| Much research work has been done on Henry James and his works, and much more on the novels in his major phase. "The final splendid flowering of James's genius" as Walter Allen has called it – is found in the three great novels James wrote at the start of the 20th century. This dissertation, with a close look into both James's three major novels and the Autobiography, argues that James employs his late works as a kind of therapy: the efficacy of his method becomes evident as James's ability to deal with his family evolves from evasion to confrontation. The principal rhetorical mechanism by which James conducts this therapy is, drawing on Derrida, manipulation of binary oppositions that mark his texts. Not only does he represent his feeling of inadequacy through his characters, but he tries to create a self independent from family through his rhetorical strategy each time he reassigns value to the secondary term in binary oppositions. In The Ambassadors, James tries to elude familial influences; in The Wings of the Dove, he escalates this effort when he reverts to the orphan figure as his protagonist, thereby eliminating the family altogether. In The Golden Bowl, he is able to deal with the family more directly by exploring a father-daughter relationship. After working through various familial issues in the fiction, James finally feels safe enough to approach his family in the Autobiography. By making himself the subject of his novels, James shifts his place in the family from a secondary to a primary position. And, as the Autobiography is, like all autobiographies, a type of fiction, James undergoes a transformation in his memoirs by becoming his own subject. The rhetoric in James's works becomes therapeutic as it enables him to provide himself some respite from his perceived feeling of inadequacy. In all three novels and the Autobiography James represents himself as an outsider, suggesting his ambivalence about living in Europe, his gender ambiguity, his conflicts over money, and his hesitancy with regard to relationships.In his fiction James portrays protagonists who, although determined and controlled by others initially, ultimately emerge transformed. As they gain their independence, his various characters serve to express the conflicts that James feels during his lifetime and the success that he feels he has not achieved. As author, he grants himself the power and control over these images of himself that he feels he lacks in his life. James employs his protagonists to represent his longing for primacy or success and utilizes them to form relationships which might compensate for his inferior relationships in the real world. In addition, James strives to transform the fragmentation and loss he feels within himself as he represents in the dynamics of various oppositions the instability and disunity that he feels as a child and continues to feel as an adult. As James intentionally shifts the value in these oppositions, his manipulations suggest their inherent instability. The different positions he takes in different works reflect his willingness to make observations from various points of view to better represent his fictional world. James's method particularly emphasizes his belief in the impossibility of ever viewing truth as fixed. This effort at restructuring his reality, while affording a temporary respite from pain, may have resulted in his heightened ability to see that all thought is relative and there is nothing definite, no source, and no origin. By viewing hierarchies as illusory, James espouses the relativism which could possibly provide the solution to the ambivalence he has felt. If he considers himself able to choose both sides of an opposition, then, for his own purposes at least, he proves himself no longer ambivalent. But to the reader, his sanction or approval of both sides of an opposition suggests the ambivalence that is crucial to the Jamesian method. When ambivalence is preserved, the conversion that James practises can take place at any time, over and... |
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