Christina Light is Henry James’s first major heroine. In both Roderick Hudson (1875) and The Princess Casamassima (1887) her appearance is delayed for dramatic effect. She appears first, very briefly, in the fifth chapter of the earlier novel (RH [Library of America] 228-30; NY [New York Edition] 94-7), in the grounds of the Villa Ludovisi, and reappears in chapter VIII when she visits Roderick’s studio. She dominates the novel thereafter, while none of the other characters develop much beyond their early presentation. The question that springs to Roderick’s lips on her first appearance is: “Who is she?” (229; NY 95), and many have taken this as a riddle set by the author, prompting numerous attempts to identify the “real” Princess Casamassima. Proposed sources fall into three categories: women personally known to James, characters in fiction, and major or minor public figures or celebrities.
The Hunt for Models
Leon Edel, in the fourth volume of his biography of James, links Christina’s “magnificent tresses” with those of Fanny Kemble’s daughter Sarah Butler Wister. Another Roman model is “the haunting Elena Lowe” who “attracted him by her beauty, her remoteness, her air of quiet intelligence —her mystery.” “In Christina, James seems to have set down the deep fascination he had felt in the mysterious and unreachable young Boston woman he glimpsed so briefly in Rome. ‘Beautiful, mysterious, melancholy, inscrutable,’ were the words he had used to describe Elena Lowe; for no other woman of his acquaintance had he used such language. Colm Tóibín, in The Master, suggests that the model for Christina in the second novel is none other than the author’s sister, Alice James. As Alice is often mentioned as a model for another character in the novel, the invalid Rose Muniment, Tóibín suggests that James offers a “double portrait” of Alice in Rose and “the Princess herself, subtle, brilliant and darkly powerful, recently arrived in London.” This implies treating the Christina of the later novel as a quite new character, only nominally connected with the Miss Light of Roderick Hudson. But James’s remarks in the Prefaces to both novels show that he ascribes to her a rich and stable identity. In contrast to the pallid Mary Garland, her antithesis Christina’s “presence and action are… all firm ground” (NY xix).
The way James speaks of her as developing after the close of Roderick Hudson could suggest that he has a real person in mind: “I remember at all events feeling, toward the end of ‘Roderick,’ that the Princess Casamassima had been launched, that, wound-up with the right silver key, she would go on a certain time by the motion communicated; thanks to which I knew the pity, the real pang of losing sight of her…. One would watch for her and waylay her at some turn of the road to come—all that was to be needed was to give her time. This I did in fact, meeting her again and taking her up later on” (NY xx). In the Preface to the second novel he writes of “that extremely disponible figure of Christina Light” who “had for so long, in the vague limbo of those ghosts we have conjured but not exorcised, been looking for a situation, awaiting a niche and a function”; she is one of those “honourably buried” characters who “revive for him by a force or a whim of their own and “walk” round his house of art like haunting ghosts, feeling for the old doors they knew” (1[vol. 1 of the New York edition of The Princess Casamassima].xviii). Christina, he adds, was not “completely recorded” in the earlier novel. But if she is based on his study of a real person, the ongoing development of that person would tell him how inadequate his first sketch of her had been. Her “natural passion” was “to continue in evidence” (1.xix)—again a strange way to speak of a mere fiction. But if the model was a famous woman, constantly appearing in headlines, and very much refusing to be “a recumbent worthy on the slab of a sepulchral monument” (1.xix), then her real-life irrepressibility could ricochet on her fictive portrait. “Her pressure then was not to be resisted—sharply as the question might come up of why she should pretend to strike, just there. I shall not attempt to answer it with reasons (one can never tell everything); it was enough that I could recognise her claim to have travelled far—far from where I had last left her: that, one felt, was in character—that was what she naturally would have done” (1.xix). Perhaps “one can never tell everything” indicates what James is keeping silent about: the identity of his principal model. Since none of the models suggested from among James’s acquaintance carry the double glamor surrounding Christina from the start, the glamor of extraordinary beauty and of high aristocratic status, they remain quite unconvincing.
Turning to literary models, the reception of the novel has been characterized, as A. Robert Lee remarks, by “a solid round of influence hunting.” “The similarity of plot between The Princess Casamassima and Turgenev's Virgin Soil has been much commented upon; yet it seems that in many respects James’s novel is closer to his own criticism of Virgin Soil than to the actual novel” (Anne-Claire Le Reste). In 1877, James described Turgenev’s “Neshdanoff, who is the natural son of a nobleman, not recognized by his father’s family, and who, drifting through irritation and smothered rage and vague aspiration into the stream of occult radicalism, finds himself fatally fastidious and sceptical and ‘aesthetic’—more essentially an aristocrat, in a word, than any of the aristocrats he had agreed to conspire against. He has not the gift of faith, and he is most uncomfortably at odds with his companions, who have it in a high degree.” This is a precise advance sketch of Hyacinth Robinson, who in addition knows himself to be “the bastard of a murderess, spawned in a gutter out of which he had been picked by a poor sewing-girl” (2.216). “He probably based Christina partly on the series of heroines—Elena, Lisa, Tatyana, Gemma, Marianna—whom of all Turgenev’s characters he most admired” (W. H. Tilley, The Background of The Princess Casamassima, 1961). “With the three important women in Nezhdanov’s life, however, with Mme Sipyagina, Mashurina, and Mariana, James does some fancy juggling of roles and traits to produce the Princess, Lady Aurora, and Millicent Henning. The beauty of Mariana, a lady by birth, is vulgarized and given to the sexually attractive cockney, Miss Henning…. Sipyagina, according to Lerner, is scaled upward to become the Princess” (Oscar Cargill). This again is an unconvincing suggestion.
Turning to public society for a possible model, we note W. H. Tilley’s failure to find any, though he does find real-life models for many of the characters in this thickly populated novel. “The parallel between Franz Reinhold Rupsch, the saddler [Friedrich August] Reinsdorf chose to assassinate the Emperor [Wilhelm I of Germany in 1883], and Hyacinth Robinson, the bookbinder Hoffendahl chose to assassinate a duke, is too striking to pass unobserved.” But “among the many stories of conspiracy and subversion in the Times, not one describes a princess who has left her husband to fraternize with revolutionists. If James based Christina on a figure in real life, it was someone not well known. And probably not contemporary, for while it was one thing to build characters on the model of well-documented types—young artisans who caught the revolutionary fervor, older ones who ran things from behind the scenes—it was quite another to devise a revolutionary princess.” M. S. Wilkins notes that there was “the Princess Obolensky, who joined Bakunin’s organization in Naples and later retired to Casamicciola, on the island of Ischia.” Princess Belgiojoso, née Cristina de Trivulsio, a dynamic grande dame in Rome around 1870, is proposed as a model on the basis of James’s account of her in William Wetmore Story and His Friends. Tintner calls her “the great cosmopolitan star of Paris of the 1880s”: “As a real historical character, the princess added to the material by Feuillet upon which he drew for his world-weary citizen of the world, the Princess Casamassima.” Again we sense the lack of a proper objective correlative for James’s Princess.
The hunt for models reaches its paroxysm in the far-fetched proposal that Christina is modeled on James himself. Warren Johnson asserts that “her appearances in Roderick Hudson and The Princess Casamassima [reveal] the most complete, considered, and confident portrait of the development of the mind and experience of the novelist in a character in James’s fictions.” As the hunt grows vertiginous fashionable postmodern theories are projected onto the text, as in the suggestion that The Princess Casamassima is “constructed so that anybody could read their own intertextuality into it,” and “the references sprinkled over the text were not so much intertextual as about intertextuality” (Le Reste). Much more satisfactory would be the identification of one major intertext that becomes a hidden structural and thematic pillar of the novel. Le Reste adds:
"The major target of this strategy of elucidation has been the Princess, the most unaccountable character in the book, and probably one of James’s characters that has been interpreted in the most polarized and passionate ways…. [Pierre] Walker’s book is a revealing instance of this tendency. Although he is one of these comparatively rare critics who acknowledge the status of the Princess as the novel’s “paramount enigma” (28), he still writes that the reference to Feuillet “is a very significant clue to understanding the major cruxes of The Princess Casamassima: Hyacinth’s and the princess’s friendship, the Princess’s supposedly capricious personality, and the end of the novel” (21). Tintner uses a similar strategy in her Cosmopolitan World of Henry James, yet with a radically different end, convoking another Feuillet novel to give a much less favorable interpretation of the Princess as “frivolous”… (Cosmopolitan 77)…. The same strategy is at work in [John L.] Kimmey’s comparison of The Princess with the other two novels of the so-called “naturalist series.” Arguing in a 1968 article about The Princess being a rewriting of The Bostonians, he found that the Princess was similar to Olive “in type and function” (542-3)—although Olive is a much more coherent character than the Princess. In a 1970 article focusing on The Tragic Muse, he then found the Princess to be similar to Julia Dallow, both described as “aggressive females impressing their wills on others” and “capricious personalities” (526). The ambiguous characterization of the Princess is again a casualty of [Roland] Dove’s comparison of James’s novel with Le Rouge et le noir, in which he states from the outset that “there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that the later novel was in any way indebted to the earlier one” (131), but still concludes that the Princess is “a bored and capricious woman, like Mathilde” (150)."
"Although she is the pivot around which everything revolves, she remains a missing pivot, through her elusiveness, and because both characters and readers’ attempts to make sense of her are ultimately frustrated…. Her theatricality, her sense of the mise en scène are repeatedly asserted but, as Hyacinth notes, “her performance of the part she had undertaken to play was certainly complete, and everything lay before him but the reason she had for playing it” (267; 2.19). Her incommensurable beauty thus appears not as a mere descriptive characteristic, but rather as a sign for her unintelligibility: “she was too beautiful to question, to judge by common logic,” Hyacinth reflects (195; 1.212). She can only be defined in terms of her opacity and the frustration she creates: indeed “a model of the unsatisfactory” (250; 1.294). At the end of the novel, her course is undetermined, contrary to the other characters whom the readers can well imagine leading their narrative lives unchanged. Her extra-narrative future is the only one which is mentioned…. Her trajectory calls for an unimaginable “outside of the text.”"
To be sure, as Tilley says, “it cannot be proved that James needed any model for the Princess; he may have fashioned her from whole cloth.” The creator of Isabel Archer, Marie de Vionnet, Milly Theale, Kate Croy, Maggie Verver, and Charlotte Stant would be capable of such a feat. Nonetheless, given James’s proclivity to reinforce his creations by drawing on hidden models, which add an extra dimension to his fictions when they emerge to light in a kind of palimpsest effect, it is worth pursuing the hunch that there is something more to James’s heroine than meets the eye. He drops hints, in his usual fashion, that come into focus in an “anamorphic” effect (like the skull that appears in Holbein’s The Ambassadors, when viewed from a certain angle). James is fascinated with Christina, in love with her in a sense, yet no woman in James’s life provides any basis for such a steady fascination. But what if the model was a public figure, with whom everyone was in love? Both novels refer to Christina ritually as the most beautiful and “remarkable” woman in Europe. What if his model simply were a real woman who was routinely granted that status—a woman among the most famous of her time, and still famous today? What if James had done what a modern novelist might do in taking the figure of Lady Diana Spencer, aka Diana, Princess of Wales, for the unacknowledged model of a fictional creation? Then one could say that the model was hidden in plain view, like Poe’s “purloined letter,” and that the literary detectives chasing after obscure leads were missing the obvious, the fascinating woman whose face stared at them from newspapers, magazines, posters, and television screens on every side. Just as the letter in Poe’s story is concealed under a shabby exterior, James conceals his model under the unprepossessing guise of a low-born adventuress, promoted by her vulgar mother as a business proposition. And yet he gives many clues that enable the reader to detect the original. Who is she? Like Isabel Archer, she may be seen as “a rich, synthesized figure about which the novelist had reflected a long time, gathering material from a variety of sources” (Cargill) Yet there is a principal model for Christina, who plays a role comparable to that of Oscar Wilde for Gabriel Nash in The Tragic Muse or that of Morton Fullerton for Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove.
The story of her early years may owe something to Alexandre Dumas, fils’s L’Affaire Clemenceau, in which “Madame Dobronowska, a Polish adventuress, and her daughter Iza, a girl of extraordinary beauty… search for a suitor with sufficient money and position to satisfy their ambition” (Cargill). But I propose that the primary model for Christina’s character and destiny is none other than Elisabeth, Empress of Austria (from 1854 until her assassination in 1898), and that James throws out many ironic hints of this buried identity. Known in popular lore as “Sissi,” the more correct form of her nickname is “Sisi,” and I shall use it for convenience in what follows. For her biography of the Empress, the fundamental work is the thoroughly documented Elisabeth: “Die seltsame Frau” by Egon Caesar Conte Corti (1934). Its dark portrait is confirmed in Brigitte Hamann’s Elisabeth: Kaiserin wider Willen (1981), translated as The Reluctant Empress (1986). The difference between the two Christinas are those produced by age and experience, and it is one of the strengths of the portrait that it captures these changes so convincingly. The situation is somewhat like that of Rosine in The Barber of Seville who is so transformed as the Countess of The Marriage of Figaro as to make it rather a shock when the name “Rosine” is voiced in the latter play. What Edel says of Elena Lowe applies better to Sisi: “Again and again in the novel she is portrayed as an enigma and a ‘riddle.’ There are references to her ‘unfathomable’ coquetry and to her nature as ‘large and mysterious.’” The epithets “beautiful, mysterious, melancholy, inscrutable” used of her in a deflationry tone in a letter of 1874 would apply perfectly to the Empress. The way James speaks of his heroine in the notebook entry on The Princess Casamassima may point to this: “The Princess will give me hard, continuous work for many months to come; but she will also give me joys too sacred to prate about.—In the 3d installment of the serial Hyacinth makes the acquaintance of x x x x x.” James’s sacred hush and portentous “x x x x x” mark the secret of her identity, not to be blabbed about. As with all James’s hidden allusive and intertextual schemes, he keeps up an ironic game with the reader, dropping a series of hints but keeping mum about their unnamed referent.
Hapsburg Hints
When James wrote Roderick Hudson in Florence in 1874, Sisi was already, at thirty-six, famous as the most beautiful woman in the world and as the willful and unhappy wife of Emperor Franz Joseph. James would have had ample opportunity to know all about her, since in addition to the newspapers, everyday conversation would have echoed the rumors that ceaselessly swirled about her. Sisi’s full name was Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie. The name Christina may recall Elisabeth Christine (1715-1797), wife of Frederick the Great, whose marriage was intended to boost Prussian-Austrian relations, but who was separated from Frederick after seven years in 1740. A more famous Christina, independent and intelligent like Sisi, is the Queen of Sweden (1626-1689), who lived in Rome after her abdication and is buried in St Peter’s Basilica; Christina Light was born “in the shadow of Saint Peter’s” (272; NY 162: “the dear shadow”). The name “Casamassima” is that of an ancient Italian town, in the metropolitan area of Bari, but it also means “greatest house,” and the House of Hapsburg was the greatest royal house of Europe, ruling the Holy Roman Empire continuously from 1440 until Napoleon abolished the Empire end in 1806, and then ruling the Austrian (from 1867 Austro-Hungarian) Empire from its foundation by Francis I in 1804 until its collapse in 1918.
Christina is a Neapolitan princess (1.294), her husband being “a Neapolitan; one of the oldest houses in Italy” (RH 323; NY 243), which in practice would suggest a Hapsburg. The Prince has a “resemblance to some old portrait of a personage of distinction under the Spanish dominion at Naples” (PC 1.269). A detail added in the New York text of Roderick Hudson confirms his Hapsburg identity: “the prince is, among many wonderful things hereditary Grand d’Espagne” (NY 407), the highest rank in the Spanish nobility. His “princely fortune,” the New York text specifies, comes mostly from “his great Sicilian property” (NY 243). The Spanish Hapsburg rulers of Naples and Sicily were Charles IV = Emperor Charles V (1516-54), Philip I = Philip II of Spain (1554-98), Philip II (1598-1621), Philip III (1621-47; 1648-65), Charles V (1665-1700), Charles VI (1713-35). An allusion to the Inquisition (RH 330-31; NY 254-5), which these monarchs would have supervised in the Two Sicilies as well as in Spain, is another recall of Hapsburg history. Christina’s maid Assunta tells her, “You dine at the Austrian Embassy,” and later when she is asked “Going where?” she replies, “To the Spanish Embassy, or whatever it is” (354; NY 289). The international sphere of her social life is a Hapsburg one. Madame Grandoni says: “There is something in the girl, as one looks at her, that seems to make it very possible she is marked out for one of those wonderful romantic fortunes that history now and then relates. ‘Who, after all, was the Empress of the French?’ Mrs. Light is forever saying. ‘And beside Christina the Empress is a dowdy!” (273-4; NY 165). Indeed, Mrs. Light does say so later in the novel: “You may laugh at me if you like, but haven’t such things happened again and again without half as good a cause, and doesn't history notoriously repeat itself? There was a little Spanish girl at a second-rate English boarding-school thirty years ago!... The Empress certainly is a pretty woman; but what is my Christina, pray?” (330; NY 253, “was a pretty woman”). Miss Pynsent has “a portrait of the Empress of the French taken from an illustrated newspaper and framed and glazed in the manner of 1853” (1.58). The Empress Eugénie (1826-1920) was a Spanish countess by birth, just as Sisi was a German duchess. The two rival imperial beauties first met in 1867 in Salzburg, where the much taller Sisi was judged the winner. The two women could pool their miseries when they last met in Cap Martin in 1894.
But Mrs Light prefers her daughter to marry a minor prince rather than a real ruler: “There might be another coup d’état somewhere, and another brilliant young sovereign looking out for a wife! At last however… since the overturning of the poor king of Naples and that charming queen,… and the dreadful radical talk that is going on all over the world, it has come to seem to me that with Christina in such a position I should be really very nervous. Even in such a position she would hold her head very high, and if anything should happen to her, she would make no concessions to the popular fury” (330; NY 253). The reference is to the Bourbon Francesco II, who had reigned for scarcely a year when he was overturned by Garibaldi in 1860. The exiled queen was none other than Sisi’s own favorite sister Maria Sophia (1841-1925), who closely resembled her and was also a famed beauty. Maria indeed held her head high, telling her husband that if he did not lead his troops against Garibaldi, she would do so herself. This is the only explicit reference to Sisi’s immediate family in either novel. Like Sisi, Maria had a troubled marriage, contracted for political reasons at the age of sixteen, and her flight from her husband in 1862 led people to draw parallels with Sisi’s own behavior. She was reconciled with him, and was able to consummate the marriage when he was cured of phimosis, bearing him a short-lived child, Maria Cristina Pia, on Christmas Eve 1869, Sisi’s 32nd birthday. She was Sisi’s hostess and initiator into the hunting world during her English sojourns in 1876 and in 1878, when she upset Crown Prince Rudolf by passing on a rumor about his mother’s relations with Bay Middleton (on whom see John Welcome, The Sporting Empress, 1975). She appears as a character in Proust, where she is praised as a “heroic woman,” “the soldier queen who herself fired shots on the ramparts of Gaeta” (À la recherche du temps perdu, Pléiade edition 3.752), “the glorious sister of the Empress Elisabeth” (3.825). Madame de Verdurin, in wartime, smears her as “a frightful spy” (4.344). Oriane de Guermantes comments on the late Empress: “a little dotty, a little crazy, but a very good woman, kind, dotty, and very lovable” (2.799). She adds a mischievous comment on the Empress’s loose-fitting dentures. Sisi had in fact bad teeth, which even the most expensive dentists could not remedy.
Unlike Sisi, Christina comes from nowhere, and it is her beauty alone that warrants her mother’s squalid ambition. Still the New York text manages to give that beauty historical depth: “Her beauty had a robustness and tone uncommon in the somewhat facile loveliness of our western maidenhood” (266); “her beauty had, in spite of her youth, an air of longer history than consorts, in general, with the rather extemporised look of American loveliness” (NY 154). Christina’s consent to marry Prince Casamassima after the revelation of her illegimacy is intensively rewritten in the New York text. Madame Grandoni says, “The old obloquy attaching to irregular birth is now mere stage convention and melodrama” (much more so when James is rewriting than in 1875). Rowland replies: “Well, Christina has a taste for that—she was glad immediately to be able to see herself in a new high light” (NY 418-19). Both novels see Christina as acting a part. One might say that the part she acts is a parody of that of Sisi, who herself was quite histrionic, whether attempting to be a model empress or fleeing that role to adopt truant or Bohemian ones, or finally the poetic and tragic attitudes of a heroic recluse. Madame Grandoni, who is German despite her Italian name, makes the puzzling statement of the Princess that “she isn’t German, poor lady, any more” (1.210). The meaning is “any more than she is Italian,” but the phrase seems another glancing hint at the Bavarian Sisi. Begun in Florence, Roderick Hudson “was earnestly pursued during a summer partly spent in the Black Forest” (RH viii), and its heroine is linked with Germany at several points. German allusions continue to throng around the Princess in the second novel. Hyacinth refers to Schopenhauer, which the Princess finds “delightful” (2.48); she recurs to that later: “It is most extraordinary, your knowing about Schopenhauer” (295); “your knowing poor dear old ‘Schop.’” (2.59); he refers back to this in his letter to her from Venice, calling Schopenhauer “that musty misogynist” (2.142), a view shared by Sisi, though both she and Ludwig II “revered the philosophy of Schopenhauer” (Hamann). In the last scene she says to the sinister Schinkel: “You’re English is remarkably good—I wish I spoke German as well” (2.424). Again, James seems to play ironically with the originally German identity of his model.
Parallel Beauties
Christina first appears as “a young girl, apparently of about twenty. She was tall and slender, and dressed with extreme elegance; she led by a cord a large poodle of the most fantastic aspect” (229). Sisi’s tallness (172 cm) and slimness were much commented on as was her elegance of dress. Her hour-glass waist was along with her hair her most celebrated physical feature. She was also a dog-lover. Sisi’s dazzling beauty was her most celebrated attribute. Beauty ran in the family, among her sisters, and also in Ludwig II and Crown Prince Rudolf. In her late twenties she grew in self-confidence as “she felt more every day the power of her beauty over her husband, but also over the entire outer world” (Corti). Lady Aurora comments on Christina: “She might do so many other things. She might charm the world” (2.192). Rosy Muniment thinks that “the Princess might be anything, she might be royal or imperial” (2.205). Hyacinth notes a “divine power of conciliation” as “the most wonderful of her secrets” (2.209). These references point beyond the actual Christina to her ideal potential, which coincides with the ideal image of Sisi, whose charm at least in the early years played a great role in Austrian politics. “It was not deference, however, her face provoked, but startled, submissive admiration; Roderick’s smile fell dead, and he sat eagerly staring. A pair of extraordinary dark blue eyes, a mass of dusky hair over a low forehead, a blooming oval of perfect purity, a flexible lip, just touched with disdain, the step and carriage of a tired princess—these were the general features of his vision” (229). Sisi’s most distinctive physical feature was her dusky hair, reaching to her feet, and tended with elaborate daily care. Her portraits do not show a low forehead except when the hair covers it, but her face could be described as oval. Christina’s hair is highlighted at several points: “Before him sat Christina Light, in a white dress, with her shoulders bare, her magnificent hair twisted into a classic coil, and her head admirably poised. Meeting Rowland’s gaze, she smiled a little, only with her deep gray eyes, without moving. She looked divinely beautiful” (279; NY 170, “divinely fair”).
"Christina, still in her white dress, with her shoulders bare, was standing before a mirror, readjusting her hair, the arrangement of which, on this occasion, had apparently not met the young sculptor's approval…. As Rowland entered, Christina was losing patience. “Do it yourself, then!” she cried, and with a rapid movement unloosed the great coil of her tresses and let them fall over her shoulders. They were magnificent, and with her perfect face dividing their rippling flow she looked like some immaculate saint of legend being led to martyrdom." (282; NY 178)
"“Mamma’s not really shocked,” added Christina in a moment, as if she had guessed her mother’s by-play. “She is only afraid that Mr. Hudson might have injured my hair, and that, per consequenza, I should sell for less.” “You unnatural child!” cried mamma. “You deserve that I should make a fright of you!” And with half a dozen skillful passes she twisted the tresses into a single picturesque braid, placed high on the head, as a kind of coronal (283; NY 179, producing the effect of a coronet)."
In the New York text of Roderick Hudson, James upgrades his accounts of Christina and Prince Casamassima in a more splendidly imperial direction. Here are some examples: "There she stands in her incomparable beauty, and Roman princes come and bow to her (297); there she stands in all her grace, and les grands de la terre come and do her homage "(NY 151). "She has been told… that her face is a fortune, and that, if she plays her cards, she may marry a duke" (273); "that her face is her fortune, that she was made for great things, and that if she plays her cards she may marry God knows whom" (NY 164). "He had the great quality of regarding himself in a thoroughly serious light (322); with his dim aspirations and alarms, he felt himself in charge of the very highest interests" (NY 241). "A race of princes who for six hundred years have married none but the daughters if princes (322); who for endless generations have sought brides only with some correspondence of name and condition" (NY 241-2). "She would be forced. There would be circumstances (323); There would be circumstances, conditions, necessities, des raisons majeures" (NY 243). "An old uncle, Monsignor B——" (324); "an old uncle, a high ecclesiastic, a Cardinal probably of the next batch" (NY 243). "She would make too perfect a princess to miss her destiny" (325); "She would fill a great position too perfectly to miss her destiny" (NY 245). "Her hair reached down to her feet, her hands were the hands of a princess" (329); "of an empress" (NY 251). "I have raised money on that girl’s face! I’ve taken her to the Jews and bade her put up her veil (329); put off her veil and let down her hair, show her teeth, her shoulders, her arms, all sorts of things" (NY 252).
The veil is to hide Christina’s angelic and dazzling beauty when she is ten; James subscribes thoroughly to the myth of unparalleled beauty, which in real life grew up about Sisi; the aging Sisi used veils and fans to hide the decay of that beauty. In the second novel, the drama of her dazzling beauty is replayed: “The simplest way to express the instant effect upon Hyacinth of her fair face of welcome is to say that she dazzled him” (1.205-6). “She was fair, shining, slender, with an effortless majesty…. Her dark eyes, blue or grey, something that was not brown…. The head, where two or three diamond stars glittered in the thick, delicate hair which defined its shape, suggested to Hyacinth something antique and celebrated” (1.207). A famous portrait of Sisi by Franz Xaver Winterhalter shows just such diamond stars in her hair. This is a very clear allusion to Sisi. James would have known this painting of 1864 because “countless reproductions, above all of the image in ballroom dress with the diamond stars (Diamentensternen) in the hair, made Sisi’s beauty known worldwide” (Hamann). “Her dress was dark and rich; she had pearls round her neck and an old rococo fan in her hand” (1.208), “her painted fan” (1.223). Her stature is again noted. “She smiled down at Hyacinth—who even as he stood up was of slightly smaller stature—with all her strange high radiance” (1.298). “She had still the air of youth” (at the time of composition of the novel the real-life Sisi would be in her late forties). Sisi’s youthfulness at this age was considered phenomenal. As to the color of Christina’s eyes, which here as in the earlier novel varies between blue and gray, one may recall the famous changing hues of Emma Bovary’s eyes.
The beauty trope is often simply repeated in the rewriting of Roderick Hudson: “she’s one of the great beauties of all time” (360: NY 296); “the most beautiful girl in Europe” (388; NY 339). But it is sometimes played down: “if my daughter is the greatest beauty in the world, some of the credit is mine” (326); “if my daughter is the gifted creature you see, I deserve some of the credit of the creation (NY 248). Sometimes it is enhanced: “the same indifferent tread” (330); “the same Olympian command of the air, as it were, not less than of the earth” (NY 254). “Her complexion, her glance, her step, her dusky tresses, may have been seen before in a goddess, but never in a woman” (360); “the planting and the mass of her dusky tresses, may have been seen before in a goddess on a cloud or a nymph on a Greek gem, but never in a mere modern girl” (NY 296-7). The multiplication of Greek allusions might reflect James’s awareness of Sisi’s Hellenism later in life; she built a palace in Corfu and learned modern Greek so well that she translated two plays by Shakespeare into it.
The New York version of The Princess Casamassima has some touches of a similar upgrading: “luminous sweetness” and “delicate consideration” (148) become “luminous charity” and “direct tenderness” (1.212), matching more precisely the impact of Sisi; “the Princess’s sharpest anxieties” (381) become “the eminent lady’s high anxieties” (2.183). “In her behaviour, the unexpected was the only thing to be looked for” (364) is rephrased to yield a deeper characterization: “the note of her conduct would always be a sort of splendour of freedom” (2.159-60). Her “brilliant mildness” (335) becomes a “glory of gentleness” (2.160). The vocabulary of “splendour” and “glory” exalts the personage. But “a sort of glorious charity” (365) becomes “a rapture of active ministering charity” (2.160). In both texts, when she visits the invalid Rose Muniment, “she had put off her splendour… made herself humble for her pious excursion” (365; 2.160).
The rewriting of Roderick Hudson enhances the portrayal of Christina in the light of her later development: “Christina, I suspect is very clever” (273): “Christina, I imagine, has plenty of wit—also plenty of will” (NY 164). (Mrs Light, in reply to Rowland’s question whether Christina really cares for Casamassima.) “She is a living riddle. She must needs follow out every idea that comes into her head. Fortunately, most of them don’t last long” (326); “Even to me who have so known and so watched her she’s a living riddle. She has ideas of her own, and theories and views and inspirations, each of which is the best in the world until another is better. She’s perfectly sure about each, but they are fortunately so many that she can’t be sure of any one very long” (NY 247-8). “She is generous” (360); “she’s intelligent and bold and free and so awfully on the lookout for sensations” (NY 297).
As in the case of Sisi, Christina’s beauty is subordinate to a charm of personality: “he declared if Miss Light were inordinately plain, she would still be the most fascinating of women. ‘I’ve quite forgotten her beauty,’ he said, ‘or rather I have ceased to perceive it as something distinct and defined, something independent of the rest of her. She is all one, and all consummately interesting!’” (RH 288). For “the most fascinating of women” the New York text has, rather flatly, “the most wonderful of women and the best conceivable company” (NY 187). “She is never the same” (288); “She’s never the same, and you never know how she’ll be. And it’s not for a pose—it’s because there are fifty of her” (NY 187). James compliments himself on the portrait of Christina: “The multiplication of touches had produced even more life than the subject required” (NY xx). But very many of these touches are drawn from the real-life Sisi, who was a living encyclopedia of female charm and fascination.
Other Parallels
Once we have this thread, parallels between the real Empress and the fictional Princess spring into view. Sisi’s vivid intellectual and contemplative life is mirrored in Christina’s: “she was full of resources…, she found time to read, to write, to commune with her piano and above all to think” (2.195). Like Sisi, Christina “asked personal questions with a directness that was sometimes embarrassing to the subject” (2.196-7). Like Sisi, she is “an immense walker” ch 22 268; “‘I’ve come on foot from the far south of London—how many miles? four or five?—and I’m not a particle tired.’ ‘Che forza, che forza!’ the old woman sighed. ‘She’ll knock you up completely’” (2.180). Her vitality is emphasized: “Hyacinth was struck more than ever by the fund of life that was in her, the energy of feeling, the high free reckless spirit” (2.177). The frequent occurrence of the word “high” echoes language of royalty in Vienna, where the Emperor and Empress were normally referred to as “high” personages.
The conclusion of chapter 33 may hint at a lesbian characterization of Christina: “She and Lady Aurora were evidently on the point of striking up a tremendous intimacy, and as he turned this idea over walking away it made him sad for strange vague reasons that he couldn’t have expressed” (2.202). Sisi has often been the subject of such speculation, given her great affection for beautiful women and the lack of proof of sexual relations with men other than her husband; that James was clued in to such matters is clear from the immediately preceding novel, The Bostonians. Madame Grandoni assures the Prince that his wife’s crimes are merely political: “If she were a real wretch, capable of all (1886, 468-9: ‘a licentious woman’), she wouldn’t behave as she does now, she wouldn’t expose herself to the supposition (1886, ‘irresistible interpretations’)” (2.310). But she does have an affair with Paul Muniment.
The Princess is accompanied by a Captain Sholto just as Elizabeth was accompanied by Captain George “Bay” Middleton? Middleton was rather an ugly man, though striking in the saddle. Paul Muniment calls Sholto a “tout” for the Princess, and herself a “monster” (1.258-9). Like Middleton, Sholto has been “in camps and courts” (1.255). As Miss Pynsent perceives, he is “some kind of uncanny masquerader” (1.260)—again underlining the unreality of the Captain’s behavior,—and perhaps an element of unreality pervading the novel. Middleton was Scotch, and Sholto is a boy’s name in Scotland, that of the legendary progenitor of the Douglas clan. Sholto holds that she is “the cleverest woman in Europe,” but is lacking in heart: “The Princess isn’t troubled with that sort of thing” (2.71; 303: “The Princess hasn’t”). Ironically, Sholto like Bay Middleton is a hunter, but the Princess unlike Sisi despises the sport: “He had travelled all over the globe several times, ‘for the shooting,’ in that brutal way of the English” (311); expanded with feeling in the New York edition: “in that murdering ravaging way of the English, the destruction, the extirpation of creatures more beautiful, more soaring and more nimble than themselves” (2.82). It is hard to see how Sholto can set himself up as her adorer and why he is tolerated by the Princess as a hanger-on without the shared passion for hunting that brought Middleton and Sisi together. In real life Middleton preempted the end of the relationship by riding off; Sisi, no doubt offended, was silent; losing a ring of hers that he carried round his neck, Middleton took it as an omen, and in fact died in a race three weeks later.
The first interview of Prince Casamassima with Madame Grandoni captures many traits of Sisi — “expensive and luxurious” (1.274)—her shopping expeditions were a bursar’s nightmare—whereas the Prince lives frugally, as Franz Joseph did. “Christina will never consider you—your name, your illustrious traditions—in any case in which she doesn’t consider herself much more” (1.277). A minor Italian prince would not be concerned about his wife’s behavior in London, but in the case of an Empress it could be an international incident.
Christina, like Sisi, is, as Hyacinth perceives, “proudly, ironically reserved, even to the point of passing with many people as a model of the unsatisfactory” (1.294). How would Hyacinth know this? But it is a trait of Sisi that would be known to the thousands gossipping about her all over Europe. Hyacinth has the right blend of awe, discretion, and adoration for encountering such a high personage: “He hadn’t made such an ass of himself as might very well have happened; he had been saved by the thrill of his interest and admiration, which has not gone to his head and prompted him to show that he too in his improbable little way was remarkable, but had kept him in a state of anxious, conscious tension, as if the occasion had been a great appointed solemnity, some initiation more formal than any he believed practised even in the grimmest subterranean circles” (1.295). All of this is more suited to imperial royalty than to a minor Italian princess.
His response to Christina’s bibelots again carries overtones of Sisi’s collecting habits: they reveal “the character of a woman of high fashion…. their beauty and oddness revealed not only whole provinces of art, but refinements of choice on the part of their owner, complications of mind and—almost—terrible depths of temperament” (1.285). Christina’s combination of charm and majesty is again Sisi’s: “And in this peculiar high grace of her presence he couldn’t have told you if she struck him as more proud or more kind” (1.285). “He found himself discussing the Bacchus and Ariadne and the Elgin Marbles with one of the most remarkable women in Europe” (1.286). Hyacinth reminds us a little of Keats here, and Tintner has suggested that Christina is his Lamia. Christina describes art as “a synthesis made in the interest of pleasure” (1.287). She talks irreverently of her husband, telling Hyacinth that she hadn’t seen “for nearly three years” (1.287), which matches Sisi’s much-discussed absences of years from the Viennese court. Christina asks about Pinnie and in response to Hyacinth’s description of her as “old and tired and sad and not very successful” she replies in a rather narcissistic way, “Ah, well, she’s not the only one!” At the date of writing Sisi would have been approaching fifty and would have been well known to feel exactly what those four epithets indicate. “All I ask of my husband is to let me alone. But he won’t. He won’t return my indifference” (1.288-9) again corresponds to Sisi’s situation, as does the following exchange: “‘It can’t be easy to be indifferent to you.’ ‘Why not if I’m odious? I can be—oh there’s no doubt of that!” (1.289). She claims to have been “extremely reasonable” with her husband (as Sisi was with hers in arranging his friendship with the actress Katharina Schratt [1853-1940] as a compensation for her own desertion), and that “most of the wrongs—the big ones, those that settled the question—have been on his side. You may tell me of course that that’s the pretension of every woman who’s made a mess of her marriage” (1.289). Sisi reproached Franz Joseph with his philanderings early in their marriage; she saw herself as the victim of his family. But the basic wrong was to have married her at all (at age sixteen). As for Christina, “bored to death by her royal spouse, and taking revenge upon him for his ‘mysterious crime’—and what a convenient one!—she throws herself into all kinds of social causes with more fervor than discrimination… a discontented, bored, neurotic and empty society woman struggling to amuse herself” (Maxwell Geismar). Sadly, this description perfectly fits the beloved Empress as well.
“He has conducted himself after the fashion of a spoiled child, a childe with a bad little nature, in a rage; he had been fatally wanting in dignity and wisdom and had given the Princess an advantage which she took on the spot and would keep for ever. He had acted without manly judgement, had put his uncles upon her (as if she cared for his uncles, powerful prelate as one of them might be!), had been suspicious and jealous on exactly the wrong occasions—occasions as to which her resentment of it had been just and in particular had been showy” (1.302; 213: “occasions on which such ideas were a gratuitous injury”). “This was how you spoiled your affairs most of all—by treating a person (and such a person!) as if, as a matter of course, she lied” (1.306). “At the bottom then of much that she does is the fact that she’s ashamed of having married you” (1.307). As in Sisi’s case, it is impossible to disentangle the marital disappointment, the subersive resentment of the established order, and the deeper metaphysical disillusionment.
Disillusionment
Melancholy and disillusionment are basic to Christina’s character, as to Sisi’s. She looks as if “the soul of a world-wearied mortal had found its way into the blooming body of a goddess”; “‘Where in the world has Miss Light been before she is twenty,’ observers asked, ‘to have left all her illusions behind?’” (RH 294; NY 198). “I am tired to death of myself; I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet” (301; NY 208). “I am weary, I am more lonely than ever, I wish I were dead!” (369; NY 311, “weary and dreary”). In the second novel her disillusion have become a settled state: “There’s nothing in life in which I’ve not been awfully disappointed” (1.291).
Religion too has faded: “I had the real religious passion. It has passed away” (RH 346; NY 278: “I had for three months—positively—the perfect vocation”). Rowland finds this unconvincing: “She liked to idealize herself, to take interesting and picturesque attitudes to her own imagination” (346); “She liked to carry herself further and further, to see herself in situation and action” (NY 278). The religious note is secularized in the New York edition: Rowland no longer says “I believe in God” (347), but “I’m very old-fashioned. I believe in the grand old English Bible” (NY 279). She expresses disillusion: “I was a little wrinkled old woman at ten” (347; NY 279). She asks, “Please tell me about your religion” (348; NY 280, “your faith”). He replies elusively: “It is simply a sentiment that makes part of my life, and I can’t detach myself from it sufficiently to talk about it” (348); “Such things—one’s way of meeting, morally, the mystery of the universe—lie very deep down, at the bottom of one’s trunk. One can’t always put one’s hand on them in a moment” (NY 280). This echoes the famous exchange in Faust (1.3413-68) in which the protagonist explains his nebulous religiosity to the perplexed Gretchen, again surrounding Christina with German atmosphere. Christina descants on religion in a long passage which disappears in the later text: “Beware, then, of finding yourself confronted with doubt and despair! I am sure that doubt, at times, and the bitterness that comes of it, can be terribly eloquent. To tell the truth, my lonely musings, before you came in, were eloquent enough in their way. What do you know of anything but this strange, terrible world that surrounds you? How do you know that your faith is not a mere crazy castle in the air…. Nothing is true, or fixed, or permanent. We all seem to be playing with shadows more or less grotesque. It all comes over me here so dismally! The very atmosphere of this cold, deserted church seems to mock at one’s longing to believe in something. Who cares for it now, who comes to it, who believes in it?… And yet the Catholic church was once the proudest institution in the world…. When such a mighty structure as that turns out to have a flaw, what faith is one to put in one’s poor little views and philosophies?” (348-9). Such discourse actually fits the real life Sisi better than the fictional Christina. Despite this, Christina does take a religious turn: “One day she got up in the depths of despair; at her wit’s end, I suppose, in other words, for a new sensation. Suddenly it occurred to her that the Catholic church might after all hold the key” (407). This, too, is omitted in the New York edition. These omissions show James focussing on the psychology of religion and withdrawing from theological discussion, for which he was poorly qualified and which was a threat to the integrity of his art. In The Princess Casamassima Christina is a Catholic: “I’m a Catholic, you know—but so little by my own doing!” (2.198; 1886 text, 391: “—but so little!”). “I don’t know if I’m religious or whether if I were my religion would be superstitious, but my superstitions are what I’m faithful to” (2.17; 266: “are certainly religious”). Sholto tells Hyacinth that “she wanted to cultivate a belief in ghosts” (2.75); her attitude to her superstitions is that of a collector. Sisi dabbled in spiritualism. Like Sisi, she has bursts of piety, but not of a standard ecclesiastical kind. When Hyacinth tells her “he would have conformed to the great religious rule—to live each hour as if it were to be one’s last,” she replies, “In holiness, you mean—in great recueillement?” (294; 2.57). She herself is an object of worship. Roderick uses the language of the divine: “that goddess of the Villa Ludovisi” (264; NY 151); “She’s a goddess” (270); “The daughter’s simply a breathing goddess” (NY 160). “To dance the cotillon with Miss Light” (299) becomes in the New York text, “to dance a cotillon with a divinity” (NY 206). “And then her mouth! It’s as if a pair of lips had been shaped to utter pure truth without doing it dishonor!” (288): “And then her divine mouth—it might really be that of a goddess! It’s as if a pair of lips had been shaped just not to utter all the platitudes and all the pretences” (NY 187). For his part, Hyacinth “questioned if she were really of the same substance with the humanity he had hitherto known. She might be divine but he could see she understood human needs” (1.207). He speaks of her “hands divine” (2.145). Roderick and Hyacinth have similar perceptions of her formal graces. Roderick admires “the extraordinary perfection of her beauty. ‘I had no idea of it,’ he said, ‘till I began to look at her with an eye to reproducing line for line and curve for curve. Her face is the most exquisite piece of modeling that ever came from creative hands. Not a line without meaning, not a hair’s breadth that is not admirably finished” (288; NY 186-7). Hyacinth is struck by “purity of line and form, of cheek and chin and lip and brow, a colour that seemed to live and glow, a radiance of grace and eminence and success” (1.207). Her first worshipper was her mother, on discovering her beauty as a child: “I worshipped her” (RH 328; NY 251). Madame Grandoni says, “She always looks the same: like an angel who came down from heaven yesterday and has been disappointed in her first day on earth” (1.272). In Rose Muniment’s dwelling, she is “like a radiant angel” visiting a corner of earth (2.160), and “had cast the charm of the worshipful over the little company” (2.162; 1986, 366: “thrown a spell of adoration”). Christina may be adored for her beauty, but she is exposed to criticism from the start. Paul Muniment suspects “she’s an idle, bedizened trifler; perhaps even a real profligate female” (1.230). “Profligate” refers to the suspicion that the young men the Princess picks up were also her sexual partners; similar rumor swirled around Sisi, though probably baseless. But by the end of the second novel, much disillusionment with Christina has set in. The question whether she is “humbug” is bruited (2.194); Hyacinth finds himself sympathizing with her much-abused husband (2.317); Millicent calls her “your trumpery Princess” (2.337). The Romanian philosopher Émile Cioran found deep significance in the figure of Sisi: “She was totally desenganada, disabused, cut off from the world. She was not interested in the ideological debates of her epoch [a difference from James’s Princess], her formation being principally literary…. She would have been disappointed in any circumstances; she was born disappointed.” “‘Madness is truer than life,’ the empress said, and she could have reached this conclusion without the help of a single disappointment. Why did she like Shakespeare’s fools so much? Why did she visit lunatic asylums wherever she went? She had a marked passion for what is extreme, for everything that differs from the common fate, for everything on the margins. She knew that madness was within herself, and this threat flattered her perhaps. The feeling of her singularity sustained her.” “I think that she was incapable of experiencing a real passion. The illusion that this inevitably entails would no doubt have been impossible for her. Perhaps she fell in love as a game.” What Cioran says about Sisi’s love-life applies with perfect accuracy to Christina. “She detested people, with the exception of the little folk, fishermen, peasants, village idiots. She was in her element only during her solitary ruminations…. What is going to happen, the next act in the historical tragedy of Europe, already unfolded in Vienna, the symbol henceforth of collapse. Without this grandiose backdrop, Sissi would only have been an unhoped-for subject for biographers, or a goddess for the ravaged. Tsarist Russia was not so lucky as to have a comparable figure at its close.” “The obsessions, fads, and oddities of a Sissi could take an extra charge of meaning only in an epoch that was going to culminate in a model catastrophe. This is why the figure of the empress is so significant, and why we understand her better than did her contemporaries.”
Subversion
“Nothing in Roderick Hudson suggests the revolutionary princess of the later novel. Somewhere, then, James is likely to have seen or heard or read about a beautiful, romantic lady who, separated from her husband and defying the aristocratic name, took an active part in revolution” (Tilley). But James would have followed Sisi’s career in the newspapers and in conversation, and noted her rather subversive activities in England and Ireland in the late 1870s. In Ireland, in 1879 and 1880, she had been greeted by adoring crowds, at a time when Queen Victoria, well received in her visits of 1849, 1853, and 1861, was unpopular, returning for a last visit only in 1900. Sisi could well have been regarded as fomenting rebellion. Sympathetic to the revolutionary ideas of 1848 she had used her influence to set up the Kingdom of Hungary in 1867, splitting the Austrian Empire in two. The new notes in the character of Christina Light roughly correspond to new aspects of Elisabeth’s character that had come to the fore since the publication of Roderick Hudson. James must have been aware of Queen Victoria’s disapproval of Sisi’s influence in Ireland. He wanted to go to Ireland in order to “see a country in a state of revolution.” (letter to Thomas S. Perry, Jan. 1886). On one of her hunts, in 1879, she penetrated the precincts of Maynooth College, the national seminary (my alma mater), which Victoria suspected of encouraging Fenian sympathies, and she was made much of by the priests and seminarians, on two further visits as well. Her second visit to Ireland in 1880 prompted Victoria to tell Franz Joseph to recall his wife. Unprecedently, he commanded, and she obeyed. Her host in Ireland, ironically, was Earl Spencer, ancestor of Princess Diana. Sisi’s political outlook is now better known thanks to her verse diary, with its withering satire on her husband’s family and on Queen Victoria’s. She planned that it would be published in 1950, “in favor of those unfortunates who are branded criminals for their political struggles and libertarian inclinations” (Corti). In a changed world, it finally became public eighty-six years after her death: Kaiserin Elisabeth, Das poetische Tagebuch, ed. Brigitte Hamann (Vienna, 1984).
Sisi pretended to scorn class distinctions and to cherish the people, which endeared her to the people of Hungary and of Ireland, and she is still recalled in Munich and Vienna today as “the people’s Empress.” But it was a role she played increasingly rarely, generally cherishing her solitude. It endeared her to the people of Hungary and of Ireland, and she is still recalled in Munich and Vienna today as “the people’s Empress.” Christina’s interest in “the people” is a repetitive trope in The Princess Casamassima: “I like to know all sorts of people” (1.209). “We take a great interest in the people” (1.212) Christina finds English society boring — “it’s the common people who please her” (1.278)—this description applies to the rapturous love affair between Sisi and the common people of Hungary and Ireland. James’s detection of the psychological motive of this interest is acute: “She would be world-weary—that was another of her notes; and the extravagance of her attitude in these new relations would have its root and its apparent logic in her need to feel freshly about something or other” (1.xix). “She wishes to throw herself into the revolution, to guide it, to enlighten it” Madame Grandoni explains (1.220). She later warns Hyacinth of those “who even think it useful to throw bombs into innocent crowds and shoot pistols at their rulers” (1.283), ironic in view of Sisi’s fate at an assassin’s dagger in 1898. “The pronunciation of her words and the very punctuation of her sentences were the revelation of what he supposed to be society—the very Society to the destruction of which he was dedicated” (1.216). The anarchist Lucheni, full of resentment at the ruling classes who could afford to stay in the best hotels and who set to limits to their greed. “I’m one of thousands of young men of my class—you know, I suppose, what that is—in whose brains certain ideas are fermenting” (1.216). She replies, “You’re much more interesting to me than if you were an exception” (1.217). Showing off her bookbinder to Lady Marchant and her daughters is “an episode from which the Princess appeared to derive an exquisite gratification” (295) or as the New York edition has it, “that appeared to minister in the Princess to a thorough ironic glee” (2.59). He asks why not tell them who he was: “Otherwise, where was the point” (2.59) and she replies that they’d not have believed her.
The decline of Christina in the second novel—“She has degenerated into a bored and willful woman, who seeks excitement in undermining a society whose greatest flaw, in her eyes, is its dullness” (M. E. Grenander)—bespeaks a deeper distress, again analogous to that of Sisi. As Millicent Bell observes: “There is a tragic side to the Princess, even if James’s tone in treating her represses it.” She is in the line of Daisy Miller, “young women whose resistance to a preconcluded definition is the essence of their ordeal.” But her drama is more complex and elusive than this suggests, and again mirrors the complexity of the real-life model. The young Christina of Roderick Hudson might invite comparison with Daisy Miller, but the mature Princess is beyond that. Christina “haunted James as someone whose destiny could not easily be concluded and even in this novel she remains unconcluded” (Bell), as Sisi’s destiny remained unconcluded when James wrote. “Like Isabel she is in search of some adequate employment of her superior character, and cannot find it” (Bell)—that sentence fits Sisi so well that it could serve as her epitaph!
Though professing “very little respect for distinctions of class” (1.289), Christina may remain intensely class-conscious, taking a perverse delight in acting as if she were déclassée. Hyacinth imagines that “perhaps it was her habit to sent out every evening for some witless stranger to amuse her” (1.212). The social obstacles are a challenge she delights to brave. An obscure Italian princess in exile might be described as “a woman in my position, who’s tiresomely known, and to whom every sort of bad faith is sure to be imputed” (1.216), but the description better fits Sisi, dogged by paparazzi and the object of incessant public commentary. Even in the strange final scene in which the Princess and Schinkel keep watch outside Hyacinth’s room, until finally they break down the door and discover his dead body, touches reminiscent of Sisi are added: “She was used to the last vulgarity of stare and didn’t mind it” (2.424; 548: “She was used to being looked at hard”). She pays the cab over-generously, and in response to Schinkel’s observation, “You gave him too much,” replies, “Oh, he looked like a nice man. I am sure he deserved it” (550; 2.426). A similar scene is depicted in Sisi’s Greek tutor Constantin Christomanos’s adoring memoir: “The Empress bade me give the young man a gold coin: ‘If it was a matter of helping us over a greater obstacle, I’d have given him tenfold,’ see said with the satisfied smile of inner triumph.” Even at the end her anxiety about Hyacinth does not suspend her aesthetizing and self-dramatizing outlook: “The Princess was anxious, was in a fever; but she could still relish the romance of standing in a species of back slum and fraternising with a personage so like a very tame horse whose collar galled him” (2.424).
Christina’s relations with her husband’s family are exactly Sisi’s with her in-laws: “My husband traces his descent from the fifth century, and he’s the greatest bore in Europe. That’s the kind of people I was condemned to by my marriage” (1.291). The Hapsburgs traced their lineage to the founder of the family, Adalrich, Duke of Alsace, who died after c. 683 AD. They may have regarded the young Sisi as privileged to marry into them. As to Christina, the Casamassima family “considered that they had done her a great honour in receiving her into their august circle (putting the best face on a bad business) after they had moved heaven and earth to keep her out of it” (1.294). “What she had had to suffer from their family tone… had evidently planted in her soul a lasting resentment and contempt” (1.295).
“Hyacinth gathered that the force of reaction and revenge might carry her far, make her modern and democratic and heretical à outrance—lead her to swear by Darwin and Spencer and all the scientific iconoclasts as well as by the revolutionary spirit” (1.295). Sisi had shown these attitudes above all in taking in hand the education of her precocious son Rudolf, whom she supplied with teachers representing precisely these attitudes in science, politics, and religion, with a strong dash of anticlericalism. “Heretical” is an odd quality to ascribe the Italian-born American woman, but had precise connotations in Catholic Austria. But here it could refer to social “heresies” like those of Lady Aurora (1.291).
Like Sisi “she had never been in America, and knew very little about it, though she wanted greatly to cross the Atlantic” (1.292); a statement that does not quite fit the daughter of an American woman. She speaks of Fate as Sisi did: “her destiny might require her to take some step” (1.293). Again pure Sisi: “her disgust with a thousand social arrangements, her rebellion against the selfishness, the corruption, the iniquity, the cruelty, the imbecillity of the people who all over Europe had the upper hand” (1.293).
Sisi was notoriously self-obsessed, and it is to escape such self-obsession that Christina wants “to throw herself into some effort that would make her forget her own affairs and comprehend the troubles and efforts of others” (1.293). James indicates that her political slumming is but a further twist in her self-obsession. Sisi’s atttude to her social obligations is replicated in Christina’s: “I’ve got to pay stupid visits myself, visits where the only comfort will be that I shall make the people jump” (1.298). The public was well apprised of Sisi’s marital dissatisfaction. She frequently wished that her husband had never seen her, and after the Mayerling tragedy in 1889 rued that she had brought the madness of her Bavarian family into her husband’s family.
The Prince is suspicious of “this English Captain… Godfrey Gerald Cholto” and Madame Grandoni assures him that “he doesn’t count the least little bit” (1.308). “‘Isn’t he then in love with her?’ ‘Naturally. He has however no hope…. He accepts the situation better than you. He occupies himself—as she has strongly recommended him in my hearing to do—with other women!” (1.309). Sholto may be “creeping after stags in the Highlands” (1.323), matching the Scotch huntsman Middleton. Dragged into spying on Paul and Christina by her jealous husband, Hyacinth—here repeatedly given the manlier title “Mr. Robinson”—“felt his heart beat insanely, ignobly” (2.324), with jealousy. He is as much in love with Paul as with Christina, or perhaps more, to judge from such passages as this: “he merged himself, resting happy for the time, in the consciousness that Paul was a grand fellow, that friendship was a purer feeling than love and that there was an immense deal of affection between them. He didn’t even observe at that moment that it was preponderantly on his own side” (2:219). The Princess does not introduce him into real Society, and “her feeling for him is erotically indifferent and coldly curious—at best, coldly maternal” (Bell). The men Sisi patronized were useful to her education, and replaced when they had served that purpose. “It is because he is a citizen of that netherworld” (Bell) that Hyacinth replaces Sholto, but he disappoints Christina by being too aristocratic to really represent it and is replaced by the more rough-hewn Paul. Hyacinth’s love for Christina is that of a son seeking a mother. His premonition of danger to her takes on extra pathos if we think of Sisi: “dearest Princess, if anything should happen to you—! But his voice fell; the horror of it, a dozen hideous images of her possible perversity and her possible punishment were again before him, as he had already seen them in sinister musings” (2.405-6). James might be credited with some premonitory intuition here and in his account of Christina’s discovery of the dead Hyacinth. Three years after he wrote, Crown Prince Rudolf shot himself and his willing companion Baroness Vetsera, at the Mayerling hunting-lodge, in the most shocking incident of Sisi’s reign, which left her a desolate Mater Dolorosa clad in black for the rest of her life.
Hyacinth, recently orphaned a second time by the loss of his adoptive mother Pinnie, seeks in Christina a mother about all, and is crushed by her final indifference: “She turned from him as with a beat of great white wings that raised her straight out of the bad air of the personal. It took her up too high, it put an end to their talk; expressing an indifference to what it might interest him to think of her today, and even a contempt for it, that brought tears to his eyes” (2.406; the image of the wings, added in the New York text, may owe something to The Wings of the Dove). Hyacinth, like Roderick, is crushed by the onward march of Christina, who seals his destiny. But her own destiny is still wide open at the end of the story, and there are intimations that it will be a dark one.
Appendix: here is another example of how the failure to identity the real model generates unconvincing postulates:
"Another Model for Christina Light" by B. Richards, Brasenose College, Oxford University (The Henry James Review 5 (Fall 1983):60-65.
"One feels a certain need to find an original or originals for Christina since her character is so rich and full—so full, in fact, that James realized that he had not exhausted her possibilities in one book, and re-introduced her in The Princess Casamassima. I am anxious to suggest a supplementary source for Christina not because we need someone in the background of reality to be convinced of her plausibility—she is a powerful creation in her own right, and needs no support—but because opening our minds to the possibility that a fictional character may have several reallife prototypes forces us to relinquish literalist readings of fiction and to have greater respect for the artist's creative and inventive imagination. Christina Light is not a portrait of a single historical individual, but an invention, with traits of a number of women. This essay is a further contribution to a picture of James's creative methods, and, as we shaU see, also a contribution to the study of his methods of textual revision. Elena Lowe is sufficiently convincing as a source, so far as the beauty and the enigmatic quality of Christina Light are concerned, and doubtless she provided a touch of Christina's irresponsibility, but there are other features that we do not find in her, and for these we have to turn to another American expatriate of James's Roman years: Eleanor Strong. More than any other woman James knew at this time, she was capricious, and this was the dominant adjective for Christina Light. On the available evidence, she contributed as much to the creation of James's heroine as Elena Lowe and Mrs. Wister. James came across Eleanor Strong in Rome in 1869. She was in the American circle in which he moved; he first met her through his relation Mrs. Ward. He described her as "a very sweet and agreeable woman" with a "youthful and precocious daughter" (HJL I, 173). She was living away from her husband, Charles Edward Strong, as she had been since 1866."