英美文学选读学习笔记 Henry James

Henry James (1843-1916) was the first American writer to conceive his career in international terms. Today with the development of the modern novel and the common acceptance of the Freudian approach, his importance, as well as his wide influence as a novelist and critic, has been all the more conspicuous.

Henry James was born in New York City into a wealthy family, the son of the theological writer Henry James, Sr. and the younger brother of the distinguished philosopher and psychologist William James, who made a great contribution to the theory of the stream-of-consciousness technique. James was one of the few authors in the American literary history who was not obliged to work for a living. When he was very young James was taken back and forth across the Atlantic and the European education he received exposed him early to an international society. In 1862, James entered Harvard Law School, where he met William Dean Howells and developed a lifelong friendship with the man. During his study at Harvard, James read intensively Balzac, Merimee and George Sand, and also studied earnestly the novels of George Eliot and Hawthorne. Later he toured England, France and Italy, and met Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola and Turgenev, who exerted a great influence on James. While Mark Twain and William Dean Howells satirized European manners at times, Henry James was an admirer of ancient European civilization. The materialistic bent of American life and its lack of culture and sophistication, he believed, could not provide him with enough materials for great literary works, so he settled down in London in 1876, and in 1915 he became a naturalized British citizen, largely in protest against America's failure to join England in the First World War. The following year James died in London shortly after receiving the Order of Merit from King George V for his services to the British nation.

Henry James's literary achievement is remarkable. His literary writings are bulky and voluminous, ranging from book reviews, stories, travel accounts, autobiographies, novels, plays, to literary criticism. It is his novels and his literary essays that make him a fascinating case in the American literary history and a conspicuous figure in world literature.

The literary career of Henry James is generally spanided into three periods. In the first period (1865-1882), James took great interest in international themes. In almost all the stories and novels he wrote during this period, James treated with great care the clashes between two different cultures and the emotional and moral problems of Americans in Europe, or Europeans in America. Nearly every work is important in its own way in terms of James's cultivation of the theme. The American (1877) tells a story about a young and innocent American confronting the complexity of the European life; Daisy Miller (1878), a novella about a young American girl who gets "killed" by the winter in Rome, brought James international fame for the first time. In The Europeans (1878), the scene is shifted back to America, where some Europeans, who are actually expatriated Americans, learn with difficulty to adapt themselves to the American life. The Portrait of A Lady (1881) is generally considered to be his masterpiece, which incarnates the clash between the Old World and the New in the life journey of an American girl in a European cultural environment.

James experimented with different themes and forms in his middle period. Novels like The Bostonians (1886), which satirized the women liberation movement that took place in Boston, and The Princess Casamassima (1886), which exposed the anarchist conspiracy in the slum of London, were written in a naturalistic mode and proved to be unsuccessful. He also tried writing for the theater, but gave it up soon because neither of the plays he produced made a hit. However, James did have a significant try in writing some short fictions during this period. The Private Life (1893), The Death of a Lion (1894) and The Middle Years (posthumously 1917) succeed in exploring the relationship of the artist to the society only to prove that the artist would not sacrifice the truth for the passion no matter how troubled and isolated he feels. Another group of short fictions includes The Turn of the Screw (1898), a story about the troubled and abnormal psychology of opssed children, in which a whole household is terrorized by "ghosts," and The Beast in the Jungle (1903), which focuses on the imaginative obsession of some haunted men and women with their personal disaster in future.

In his last and major period, James returned to his "international theme." From 1895 to 1900, he wrote some novellas and stories dealing with childhood and adolescence, the most famous of which is What Maisie Knows (1897). After that, he successively created the following great books: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904). These demanding novels are widely considered to be James's most influential contribution to literature. The treatment of the international theme is characterized by the richness of syntax and characterization and the originality in point of view, symbolism, metaphoric texture, and organizing rhythm. James is now more mature as an artist, more at home in the craft of fiction.

James's fame generally rests upon his novels and stories with the international theme. These novels are always set against a larger international background, usually between Europe and America, and centered on the confrontation of the two different cultures with two different groups of people resenting two different value systems. The typical pattern of the conflict between the two cultures would be that of a young American man or an American girl who goes to Europe and affronts his or 'her destiny. The unsophisticated boy or girl would be beguiled, betrayed, cruelly wronged at the hands of those who tend to stand for the highest possible civilization. Marriage and love are used by James as' the focal point of the confrontation between the two value systems, and .the protagonist usually goes through a painful process of a spiritual growth, gaining knowledge of good and evil from the conflict. However, we may misintert Henry James if we think he makes an antithesis, in his international novels, of American innocence versus European corruption.

Henry James's literary criticism is an indispensable part of his contribution to literature. It is both concerned with form and devoted to human values. The theme of his essay “The Art of Fiction” clearly indicates that the aim of the novel is to sent life, so it is not surprising to find in his writings human experiences explored in every possible form, illusion, despair, reward, torment, inspiration, delight, etc. He also advocates the freedom of the artist to write about anything that concerns him, even the disagreeable, the ugly and the commonplace. The artist should be able to "feel" the life, to understand human nature, and then to record them in his own art form.

Moreover, James's realism is characterized by his psychological approach to his subject matter. His fictional world is concerned more with the inner life of human beings than with overt human actions. His best and most mature works will render the drama of inspanidual consciousness and convey the moment-to-moment sense of human experience as bewilderment and discovery. And we as readers observe people and events filtering through the inspanidual consciousness and participate in his experience. This emphasis on psychology and on the human consciousness proves to be a big breakthrough in novel writing and has great influence on the coming generations. That is why James is generally regarded as the forerunner of the 20th-century "stream-of-consciousness" novels and the founder of psychological realism.

One of James's literary techniques innovated to cater for this psychological emphasis is his narrative "point of view." As the author, James avoids the authorial omniscience as much as possible and makes his characters reveal themselves with his minimal intervention. So it is of ten the case that in his novels we usually learn the main story by reading through one or several minds and share their perspectives. This narrative method proves to be successful in bringing out his themes. As to his language, James is not so easy to understand. He is often highly refined and insightful. With a large vocabulary, he is always accurate in word selection, trying to find the best exssion for his literary imagination. Therefore Henry James is not only one of the most important realists of the period before First World War, but also the most expert stylist of his time.

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