Hildegarde

So, before I go bounding into Henry James, let me make a few notes.

First is that I truly love the nineteenth century novel, in English and otherwise.  I’ve read French drama and French poetry, and mostly it leaves me cold, but I love Balzac.  I can read Tolstoy even though I think he’s a pig, and I can read Dostoyevski nearly nonstop because I love him.

I also love Dickens, and I’m always brought up short when Robert suggests that one of the things likely to turn students off reading is giving them a Dickens novel in high school.  I wish somebody had given me a Dickens novel in high school.  Instead, I read Dickens all on my own, in one big sweep, when I was about ten or eleven years old.  He had practically an entire bookcase to himself in the upstairs “classics” room at our public library.  The room is gone these days, and the library has been updated, and it’s too bad.  Dickens will be with all the crappy stuff in the regular stacks.

The second thing is that I love Henry James, as far as I’ve read him, which is pretty far.  It’s just a little odd that I haven’t read two of his most famous books, The Turn of the Screw and The Wings of the Dove.  I’m reading The Wings of the Dove right now, and that’s sort of what I want to talk about.

Before I do, though, I’d like to point out that my absolutely favorite James novel, The Princess Casamassima is unusual in a respect important to what follows.  The Princess of the title is a lot of things, but for the purposes of the plot of that book she is not a commodity on the marriage market.    There’s an inference made that she was once, and that that is what has led to her rather irregular situation, but the book isn’t about that.

James’s books, however, do tend to be about that–about the buying and selling of women in marriage.  Almost all of James’s heroines are either desperately looking for a way to marry, or are endowed with large fortunes that make them the target of other people’s ambitions for marriage. 

That’s almost triply true of the characters in The Wings of the Dove, which is in fact a complicated plot to make it possible for two people to marry who “don’t have the means.”

Before I go into that as it applies specifically to this book–and to other James books–I’d like to point something out.

Robert at one point complained that the people in Dickens view money as something you sort of just come across, or inherit, or something–not as something you earn, in other words.

But that’s not true, not in Dickens, and not in James either, in spite of the fact that neither gives us main characters who spend their lives doing that.  Dickens has quite a few side characters who make very decent livings, and in fact rise from poverty to comfort–they just aren’t the characters about whom the story is told.  The same is true of Trollope, who often uses solid middle class barristers to contrast with high flyers like Phineas Finn or wastrel aristocrats who go into Parliament as another way to spend money. 

And, yes, Horatio Alger does give us characters whose stories are about rising from rags to riches (although the couple I’ve read got the hero where he was going at least as much from luck and/or a fortunate marriage as from hard work and perserverance).

But even if I liked Alger’s work better–I found what I read of it sort of clunky and formulaic–I’d still not be interested in reading the same story about the same people over and over again. 

And the nineteenth century novel generally (Dickens is actually somewhat–but only somewhat–of an exception) was both aimed at and written about a class of people for whom such a story was literally senseless.

The issue, in the vast majority of these novels, is not making money, or even getting it, but being able to live a very particular kind of life among a very particular kind of people, something that would be virtually impossible for somebody who was self-made.

For women, it would be worse than impossible.  A woman could of course make a living–many women did–but she could not both make a living and be “respectable,” except in some cases as a writer.  And being “respectable” is what the point is here. 

There is a very real sense in these books that a life that is not “respectable” is ugly and difficult to endure, a nasty, dirty, low thing that is shameful in and of itself.  It is certainly all of that for women.

For men, the situation is somewhat less clear.  It was indeed possible for a man to earn his fortune and still be “respectable,” but in order for that to be the case, he had to have started out as a “gentleman.”

That is, he had to have a certain kind of accent, a certain kind of manners, a set of social behaviors and assumptions that were largely closed to anybody who, say, had not been to an English public school. 

All the British writers of this period that I can think of–and Jane Austen in the period just prior–took the superiority of “respectable” life for granted, so much so that descriptions of or encounters with other classes and ways of life tend to be entirely negative.

That goes for descriptions of and encounters with the aristocracy as well as with the lower classes.  Trollope gives us Plantagenet Pallister and Lady Glencora, but they are unusual even for him, and Planty Pall is an upper middle class professional who happens to have been handed a Dukedom.  He works like a pack mule the entire time he’s in the House of Commons, and then he works like a pack mule again when he ends up in the House of Lords.

American writers are not so automatic in their acceptance of respectability–and Edith Wharton is about as jaundiced an eye as you can get on this world–and James therefore is never entirely comfortable with absolute appreciations of “respectability.”

He gives us Isabel Archer, in The Portrait of a Lady, as a kind of epitome of all things perfect in the behavior of a gentlewoman, but he’s always a little unhappy with the way things are set up.  And he’s neither naive nor in denial. 

If part of “respectability” at this period is to be free of the taint of buying and selling–and it is–then James can see quite clearly that the respectable world is in no way free of it.  All his heroines are bought and sold, the rich ones as well as the poor ones.  They are bought and sold, and the buying and selling either destroys them or leaves them bearing up heroically in the emotional waste it has made of their lives.

That said–and I want to go on with that thought as it relates to The Wings of the Dove–what the issue is in these books is not “how to have a comfortable income,” but “how to live a life of respectability.”

And such a life would not be available to someone who earned his income the way Horatio Alger’s characters are supposed to have earned theirs.  The very acts of earning income in those ways would disqualify them for the only life the characters in the novels of James, and Trollope (and sometimes Dickens) think is worth living.

Ack.  It’s a nice day.  More later.