Unnatural questions: The otherworld of Henry James.
Item
-
Title
-
Unnatural questions: The otherworld of Henry James.
-
Identifier
-
AAI9605683
-
identifier
-
9605683
-
Creator
-
Wolf, David.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Joan Richardson
-
Date
-
1995
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, English | American Studies | History, European
-
Abstract
-
Unnatural Questions: The Otherworld of Henry James reads Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors to be a modern quest-hero who journeys to a peculiarly Jamesian epic otherworld--"Europe"--an antithetical culture he regards as alien yet potentially redemptive. Strether's archetypal experience of "Europe" evokes comparison with the otherworld experiences of Odysseus, Aeneas, and Dante's pilgrim even as it modifies them. In late Jamesian narrative, the hero transgresses his cultural boundaries and penetrates a forbidden place of difference. This otherworld is idiosyncratically defined by James as the aesthetic space presented by specific European paintings (the Lambinet landscape in The Ambassadors, the Bronzino portrait in The Wings of the Dove) that invite Americans to explore the historical heritage of the old world by imaginatively exploring their visual depths. Strether and Milly Theale acquire a new consciousness of self and of nationhood through their cognitive immersion in a painterly otherworld crowded by shades--spectral signifiers. These shades differ from the classical epic ghosts of the dead in their failure to correspond to specific human characters. In James, instead, they represent the essential units of the Jamesian perceptual field, the counterparts to the phenomenologist's phenomena. I trace James's frequent, conscious use of "shade(s)" ("Madame de Vionnet salon is haunted by "dim historic shades", Strether perceives a "shade of pity" in Maria's face when he misinterprets Chad's stratagem) to show how he exploits its references to epic, aesthetics, and psychology (William James refers to the "shadings of relation" that form a self). James thus makes the sense of an expansive European history textually present through his formalist decision to revive the conventions, structure, and mood of classical epic. The residual presence of epic manifests the traces of a European past emblematic (in The Ambassadors) of Napoleonic power, glory, and empire.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
