'Who Could say now with What Passion?': Reimagining Henry James and 'The Beast in the Jungle'

• Published in: ELH Vol. 90; no. 3; pp. 827 - 849
• Main Author: Stuart, Christopher
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.09.2023
• Subjects: American literature; Archives & records; Biographies; Culture; Epistemology; Homophobia; James, Henry (1843-1916); LGBTQ people; Men; Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835-1910); United Kingdom > UK; England
• ISSN: 0013-8304; 1080-6547; 1080-6547
• DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a907210

In her widely influential book Epistemology of the Closet (1990) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick imagines Henry James as a thoroughly repressed, self-blind Edwardian bachelor whose unconscious efforts to disguise his homosexual desires are precisely what reveal them in his fiction, at least to the contemporary reader willing to look beyond the dominant culture's pervasive homophobia. New possibilities emerge if we imagine later James works not as the product of a culturally determined and largely unconscious reflex but as the result of a self-consciously queer writer's strategic concessions to the marketplace, concessions including perhaps the disguise of his own same-sex romances, or those of his friends, in narratives of heterosexual couples. On the contrary, the epistolary record shows that these attachments were surely powerful and painful enough to have influenced the shape and themes of many of his later works, even if his contemporary cultural climate necessitated its disguise. i. james's queer milieu Those critics since Sedgwick who have furthered her investigations into the queer dynamics of "The Beast in the Jungle" have typically bypassed biographical and archival research, accepting as axiomatic her account of the suffocating cultural climate for homosexuals in Edwardian England and her diagnosis of James's neuroses.4 Simultaneously, scholars working more directly with the James and James-related archives have produced an increasingly detailed, complicated, and variegated picture of queer life as it was actually lived by James and the men who formed his inner circle. Challenging Sedgwick's hypothesis that James suffered an intense homosexual panic, more recent biographical scholarship has reinforced Edel's earlier implication that by the early years of the turn of the 20th-century James eagerly sought out the company of self-acknowledged and sexually active queer men.