Abstract
In The Golden Bowl, Chapter XXIII, after we have just seen the Prince and Charlotte leave for their adulterous afternoon at Gloucester, there is a conversation in which Fanny and the Colonel try to size up the new situation. Fanny justifiably fears the worst:
‘I think there’s nothing they’re not now capable of — in their so intense good faith.’
‘Good faith?’ — he echoed the words, which had in fact something of an odd ring, critically.
‘Their false position. It comes to the same thing.’ (312)
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Notes and References
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London: Edward Arnold, 1958), pp. 140–50.
Henry James, The Sacred Fount, introd. Leon Edel (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1959), p. 9.
Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (London: Hutchinson, 1964) p. 33.
T.S. Eliot, ‘On Henry James: In Memory’, in F.W. Dupee (ed.), The Question of Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Henry Holt, 1945), p. 110.
There are a number of good studies on James’s names. See Richard Gerber, ‘Die Magie der Namen bei Henry James’, Anglia 81 (1963), no. 1/2, esp. pp. 189–91. See also
Robert L. Gale, ‘Names in James’, Names, 14–15 (June 1966), 83–108;
Joseph M. Backus, ‘“Poor Valentin” or “Monsieur le Comte”: Variation in Character Designation as Matter for Critical Consideration in Henry James’ The American, Names 20–21 (1972–3), 47–55;
Evelyn J. Hinz, ‘Henry James’s Names: Tradition, Theory, and Method’, Colby Library Quarterly, 9 (September 1972), no. 11, 557–78;
Joyce Tayloe Horrell, ‘A “Shade of a Special Sense”: Henry James and the Art of Naming’, American Literature, 42 (May 1970), no. 2, 203–220.
Cf. Simon Nowell-Smith, The Legend of the Master (London: Constable, 1947), p. xxiii. See also pp. xxvi–xxvii.
See e. g. F.W. Dupee, Henry James (London: Methuen, 1951), p. 13; or
Van Wyck Brooks, The Pilgrimage of Henry James (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), p. 4.
Henry James, The Complete Tales of Henry James ed. and introd. Leon Edel (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962–4), 3, p. 56.
Henry James, The Awkward Age, The Norton Library (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969), p. 255.
Walter Wright, ‘Maggie Verver: Neither Saint Nor Witch’, in Tony Tanner (ed.), Henry James: Modern Judgements (London: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 316–26.
E. Duncan Aswell, ‘James’s In the Cage: The Telegraphist as Artist’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 8 (Fall 1966), no. 3, 375–84.
For a study of this aspect of The Turn of the Screw, see Norrman, pp. 52, 8993, 150–80 and passim; and E. Duncan Aswell, ‘Reflections of a Governess: Image and Distortion in “The Turn of the Screw”’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 23 (June 1968), no. 1, 49–63. In the fifties and sixties critics tended to see these passages of symbolic identification in terms of limited, momentary irony
See e. g. Oscar Cargill, ‘Henry James as Freudian Pioneer’, Chicago Review, 10 (Summer 1956), no. 2, p. 21
and Marius Bewley, The Complex Fate: Hawthorne, Henry James and Some Other American Writers (London: Chatto and Windus, 1952), pp. 109–111. Since the late sixties, however, critics have gradually begun to realize that the pattern reveals something far more essential and important.
See Paul N. Siegel, ‘“Miss Jessel”: Mirror Image of the Governess’, Literature and Psychology, 18 (1968), no. 1, 30–8, and
Juliet McMaster, ‘The Full Image of a Repetition in The Turn of the Screw’, Studies in Short Fiction, 6, (Summer 1969), no. 4, 378–82.
Tony Tanner, ‘The Fearful Self: Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady’ in Henry James: Modern Judgements (Nashville/London: Aurora Publishers, 1970), 141–59, p. 148. In fact Tanner convincingly makes out very much the same similarity between the opposites of Isabel and Osmond as can be made out between e. g. the governess and the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw.
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© 1982 Ralf Norrman
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Norrman, R. (1982). Chiastic Inversion, Antithesis and Oxymoron. In: The Insecure World of Henry James’s Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16824-8_6
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