High Brow/Low Brow: James, Woolf and their Audiences

Kathryn N. Benzel

Univ. of Nebraska Kearney

benzelk@unk.edu

In spite of their differences (e.g., education, homeland, literary era, not to mention gender), Virginia Woolf and Henry James shared many concerns, including the question of who could best appreciate art and how they should go about doing so. Focusing on their characters’ inner lives, both produced work that was stylistically and structurally complex; perhaps as a result, both worried they were being insufficiently read and understood. This panel focuses on both the literal problem they faced in marketing their work to an audience—readerly or theatrical—and on the way they dramatized the problematic relationship between art and its audience in their work.

Ruth Hoberman, Eastern Illinois University

From The High Bid to The Outcry: James’s Late Plays as Art for the Masses

In his final two plays, The High Bid (1908) and The Outcry (1910), Henry James tells structurally similar stories of aristocratic landowners who are tempted to sell all or part of their possessions for financial reasons but are stopped by an outsider: in The High Bid, the American Mrs. Gracedew; in The Outcry, the British art expert Hugh Crimble. These outsiders not only mediate between the owners and the possessions they fail to appreciate, suggesting that an increasingly impoverished aristocracy is no longer able to care for their own art treasures; they also serve as mediators for the public, introducing ordinary people to the pleasures of artistic appreciation. These positively depicted explicators of art contrast with guides James had depicted a mere four years earlier: Charlotte Stant, in the Golden Bowl, punished for her sexual transgressions by having to lead tourists around her husband’s estate, and Morris Gedge, in “The Birthplace,” forced to embroider history in order to hold onto his job leading tourists around a site based on Shakespeare’s birthplace. In my paper I argue that James’s 1904 visit to America and his experience preparing the New York Edition of his novels intensified his interest in creating a responsive audience for art. This interest is expressed in these final plays, where James explores the role of the aesthetic go-between in particularly dramatic and hopeful terms.

Dana Ringuette, Eastern Illinois University

“Reading James Reading Women”

Henry James’s essays on “The Question of Our Speech, “The Speech of American Women,” and “The Manners of American Women,” all written and published between 1904 and 1907, are marked by a complexity characteristic of late Jamesian thought, syntax, diction, and logic, which might account for the comparative scarcity of critical attention, occupied as it is with the difficulties of James’s cultural criticism evident in, for example, The American Scene. Reading James reading women takes on a significance beyond his putative subject, but always with James never taking his eye off the immediate “questions” he places before us. This logic binds his interests in language, its related domains, and, by extension, the novel. The language and manners of women becomes the prime locale of inquiring into the question of the nuances of language. And if women are also the key audience for the reading of and response to literature, then the argument for discrimination and differentiation—James’s notion of criticism—for language and manners is precisely the same for the novel. How one talks, how one acts, and how one reads, become one and the same. The opportunity for real change, for real criticism, for improvement and real knowledge, lies with those who have facility with what James calls the “social rigor” necessary for the employment of language – that is, women.

Kathryn N. Benzel, University of Nebraska-Kearney

“Woolf’s Short Fiction: Common Readers or Not”

Virginia Woolf’s short story, “A Simple Melody,” describes and demonstrates the understanding that our personal experiences are separate from and part of the world’s larger context. While attending a party, the main character George Carslake is prompted to search for personal identity amidst a conflict “with [these] other beings and selves.” His attention variously focuses on the other party-goers, who all seem as disillusioned and distant as he is, and on a painting of a heath, which composes and tranquilizes his mind. The painting becomes a means of escape which causes him to imagine the heath as a site for walking where he could engage several of the party-goers in conversation, a community that would acknowledge a common “belief of some kind” and confirm a world in common. As Carslake attempts to reconcile this vision of the world with the party members, all “jostled together like fish in a net,” the narrator introduces an imaginary fiddler, who plays “a perfectly quiet old English song” that is heard throughout the story and reinforces Carlake’s imagined community as simple and united. The resultant rhythm of Carslake’s thinking, participating in his imagined community and then animated by his real difference (he’s “a queer fish”), creates a melody of living, “an expression of humanity.” Finally, though Carslake misses the point (he cannot say “[w[hether pleasure or pain dominated.”), the readers do not: the two worlds “swam side by side in the greatest comfort.”

Greg W. Zacharias, Creighton University

“Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and the Ghosts of Memory”

Important in Woolf’s and James’s fiction is their representation of the highly personal, the virtually unrepresentable, the ghosts, as it were, of intimate experience and imagination. They grounded their art in forms that would facilitate the reception of those ghosts in terms their particular audiences would or could know. We tend to think of this process of artful meaning-making most often in connection with their fiction. But it is also significant in their non-fiction and letters, where they obligate themselves to convert the experience of imagination and the imagination of experience—both ghostly functions of memory that each has to confront and understand —into a form that will readers will, they must have hoped, comprehend as communication rather than as the “art” of fiction. Attending to the representational strategies in the non-fiction, but present in the fiction, offers the advantage of showing Woolf and James dramatizing imagination and memory is less obviously complex ways than they do in the fiction. This paper will treat elements of James’s Prefaces to the New York Edition, travel writing, and letters. From Woolf, it will include passages from The Common Reader, The Common Reader, Second Series, and letters.