Henry James and "Coterie-Literature"

Abstract

Henry James is often regarded as an author of ‘coterie-literature’: someone who wrote only for and about elites. This dissertation argues that such interpretations neglect some of the complexities and ambivalences within his attitudes towards exclusion and exclusivity. My first chapter analyses the various ways in which James addressed the question of how an author like himself can write responsibly to and of people whom his social experience gives him little direct acquaintance. It takes the form both of a survey of recent Jamesian criticism and of a comparison of James’s own critical and aesthetic thought with that of one of his contemporaries, William Dean Howells. Is it a reader’s fault if they do not understand James’s work? This question is related, as I argue in my second chapter, to the problem James faces in evaluating the intelligence and the ignorance of the hero of The American, Christopher Newman: how much can Newman be expected to know or understand, especially about art? I suggest that James is indulgent to Newman’s philistinism. My third chapter discusses the growing difficulty of James’s style on the cusp of the twentieth-century. The Awkward Age seems to justify the epithet ‘coterie-literature’, and not only because it takes as its subject matter an insular aristocratic coterie. I suggest that James’s novel is deliberately teasing his ‘initiated’ readers – readers, that is, who might be inclined to think of themselves as ‘privileged and modern’ for being able to read Henry James. My final chapter traces James’s reaction, both critical and imaginative, to the sometimes furiously unsociable Gustave Flaubert. James laments Flaubert’s obsession with the ‘bêtise’ of other people. This frustration, he argues, was disabling for Flaubert’s creative endeavour. Yet in ‘The Death of the Lion’ and ‘The Velvet Glove’ we discover the Jamesian ‘man of imagination’ to be excited and enlivened by his associations with the unintelligent upper-classes.