Henry James and the Redefinition of "Awkward" Concepts through Fiction

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Henry James and the Redefinition of “Awkward” Concepts through Fiction Merle A. Williams The fiction of Henry James would seem naturally to invite discussion in philosophical terms, given the complex family background of his father’s Swedenborgian or theological researches, and his brother William’s enquiries, which range from shrewd psychological analysis to the genesis of pragmatistic thinking. The question of influence is always a vexed one, though, and the younger Henry James’s mode of philosophizing turns out to be at once flexible, innovative, and unique. It has been searchingly explored in Richard Hocks’s pioneering study, Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought, in which the intellectual affinities and differences in method between the two brothers are lucidly probed and unfolded. In The Phenomenology of Henry James, Paul Armstrong creatively interprets some of James’s major works in the light of phenomenological themes and techniques, emphasizing the novelist’s fascination with the processes of consciousness and his strong moral orientation. John Carlos Rowe extends the investigation still further in The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James by demonstrating how engagingly and fruitfully James’s texts may be investigated in relation to theoretical perspectives as diverse as Marxist critiques of modernity, an interrogation of feminist concerns, or the adaptation of psychoanalytic paradigms. And, most recently, Julie Rivkin has embraced and vividly applied the volatile resources of deconstructive reading to James’s varied production in False Positions. Nonetheless, this detailed and sophisticated scholarship betrays a gap when it comes to treating one of James’s most elusive and admittedly “awkward” fictional endeavors, The Awkward Age. David McWhirter is sensitively alive to this dimension of “awkwardness,” for he delicately teases out the tight nexus of historical transition and enforced social fixity, burgeoning experience and evasive langauge in James’s puzzling novel. But The Awkward Age is also an arresting [End Page 258] example of Jamesian philosophizing at work, for it clearly enacts his capacity for conceptual experimentation, realignment, and dissolution. At the same time, the novel underscores the concreteness of James’s imaginative explorations and his openness to a near-Keatsian “negative capability,” which frees him from rigid or reductive preconceptions. Confronting “awkward” issues facilitates a new (and sometimes distressing) vision. In The Awkward Age, Henry James, in fact, offers a vivid sketch of London in the “naughty nineties,” highlighting the contrived assurance of polished city manners and the smart sophistication of drawing-room talk. Yet, as Daniel Mark Fogel has aptly noticed, James is not merely skating over the glittering, brittle surface of public appearances; he is deeply perturbed by the changes in manners, beliefs, and values which he perceives to be taking place in English society (19–20). In his thoughtful uneasiness, James focuses on the time-honored problem of when a young woman may be regarded as coming of age in the eyes of her guardians, thus making the transition from the confined protection of the nursery to the full responsibility of adulthood with its opportunities and its susceptibility to dubious choices and associations. In his preface to The Awkward Age, James humorously puzzles over “the English trick of the so morally well-meant and so intellectually helpless compromise,” which leaves Edwardian girls hovering in a curious sort of shadowland between childish dependence and purity, on the one hand, and mature exposure to the ways of the world on the other. In America, he wryly observes, the strain on everyone’s delicacy of judgement is pragmatically reduced by the assumption that the young are sufficiently resilient to have coped with reading the newspapers (AN 103–4). That community seems to be more strongly in command of its social praxis because it is more aware and more accepting of its own blemishes. At the heart of James’s sustained enquiry in The Awkward Age, however, lies the teasing notion of innocence, innocence in its relation to knowledge and potential corruption. Seriously as James takes the prevailing upheaval in British manners and conventional morality, he sees the dilemmas of his novel as arising equally compellingly out of deeply rooted epistemological uncertainties. He is determined to explore these philosophical perplexities in his attempt at understanding the confused knotting of a disconcertingly taut social fabric...