Abstract
Readers of James’s novels and tales get to see very few corpses and only rarely witness a moment of death. In only a handful of cases is the moment of a character’s death directly reported by the narrator. Mrs Marden in ‘Sir Edmund Orme’ and Morgan Moreen in ‘The Pupil’ (1891), Ralph Limbert in ‘The Next Time’ (1895), George Stransom in ‘The Altar of the Dead,’ and Miles in ‘The Turn of the Screw’ all fall dead on the spot in the closing lines. The heart suddenly fails. In a few more works, such as Roderick Hudson and The Princess Casamassima, the narrative gives us a fairly direct view of the principal corpse. But even when the fiction does deliver the shock of an apparently direct encounter with death — the narrative seeming to bend the reader’s head to gaze into a character’s lifeless face — this moment is constrained. Our access to the spectacle of death is policed by James’s characteristically urbane prose style and fairly rigorous control over point of view. In many cases, the narrative elaborately denies us sight of the corpse, or even of a ritually substitute body such as the grave, and instead encourages us to peer through multiple layers of suggestion. This effect climaxes in The Wings of the Dove, where the whole text becomes suffused with a death so long anticipated and so pointedly unwitnessed by the reader.
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Notes
Ronnie Bailie, The Fantastic Anatomist: A Psychoanalytic Study of Henry James (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), p. 4.
Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, ‘Shame and Performativity: Henry James’s New York Edition Prefaces’ in Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship, ed. David McWhirter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 235.
Barbara Leckie, Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law, 1857–1914 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 154–201.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Paul De Man (New York: Norton, 1965), pp. 237–41.
Lisa Downing, Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Oxford: Legenda, 2003), pp. 1–25.
Henry James, ‘The Altar of the Dead’ in Complete Stories 1892–1898 (New York: Library of America, 1996), p. 485.
Henry James, Watch and Ward in Novels 1871–1880 (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 10.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 3–4.
Palmer Arm and Leg Patent, advertisement, Atlantic Monthly Mar. 1865, back cover.
Susan M. Griffin, ‘Scar Texts: Tracing the Marks of Jamesian Masculinity,’ Arizona Quarterly 53 (1997), 64.
Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (London: Penguin, 1981), pp. 560–601.
Henry James, ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ in Complete Stories 1898–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1996), p. 535.
Barbara Johnson, in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. xi-xlviii.
Henry James, ‘The Jolly Corner’ in Complete Stories 1898–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1996), p. 704; hereafter cited as JC.
Henry James, ‘The Aspern Papers’ in Complete Stories 1884–1891 (New York: Library of America, 1999), p. 303.
Richard Salmon, Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 84.
Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 43–58.
Henry James, ‘The Death of the Lion’ in Complete Stories 1892–1898 (New York: Library of America, 1996), p. 388.
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, 2 vols (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), vol. 2, pp. 386–7; hereafter cited as WD.
James, The American, pp. 871–2. This is the first American book version (1877).
In the New York Edition, a different repetition is used to create the closing cadence: Mrs Tristram’s ‘“poor, poor Claire!”’ emphasises Claire’s disappearance from the world rather than the letter’s; Henry James, The American (New York: Scribner’s, 1907), p. 540.
Stanley Olson, John Singer Sargent: His Portrait (London: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 241–4.
F. Hilaire d’Arois, photographs of Henry James in Portraits — H. James, Jr, Pf MS Am1094, Houghton Library, Harvard University; reprinted in Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, A Biography (London: Hodder, 1992), facing p. 305.
Georg Kolbe, ‘How Death Masks Are Taken’ in Ernst Benkard, Undying Faces: A Collection of Death Masks, trans. Margaret M. Green (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), p. 44. Nietzsche’s death mask is shown as plate 97 in Benkard’s collection; Victor Hugo’s is plate 86. Both can currently be viewed online at Thanatos.net’s Deathmask Gallery (2002–3), URL: http://thanatos.net/deathmasks.
Jeremy Stubbs, ‘Surrealism and the Death-Mask’ in Dying Words: The Last Moments of Writers and Philosophers, ed. Martin Crowley (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), p. 75.
David Lodge, Author, Author (London: Secker & Warburg, 2004).
Joyce’s readings from Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake are available on The James Joyce Audio Collection, narr. James Joyce and Cyril Cusack, audio compact disk (New York: HarperAudio, 2002).
I take these terms from Ruth Leys, ‘Death Masks: Kardiner and Ferenczi on Psychic Trauma,’ Representations 53 (1996), 63.
J. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). One chapter is devoted to James’s ‘The Last of the Valerii.’
Gay Wilson Allen, William James: A Biography (London: Hart-Davis, 1967), p. 491; William James death mask, *45Z-2, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Henry James, The Sacred Fount (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), pp. 34–6.
Henry James, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 581–4.
W. H. Auden, ‘At the Grave of Henry James’ in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1991), p. 310, lines 1, 17.
For a more recent comment on James’s grave see Heather O’Donnell, ‘Stumbling on Henry James,’ Henry James Review 21 (2000), 234–41.
Stephen Prothero, Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 20–1, 100–1.
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© 2005 Andrew Cutting
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Cutting, A. (2005). Corpses and the Corpus. In: Death in Henry James. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230285996_3
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