Henry James Society: "Possessing James"
Session Coordinator: Larry Shillock
English Department, Wilson College
1015 Philadelphia Ave. , Chambersburg, PA 17201
lshillock@wilson.edu

A Tenant in the House of Fiction: G. K. Chesterton’s Attempt to Evict Henry James from British Culture

Henry James was one of the most influential literary critics of the early twentieth century, and his work directly prefigures modernist literary criticism. James used his critical acumen to dismiss nearly every significant writer who came to literary maturity in the Edwardian period—his attack on H. G. Wells is merely the best remembered example—and his critiques of the Edwardians were echoed by the major modernists. The reception of Henry James in the 1920s and 1930s constitutes a pivotal battle in the war over the nature of literature fought between the older, and more populist, Edwardian authors and the younger, and more elitist, modernists.

In G. K. Chesterton’s Autobiography (1936), James functions as a synecdoche for modernism itself, for a literary world convinced that human nature had changed in 1910, and that the Edwardians must be forever passé. Chesterton’s autobiography employs the populist device of farce to create a textual Henry James who, precisely because of his great refinement, has failed to understand English culture. In Chesterton’s retelling of literary history, democratic English culture has been taken over by aristocratic Americans, and if English culture is to be saved, Henry James must be dispossessed from the House of Fiction.

Chene Heady
Indiana University
cheady@indiana.edu

"I Engage Myself to You Forever": The Rise and Fal of Merton Densher’s Predatory Sexuality

The idea of “possession” is a powerful one in The Wings of the Dove. Characters possess—and covet—fortunes, titles, one another’s thoughts, and finally, Merton Densher comes to “possess” Kate sexually. I intend to establish the relationship between all these possessions and show how Densher, an essentially passive character, finally consents to actively “working” Milly by “working” Kate into his Venice rooms.

As Kate and the other characters work to align Milly and Densher, his earlier complaints that he and Kate are “not together” become more and more sexual, to the point that he thinks, on his return from America, that such waiting could “make a man ill.” Once the characters move to Venice, he makes his bargain with Kate. In doing so, he is exercising the only power he feels himself capable of in that “circle of petticoats”—his male sexuality. Yet Densher’s passivity is organic to his character, and his one act of aggression is his last. Like Milly he is an essentially rootless character, and though he may still love Kate, his true inheritance from Milly is the ability to turn his face to the wall, away from Lancaster Gate.

Audrey Raden
CUNY Graduate Center
OrpheusRaden@aol.com

Ghostly Possession/Possessing the Ghost in James’s "The Altar of the Dead"

Henry James’s haunting short story “The Altar of the Dead,” ostensibly a tale of ritualistic grieving for lost loved-ones, explores the negative psychic ramifications of privileging presence over absence and exposes James’s proclivity for Derridean reservations in a work usually trumpeted for its phenomenological harmony. Stransom creates a memorial altar of candles as an act of exclusion, to commemorate all but his estranged former friend, Acton Hague. An unnamed woman employs Stransom’s altar specifically to commemorate Hague, an action Stransom cannot abide. The contest for possession of the altar therefore motivates the ghostly possession of the living, as the narrative enacts the Derridean play between absence and presence that haunts all texts. James’s story of ghosts—liminal traces of absent existences—and the haunted loved-ones possessed by them calls for an examination of textual haunting as a subversive technique designed to de-center readers and expose supposedly stable subject positions as ultimately unstable.

Melissa McLeod
Georgia State University
mmcleod@langate.gsu.edu

The Possession and Self Possession of James’s Heroines

Most heroines in the work of Henry James become “possessed” in one way or another but, using Washington Square’s Catherine Sloper and Isabel Archer (from the 1908 New York Edition of Portrait), I will suggest that self-possession occurs only if and when the character recognizes the source(s) of her possession.. Specifically, I will argue that the unlikely Catherine is the more self possessed of the two characters because she eventually recognizes all the forces that have conspired to manipulate her will, while Isabel Archer remains confined within the constraints of her romantic ideals. Despite her claims to “independence,” James shows that, in the end, Isabel remains bound to the same sense of convention and appearances with which she began. Although Isabel eventually realizes that she has become Osmond’s possession, she is never able to acknowledge that she has always sublimated her sense of independence to her ideal of the romantic heroine. Because she refuses to recognize her more insidious possessor, Isabel’s will remains enslaved by her own conventional notions of what it means to be a “lady

Rebecca Bowman
Otterbein College
Rbowman@Otterbein.edu