“The Benefits and Limits of Heightened Perception in the Experimental Works of Henry James (1895-1900)”
Résumé
At first view, it may seem somewhat arbitrary to point to a single five-year period in the career of Henry James as an ‘experimental period’, for the author is notorious for his life-long efforts to advance the late nineteenth-century novel through carefully staged (and well-documented) experiments in style and form. As early as 1878, James had admitted as much in a letter to his brother William: “Being ‘very artistic’, I have a constant impulse to try experiments in form” (Letters 2 66), and the years 1885 to 1900—sandwiched between his initial ‘main phase’, which brought him international acclaim through such works as Daisy Miller (1878) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881), and his most mature ‘major phase’ of the early twentieth century, which included The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904)—could be seen as a succession of three five-year experiments. The years 1885-1890 are often dubbed James’s ‘Naturalist Period’, for his attempt to show French naturalists a more ‘tasteful’ form of Naturalism through works such as The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima, both in 1886. The next five years, often referred to as “The Dramatic Years”, would be a remarkable experiment indeed, as James, following the great success of his stage adaptation of his novel The American for Edward Compton in 1890, would give up the novel completely in an attempt to rebrand himself and write for the London stage. Though some of the short stories he wrote during this time were published and well-received, his attempt to be the toast of London’s West End would be one of the most spectacular failures of his career. By 1894, none of his dozen or so plays had even been produced, and he put all of his desperate hope into the two final plays of the period, which he considered his finest—The Promise (1893) and Guy Domville (1894). Though James had high hopes for the former, the actress-producer he was negotiating with for two years finally turned down the project (Letters 2 299). The latter however, Guy Domville, would be picked up by popular actor-producer George Alexander and would premiere at the Saint James Theatre on January 5, 1895—a night that would forever haunt James as the most monstrous public failure of his career and send the author scurrying back to the novel, though thoroughly determined to reinvent the genre through intense experimentation in form and point of view.
It is thus the last five years of the nineteenth century, those between the theatre fiasco and the works of his ‘Major Phase’, that many scholars have dubbed “The Experimental Period”—though others, perhaps focusing more on the possible psychological effects of his failure as a playwright, have used more derogatory appellations, such as James’s “Treacherous Years” (Edel, Shinn), his “Awkward Period” (Dupee, McWhirter), or his “period of crisis” and “mid-career trauma” (Geismar). However, it would be James’s attempt to once again reinvent himself, or rather to re-invent the Jamesian novel, and his attempts to somehow create a new hybrid between the art of drama and novel-writing, that would allow James to become the much-acclaimed pioneer in twentieth-century modernism we know him to be.
Only five days after the so-called ‘traumatic’ opening of Guy Domville, James sat down at his desk, picked up his “own old pen” of the novelist and set out enthusiastically to write the “work of his life”:
I take up my own old pen again—the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself—today—I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will (Jan. 10, 1895; Notebooks 200).
Some twelve days later, in a letter to William Dean Howells concerning his return to the novel, James further proclaimed, “I shall never again write a long novel, but I hope to write six immortal short ones—and some tales of the same quality.” (Jan. 22, 1895; Letters 3 513). Those six “immortal” experimental works—though very few would be as “short” as he had hoped them to be—that sought to allow James to apply the difficult lessons of his years as a playwright to his new novel would be the following: The Spoils of Poynton (1897), What Maisie Knew (1897), “In the Cage” (1898), “The Turn of the Screw” (1898), The Awkward Age (1899) and The Sacred Fount (1901) . These works, the “germs” or basic plots of which were nearly all conceived in 1895, would indeed involve intense experiments in narrative form, voice and point of view—one of the most astounding of which involves James’s notion of providing “enhanced perception” to his “reflectors” or “centres of consciousness”—terms James coined for point-of-view characters who respectively see and interpret the events of the novel for the reader.
This study will then focus on certain features these experimental novels had in common, including what James saw as the essence of the dramatic art cleverly applied to novel-writing, thereby justifying our designation of these six novels and novellas as the “immortal works” James so explicitly set out to write in 1895. However, the main focus will be on the shared notion of ‘enhanced perception’ that James applied to his new point-of-view characters, demonstrating an unusual application of James’s penchant for dialectics, as these ‘centres of consciousness’ would be gifted with powers of vision and of understanding that are at once greatly enhanced in terms of perspicacity and yet still bewilderingly limited—at once both heightened and impaired—an apparent paradox that is in fact one of James’s most effective tools providing richness and depth to works that on the surface may appear far more straightforward than the works of his more universally acclaimed Major Phase.