Meaning in Henry James - Tapa dura

Henry James rebelled against the tyranny and banality of plots. Believing a life to have many potential paths and a self to hold many destinies, he hung the evocative shadow of "what might have been" over much of what he wrote. Yet James also realized that no life can be lived - and no story written - except by submission to some outcome. In this study of James's work, Millicent Bell explores this oscillation between hope and fatalism, indeterminacy and form, and uncertainty and meaning. In the process Bell provides fresh insight into how we read and interpret fiction. Bell demonstrates how James's texts steadfastly, almost perversely at time, preserve a sense of alternative possibilities. James involves his characters in overlapping scenarios drawn from folklore, drama, literature, or naturalist formula. The reader engages, with the hero or heroine, in imagining many plots other than the one that finally - and often ambiguously - emerges. The story arouses expectations, proposes courses, then cancels them successively. Not surprisingly, James's deepest sympathies lay with those characters who resisted entrapment by cultural expectations - his idealistic free spirits like Isabel, his marriage renouncers like Fleda Vetch, his largely silent and detached witnesses to life like Strether and the generous Maisie. They are frequently the victims of callous manipulators who box them into oppressive roles or who literally "plot against" them. By looking closely at James's critiques of the "clever" catagorical mind and at his portraits of characters of unfulfilled potentiality, Bell celebrates the paradoxes of James's story-denying fiction. In extended analyses of "Daisy Miller","Washington Square", "The Portrait of a Lady", "The Bostonians", "The Princess Casamassima", "The Aspern Papers", "The Spoils of Poynton", "The Turn of the Screw", "What Maisie Knew", "The Beast in the Jungle", "The Jolly Corner", "The Wings of the Dove", and "The Ambassadors", Bell relates James's work to influential movements of the day, notably impressionism and naturalism. She examines the influence of Hawthorne, Emerson, Flaubert, Balzac, and Zola on James at various periods throughout his career. Drawing on traditions of criticism and on recent theories, Bell forges a critical approach for this reading of one of the greatest writers.

Henry James (1843a1916) wrote more than twenty novels, including "The Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw," and "The Golden Bowl," Philip Horne, series editor, is a professor of English at University College London. Adrian Poole is a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Andrew Taylor is a lecturer in English at the University of Edinburgh. Millicent Bell is an emerita professor of English at Boston University.