingham. Consider how the majestic image of the pagoda that opens the second half of James's novel is reduced to incoherent babble on Maggie's lips in the film. The seller of the golden bowl is a Henry James look-alike, whom Maggie describes as 'that nice man'. I take this as a barb directed by Jhabvala at James himself, who showed a dehumanized set of values in making so much of Maggie and treating Charlotte so unkindly (half the novel is written from Maggie's point of view, whereas we have access to Charlotte's only on one occasion). At the end of the new film it is Charlotte who triumphs, assuming her American destiny and flourishing on it. Maggie's triumph is elided; she does not appear in the final sequence. In the heroic scenes in which she lies to Charlotte (assuring her she has nothing against her) and accepts Charlotte's final lie (when Charlotte pretends to be leaving for America of her own accord, to save her marriage from Maggie), we share Maggie's point of view in the novel, whereas in the film our sympathy is directly engaged on Charlotte's side. The heavy symbolism of the cracked bowl is rather tiresomely emphasized in the film, and a new dimension of symbolism is added by the invention of a story about a step-mother punished for improper amours in the bloody past of Amerigo's family, a prefiguration of Charlotte's fate. Perhaps the fuss about the cracked bowl is deliberately made tiresome to withdraw sympathy from Maggie, whereas Charlotte's fate is given maximum pathos.

　 The story Jhabvala tells is lying there, ready to be exhumed, in James's novel, but the finer play of consciousness in which that story is enfolded over and over again cannot be transferred to the screen, and the values exhibited in that play of consciousness seem impossible to convey to a contemporary audience; in any case, what could be done in that line has already been achieved superbly in Martin Scorsese's adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. What troubles the reader of the novel is that his or her suspicions about Maggie, its ostensible heroine, are revived by this film, which mounts the case against the Ververs as effectively as Deborah Kerr's performance in The Innocents impugns the Governess in The Turn of the Screw. James intended us to view the heroine of the latter story ironically, and it seems clear that there is a no less abundant play of irony in the presentation of Maggie. But Maggie is nonetheless to be taken as a heroine exhibiting virtues dear to James, just as Milly is in The Wings of the Dove. To read either of these novels as merely exposing the manipulativeness of the idle rich would greatly reduce their significance. Maggie is the central protagonist, but she is not put forward as a heroine. But if Maggie-phobia reaches the point at which we lose sympathy with her in her painful struggle or see her as a villain, then again we have made the novel a failure. Kate and Charlotte may be more vivid and attractive presences, but it is Milly and Maggie who carry the moral burden of the tale. I suggest that James allows all sorts of sinister virtualities to play about his chosen heroines, impurities of motive which they themselves to some extent penetrate, but that the characters he constructs are sturdy enough to be able to retain our sympathy and final approval despite these shadows.

　 Though Maggie represents civilised order and James was an ardent supporter of this value, he probably had much more sympathy for Charlotte than Maggie has -- even in her oh-so-heroinely moments of compassion. One could say the novel pays tribute to the necessities of civilized living even as it exposes the cruel cost they can exact -- a cost paid maximally by Charlotte, but also by the other three. Established society is often unfair and abusive in its claims on the individual, yet dealing patiently with the necessities it imposes, rather than relapsing into impulsive barbarism, could be seen as quite a virtuous activity, and James gives all four protagonists high marks for that. Published ten years before the Great War, the novel is a monument to the arts of diplomacy; that would seem to be its chief claim to moral relevance today as well.

　 The lesson Jhabvala draws from the novel is that it exposes the exploitativeness of patriarchal society. She has Charlotte lecture on a Holbein portrait of Henry VIII, an emblem of male arrogance. The corresponding scene in the novel is subtler. James seems more fascinated by the exploitation of Amerigo than by the oppression of Charlotte. Leland S. Person has analyzed the sadomasochistic dynamics of the novel in depth, noting especially the way Amerigo is exploited by his 'owners' -- allowed the 'use-value' of his sexual prestige as the hired lover of Verver's wife and daughter, while the 'exchange-value' is retained by Adam and Maggie (who even in her masochistic postures is really stage-managing him). 'Amerigo's ready cooperation in producing a masculine performance on demand effectively reduces him, in the extended financial metaphor that James prosecutes throughout the novel, to a kind of bank -- a sperm bank -- of masculinity' (Person 2000, 158). Such hyper-subtlety is no surprise in late James. His mind ran along those lines from the start, always clued in to the intersection of financial and erotic complexities. The perverse laws of the sexual market explored in The Golden Bowl already emerge in The Awkward Age, the central conceit of The Sacred Fount, and the exchange between Chad and Madame de Vionnet. Those who come closest to being passionate lovers are the losers in this market: May Server, Marie de Vionnet, Charlotte. The message of this is not a feminist one, but concerns more generally the integrity of personal relationships in a capitalist world. Mr Longdon and Nanda, Strether, Densher preserve integrity by a final withdrawal (preceded by Isabel Archer and Maisie Farange). In The Golden Bowl no one withdraws from the game, and the final tableau could be read as civilized compromise, a triumph for all concerned. Or it could be read, more troublingly, as defeat and loss for Amerigo and Charlotte and brazen capitalist gratification for the Ververs. As Roger Ebert remarks in his review of the film: 'There are four good people in "The Golden Bowl" and four bad people, making, in all, four characters'. Whatever Maggie's ultimate standing as a moral agent, the novel brings home the message that the practice of virtue is enhanced by awareness of the virtualities of evil that lurk in every corner of capitalist society and of the human heart.

　 The Golden Bowl is James's most Wagnerian work. Charlotte and Amerigo are explicitly presented as doomed Wagnerian lovers. The image of the bowl plays a central part comparable to the image of the Ring in the Tetralogy. Also Wagnerian is the association of wealth with a curse on love. Maggie strikes up the Wagnerian theme of 'redemption through love', but her enactment of it leaves more troubling questions than did Milly's in The Wings of the Dove. Just as the Ring Cycle ends in obscurity and ambiguity, so the reader is left pondering inscrutable mysteries at the end of The Golden Bowl. Like Shakespeare's Hamlet, these are works in which the artist of genius takes on material exceeding his grasp, or becomes the channel of something greater than his conscious intention. Despite infinite labours of form, the ultimate result eludes clarity, as one discovers if one tries to tell the story of Hamlet or of the Ring Cycle. The story of The Golden Bowl leads into a similar opaque maze. Perhaps the highest achievements of art lie beyond the horizon of Apollonian vision, sounding an obscurity that is brought to awareness only when all the shafts in Apollo's quiver have been spent.

　

　　　　　　　　　　　　　Works Cited here and in the articles below

Bell, Millicent (1998). 'The Unmentionable Subject in "The Pupil"'. In: Freedman, 139-50.

Bradley, John R. ed. (1999a). Henry James and Homo-erotic desire. London: Macmillan.

Bradley, John R. (1999b). 'Henry James's Permanent Adolescence'. In: Bradley (1999a), 45-68.

Ellmann, Richard (1999). 'James Amongst the Aesthetes'. In: Bradley (1999a), 25-44.

Felman, Shoshana (1982). 'Turning the Screw of Interpretation'. In: S. Felman, ed. Literature and Psychoanalysis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 94-207.

Freedman, Jonathan, ed. (1998). The Cambridge Companion to Henry James. Cambridge University Press.

Gargano, James, ed. (1987a). Critical Essays on Henry James: The Early Novels. Boston: Hall.

Gargano, James, ed. (1987b). 'James's The Sacred Fount: The Phantasmagorical Made Evidential', in Gargano, ed. Critical Essays on Henry James: The Late Novels. Boston; Hall, 113-30.

Graham, Kenneth (1975). Henry James: The Drama of Fulfilment. Oxford: Clarendon.

Graham, Wendy (1999). Henry James's Thwarted Love　Stanford University Press.

Haralson, Eric (2000), '"His little heart, dispossessed": Ritual Sexorcism in The Turn of the Screw'. In: McCormack, 133-48.

Hederman, Mark Patrick (2001). The Haunted Inkwell: Art and Our Future. Dublin: Columba Press.

Hughes, Clair (2001). Henry James and the Art of Dress. New York: Palgrave.

Käsemann, Ernst (1974). An die Römer. Tübingen: Mohr.

James, Henry (1984). The Figure in the Carpet and other stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

McCormack, Peggy, ed. (2000). Questioning the Master: Gender and Sexuality in Henry James's Writings. London: Associated University Presses.

Person, Leland S. (1999). 'Homo-Erotic Desire in the Tales of Writers and Artists'. In: Bradley (1999a), 111-23.

Person, Leland S. (2000). 'Jamesian Sadomasochism: The Invisible (Third) Hand of Marriage in The Golden Bowl'. In: McCormack, 149-75.

Stevens, Hugh (1998). 'Queer Henry In the Cage'. In: Freedman, 120-38.

Stowe, William (1998), 'James's Elusive Wings'. In: Freedman, 187-203.

Symonds, John Addington (1984). Sexual Inversion. New York: Bell Publishing Company.

Tintner, Adeline (1995). 'A Gay Sacred Fount: The Reader as Detective'. Twentieth Century Literature 41:224-48.

Other names referred to are interlocutors in the discussion at JAMESF-L@creighton.edu.