Abstract
Annie Fields, Emily Dickinson, and Marguerite Duras each recognize Henry James's consistent interest in women's negotiations with the turn-of-the-century imperative of individual self-determination, as complicated by period-specific ideals of femininity. James ambivalently identifies with late-nineteenth-century notions of womanhood, and all of the associated concepts that that idea also represented for him, in ways that are both founded in and resistant to normative paradigms. In this conclusion, I contend that the potential feminism so many women authors, writing in different times and places, have found in James’s work cannot simply be an external imposition by readers trying to force him into conformity with our own era’s sensibilities. In addition, a recognition of the ethnic and class specificity of James’s notion of womanhood, and the limited perspective it provides, must be at the heart of our analyses of what I argue is the queer/feminist potential in his work.
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Notes
- 1.
“There’s a certain slant of light” is F320A in Franklin.
- 2.
Virginia Woolf wrote four separate essays on James, which were published in the posthumous collections The Death of the Moth (1942) and Granite and Rainbow (1958). Woolf concludes the review “Henry James’s Ghost Stories,” first published in the Times Literary Supplement on December 22, 1921 as follows: “We must admit that Henry James has conquered. That courtly, worldly, sentimental old gentleman can still make us afraid of the dark” (292). On the responses of Woolf and other modernists to James, see Maud Ellmann, Chaps. 3 and 4.
- 3.
In addition to Stein’s Four in America (1947), see Moore’s poem “An Octopus,” first published in 1924; Silko’s 2000 novel Gardens in the Dunes as well as the 2012 article in the HJR in which she cites James as an influence for that work; and Cynthia Ozick’s 2010 novel Foreign Bodies.
- 4.
In a 1996 memoir Corin Redgrave recalls his father’s difficulty acknowledging to his son the open secret of his bisexuality, which he attributes to “a split personality,” in a manner reminiscent of the pre-twentieth-century pseudoscientific conceptions of spiritual “ hermaphroditism” that Reis discusses. Corin sometimes describes his father as “gay.” While writing his adaptation of James, Michael Redgrave is in a long-term relationship with a man, installed nearby and closely integrated into the actor’s family life, with his wife and children (17–19, 27–28, 104, 106–109).
- 5.
Way back in 1972, gay rights activist Carl Wittman argued that the “women’s liberation movement” is the “closest ally” of gay men (39). Barbara Smith, writing in 1990, reminds feminists that “the major ‘isms’ including homophobia are intimately and violently intertwined” (100).
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Wichelns, K. (2018). Conclusion: Towards a Queer Feminist James. In: Henry James's Feminist Afterlives. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71800-2_6
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