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Chapitre d'ouvrage Année : 2017

“Henry James’s ‘Theatre of Error and Renouncement’: Guy Domville and the Novels of the Experimental Period”,

Résumé

The novels written by Henry James in the late 1890’s, immediately following his failed five-year stint as a London playwright, are too often written off by critics as a period in which, with a few exceptions, the author was still searching for the right formula that would allow him to write his ‘masterpieces’ of the coming “Major Phase” (The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl) and was still reeling from the humiliation and so-called trauma of his failed final play of the 1890’s, Guy Domville. Jamesian critics throughout the years have often labeled this period, from 1896-1900, in terms that stress that despair and uneasiness: hence Leon Edel and Telma Shinn dub the period “The Treacherous Years”, while F.W. Dupee and David McWhirter borrow from the title of one of the novels of the period and call it “Henry James’s Awkward Period”, while still others like Maxwell Geismar go so far as to call it James’s “period of crisis” and of “mid-career trauma” . However, most Jamesian critics today agree that the most apt appellation for these novels written in the shadow of his failure as a playwright would be ‘The Experimental Phase’, as redefining and remodeling the novel in light of what he had learned writing so many unproduced and forgotten plays was his main goal, if not his obsession . Indeed, only seventeen days after the embarrassing night of the premiere of Guy Domville in London, James explained, in a letter to William Dean Howells, his intention to return to novel-writing but to use what he learned in the theatre to rework the form, to “never again write a long novel” and to instead write “six immortal short ones” . Though not all of them would be as “short” as he intended, those six “immortal” novels, the plots of nearly all of which were outlined in his notebooks during those first months of his return to the novel, would be 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). Thus James would not return to his popular International Theme and predilection for novels on Americans abroad, but instead focus on five novels dealing with bewildered young British women, bookended as it were by a play (Guy Domville) and a novel (The Sacred Fount) about middle-aged British men. The six novels in question will all, as this study will demonstrate, be greatly influenced by the plot, theme and key devices used in James’s failed play, and illustrate how James, by creating a new hybrid sub-genre that would combine the essence of the novel with the quintessence of stage-drama, attempted to turn a monumental mistake into ground-breaking success. Thus, as this study will show, James would re-adapt his ideal three-act movement from Guy Domville to his new novels, all of which could be seen as novels of initiation that represent, rather paradoxically, recognition of one’s mistakes and retreat from one’s new environment as a successful step forward, thereby allowing James to redefine the bildungsroman on his own terms. In addition to this new focus in terms of plot and theme—that of a new ‘theatre of error and renouncement’ for the Jamesian novel—the author would also make key changes to the structure and narrative make-up of his new novels, as they were to be clever hybrids of drama and fiction, and as James was convinced that from then onwards “the scenic method [was] my only salvation!” . By borrowing numerous devices from the theater, by experimenting with complex narrative set-ups and forms of point of view and by attempting to keep his own authorial presence hidden within the wings of his fiction rather than center-stage, James would indeed go beyond simply making up for those “wasted years” or even making “a silk purse out of a sow’s ear” (NB, 208, 200). Indeed, these works by Henry James would help redefine the novel in general and open wide the door to twentieth-century modernism—and all of this stemming from what the author saw as the most egregious and humiliating error of his career.
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halshs-01427631, version 1 (05-01-2017)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-01427631 , version 1

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Dennis Tredy. “Henry James’s ‘Theatre of Error and Renouncement’: Guy Domville and the Novels of the Experimental Period”, . Volume sur le thème de l'erreur (publication prévue en 2017 par la Presse de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2017. ⟨halshs-01427631⟩
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