Reviewed by Jen Camden, Ohio State University.

Critics of Henry James have always been interested in one thing: sex.   We are intrigued by the puzzle of James’s own sexuality, and fascinated by the ambiguous gender and sexual orientations of his characters.  From an early review of Roderick Hudson, which teasingly suggested that ‘Rowland Mallet might be a male Mary Garland, and Mary Garland a female Rowland Mallet, Esquire’ (Kevin J. Hayes, ed.,  Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews), to the debate amongst feminist critics as to whether James, as Gilbert and Gubar have argued, ‘struck out against the women whom [he] saw as both the sources and the witnesses of [his] emasculation’( The War of the Words. Vol. 1 of No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century), or if, as Nina Baym has claimed, his novels ‘pose a continual challenge to the masculinist bias of American critical theory’ (‘Melodramas of Beset Manhood’), James’s portraits of men and women have inspired much critical debate.

In Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity, Leland S. Person enters the critical fray by turning to an under-represented aspect of James studies: the question of masculinity.  While, as Person notes, James’s own masculinity has been subjected to rigorous interrogation, few scholars have devoted sufficient attention to James’s representation of masculinity. Person begins by examining James in relation to George Sand and Honoré de Balzac.  George Sand’s improvisational abilities and her uniquely gendered status, what Person terms a ‘female man,’ occupy one end of the spectrum.  On the other end, Person locates Balzac as a ‘male man’(24).  Between the two, Henry James sits, suspended, as a ‘man in the plural term’(24).  The question of James’s own suspended masculinity is transmuted into his texts, where James plays with the question of masculinity in relation, or in suspense.

In his first chapter, Person turns to the complex quadrangle of relationships in Roderick Hudson.   Person is certainly not the first critic to suggest at least a homosocial relationship between Roderick and Rowland, but his reading differs from other approaches through his incorporation of the aesthetic.  In effect, Person complicates the familiar quadrangle by suggesting that Roderick and Rowland’s relationship is not simply mediated by Mary Garland or Christina Light, but more importantly by Roderick’s art.  Person reads this ‘homoaesthetic creativity’(47) as ultimately narcissistic, observing that Roderick’s artistic development is ‘more narcissistically than relationally’(51) defined, while Rowland is only able to gaze directly on Roderick once death has rendered him ‘statue-like’ and thus ‘Rowland’s gaze and any desire it may express remain narcissistically contained’(57).  This reading reveals the text in which James claimed, ‘relations stop nowhere’(Roderick Hudson), as a text in which relations simply stop.

If readers of Roderick Hudson have attempted to play matchmaker among the four main characters, readers of The American have often been disappointed in Newman’s failure to secure Claire at the conclusion of the novel.  In his second chapter, ‘Nursing the Thunderbolt of Manhood in The American,’ Person explains our frustration with James’s ending.  He suggests that James is attempting to challenge the definition American manhood, the successful businessman, by reeducating Christopher Newman while attempting to preserve him from accusations of queerness. However, Person claims that James ultimately fails to realize the possibility of a ‘pure’ homosociality or heterosexuality, thus leaving Newman’s masculinity in suspense at the end of the novel.  In contrast to Christopher Newman’s dominant role in The American, The Portrait of a Lady contains a collection of gentlemen.  As Person notes at the start of his third chapter: ‘With every male playing the gentleman, the term effectively deconstructs – opening gentle manhood to plural performances.  The question of being a gentleman seems necessarily in suspense’(88).  The gentlemen of Portrait have too often been overlooked in favor of Isabel Archer, and Person’s reading nicely teases out the range of masculinities James presents.  Every reading of Portrait must, of course, tackle the conclusion, and James’s famous observation that he has left Isabel ‘en l’air’(Complete Notebooks) meshes nicely with Person’s attention to ‘suspense,’ though I am less convinced of Person’s conclusion that ‘James finds himself as author in much the same position as Osmond finds himself – in a state of suspense in which he waits to see what Isabel will do, waits in his relation to her to see what kind of gentleman he will become’(104).  More compelling is Person’s historically framed reading of The Bostonians.  His move to historicize this reading of The Bostonians seems fitting for what Michael Davitt Bell has termed James’s only truly realist novel. (The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea)  By reading Basil Ransom through the transition from abolitionist to women’s rights movements, and Basil’s own marginalized status as a fiscally challenged, white, male Southerner, Person redeems the melodramatic conclusion of the novel as a sort of reverse captivity narrative, in which Basil reclaims Verena from a homosocial or homosexual relationship with Olive and restores her to the heterosexual economy.

In his fifth chapter, ‘Deploying Homo-Aesthetic Desire in the Tales of Writers and Artists,’ Person returns to one of the subjects of his introduction and first chapter: ‘the poetics of male desire – the deployment of male desire in acts of writing and reading between men’ (124).  This foray into James’s short fiction is compelling for Person’s suggestion that ‘the aesthetic becomes rather than screens the erotic’ (137), which requires that the possibility of an open homoeroticism is displaced onto lost or absent texts. 

The concluding chapter, appropriately, tackles James’s last completed novel, The Golden Bowl.   Person argues that The Golden Bowl is ‘one of James’s most complex efforts to experiment with a multivalent manhood that does not rest easily in any traditional subject position’(150). This reading differs from previous chapters in its attention to sado-masochism.   Person’s reading focuses on Amerigo’s complicated relationship to Adam Verver and Maggie, in which Amerigo does the ‘dirty work’ of masculinity for Adam, while enjoying a feminized subject position in relation to Maggie. By reading Amerigo as suspended between heterosexual and homosocial economies, as well as between sadistic and masochistic identifications, Person accounts for the shifting power dynamics of the novel.  Although Person’s reading of The Golden Bowl is compelling, it doesn’t serve as an effective conclusion to his argument.  In fact, and perhaps this is intentional, Person leaves us in a state of suspense.  Similarly, Person’s use of types, such as the ‘Masculine Achiever’ and ‘Christian Gentleman’ to frame his discussion of masculinity seems more distracting than helpful.  Although such types seem intended to draw his discussion of James’s male characters into the wider arena of nineteenth-century masculinities, Person’s discussion of Sand and Balzac is a much more convincing frame, which suggests that perhaps a more specific grounding in personalities (whether historical or fictional), might be a more useful context.  Despite these two caveats, however, Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity is a compelling and important consideration of Jamesian masculinity. James scholars will appreciate Person’s excellent reading of James’s portraits of gentlemen.

© The College of St Mark & St John