Abstract
Henry James’s fiction is full of death. It drives the plot, colours the mood, and heightens the climaxes of his novels and tales. Among the cast of James’s characters are suicidal artists, murderous lovers, adventurous heiresses, romantic consumptives, fallen soldiers, intrusive biographers, and faithful keepers of the flame. Death comes violently by poison, drowning, gunshot, fall, and execution, peacefully at home, or as a gothic spectacle. James gives us some of the most famous hauntings in literature, and by the end of his long career has explored again and again the relationships between the living and the dead. Jamesian death is varied and complex. It is not a passenger, contributing nothing of interest to his novels and tales — how could it be, as if separate from everything else that makes James one of the most critically contested of writers? Death informs James’s narrative structures and strategies, his characteristic subjects and styles, and thereby invites the full range of critical approaches that have made James studies such a rich field.
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Notes
The major studies are Martha Banta, Henry James and the Occult: The Great Extension (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972)
T. J. Lustig, Henry James and the Ghostly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Jeremy Tambling, Henry James (London: Macmillan, 2000).
Deriving in large part from Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).
Examples of this line of thought are John Auchard, Silence in Henry James: The Heritage of Symbolism and Decadence (London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986)
Edwin Sill Fussell, The Catholic Side of Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
James and the Sacred, special issue of Henry James Review 22 (2001).
Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother (London: Macmillan, 1914), pp. 422–79
Leon Edel, Henry James: The Untried Years 1843–1870 (London: Hart-Davis, 1953), pp. 318–37
Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), p. 364 and at large.
Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 369.
James’s letters are to his mother, brother, and Grace Norton between 26 March and 1 April 1870; Henry James Letters, ed. Leon Edel, 4 vols (London: Macmillan, 1974–80; Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1984), vol. 1, pp. 218–32.
Garrett Stewart, Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 4.
Ibid., p. 4; Stewart is citing Leon Edel, Henry James: The Master, 1901–1916 (London: Hart-Davis, 1972), p. 546.
Shoshana Felman, ‘Turning the Screw of Interpretation,’ Yale French Studies 55–6 (1977), 128.
Susan Clark, ‘A Note on The Turn of the Screw: Death from Natural Causes,’ Studies in Short Fiction 15 (1978), 110–12
Peter G. Biedler, Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James: The Turn of the Screw at the Turn of the Century (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), pp. 198–219
Eric Haralson, Henry James and Queer Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 79–101
Carvel Collins, ‘James’ The Turn of the Screw’, Explicator 13 (1954–5), 49.
Robin P. Hoople, Distinguished Discord: Discontinuity and Pattern in the Critical Tradition of The Turn of the Screw (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1997).
Henry James, ‘The Turn of the Screw’ in Complete Stories 1892–1898 (New York: Library of America, 1996), p. 740.
Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion, 1960).
‘Is There a Life after Death?’ in The James Family, by F. O. Matthiessen (New York: Knopf, 1948), p. 605.
Henry James, The American in Novels 1871–1880 (New York: Library of America, 1983), pp. 831–3.
This interpretation of ‘still life’ comes from Robert Smith, Derrida and Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 131.
N. A. Blain explores this point in ‘Ideas of “Life” and their Moral Force in the Novels of Henry James’ (unpublished dissertation. University of Strathclyde, 1981). Conversely, James’s ghostly tales suggest that perhaps nobody ever reaches absolute ‘death’ either.
See, for example, Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (London: Penguin, 1998).
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966), vol. 1, pp. 398–402
Henry James, The Princess Casamassima in Novels 1886–1890 (New York: Library of America, 1989), pp. 287, 295, 351.
Studies of James and philosophy include Richard A. Hocks, Henry James and Pragmatista Thought: A Study in the Relationship between the Philosophy of William James and the Literary Art of Henry James (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974)
Stephen Donadio, Nietzsche, Henry James, and the Artistic Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)
Henry Sussman, The Hegelian Aftermath: Readings in Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Proust, and James (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 11–12, 230–9
Paul B. Armstrong, The Phenomenology of Henry James (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).
William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802 in Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 741–60
Mark Seltzer, Henry James and the Art of Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).
Ross Posnock, The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 76–7
John Carlos Rowe, ‘Henry James and Critical Theory’ in A Companion to Henry James Studies, ed. Daniel Mark Fogel (London: Greenwood, 1993), pp. 73–93.
Winfried Fluck, ‘Power Relations in the Novels of James: The “Liberal” and the “Radical” Version’ in Enacting History in Henry James: Narrative, Power, and Ethics, ed. Gert Buelens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 16–39.
Leon Edel, Henry James: The Treacherous Years 1895–1901 (London: Hart-Davis, 1969), p. 169.
Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 356–7
Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 196–7
Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 87–114.
See Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s Online Pioneers (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998).
Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 13.
Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), p. 4.
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© 2005 Andrew Cutting
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Cutting, A. (2005). Introduction. In: Death in Henry James. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230285996_1
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