Henry James and the Visual

by Kendall Johnson

Overview

In the decades after the Civil War, how did Americans see the world and their place in it? In this text, Kendall Johnson argues that Henry James appealed to his readers' sense of vision to dramatise the ambiguity of American citizenship in scenes of tense encounter with Europeans. By reviving the eighteenth-century debates over beauty, sublimity, and the picturesque, James weaves into his narratives the national politics of emancipation, immigration, and Indian Removal. For James, visual experience is crucial to the American communal identity, a position that challenged prominent anthropologists as they defined concepts of race and culture in ways that continue to shape how we see the world today. To demonstrate the cultural stereotypes that James reworked, the book includes twenty illustrations from periodicals of the nineteenth century. This study reaches startling conclusions not just about James, but about the way America defined itself through the arts in the nineteenth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521283397
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/16/2011
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Kendall Johnson is Assistant Professor of English at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania.

Read an Excerpt

Cambridge University Press
9780521880664 - Henry James and the Visual - by Kendall Johnson
Excerpt

Introduction: the cultural varieties of visual experience

A terrible danger is hanging over the Americans in London. Their future and their reputation this season depend entirely on the success of Buffalo Bill and Mrs. Brown-Potter. The former is certain to draw; for English people are far more interested in American barbarism than they are in American civilization.

Oscar Wilde, “The American Invasion,” Court and Society Review (March 1887)¹

As a boy, Henry James loved cartoons. In the essay “Du Maurier and London Society” (1883), he recalls leafing through issues of Punch from the 1850s, when he “played in a Union Square, which was then enclosed by a high railing and governed by a solitary policeman.” This young, “silent devotee of Punch” felt “transported” by the famous cartoonists to the “London of the First Crystal Palace” of 1855 (DM 327). James then rejoins the present, asking his reader to appreciate Du Maurier’s contemporaneous “skill in race-portraiture” (DM 365) and “peculiar perception of the look of breeding, of face” (DM 350).

The term “race” here is not a static category of biological determinism. Instead, it implies that social interactions have physical effects in which thekeen observer discerns a visual pattern. Yet the consistency of type, upon which “race portraiture” might ostensibly depend, seems uninteresting to James. Whereas Du Maurier may wish everyone “to be tall, straight and fair,” he draws “the whole multitude of the vulgar who have not been cultivated like orchids and race horses” (DM 350). James finds “real entertainment in the completeness, in the perfection of certain forms of facial queerness.” He avers that “No one has rendered like Du Maurier the ridiculous little people who crop up in the interstices of that huge and complicated London world” (DM 348).

James directs our attention to “two brilliant, full page” cartoons from the Punch Almanac in 1865 (DM 346). The first drawing, “Probable Results of the Acclimatisation Society. – The Serpentine,” presents a remarkable

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Figure 1: George Du Maurier, “Probable Results of the Acclimatisation Society. – The Serpentine,” Punch Almanack for 1865, no page number.

afternoon on the grounds between Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens (Figure 1). Children lounge with a hodge-podge of potentially fierce animals in a peaceable kingdom that seems precariously balanced. A whale upends a young man’s boat, pitching him high into the air (upper right of figure). The sign posted on the tree to the left reads “NO TIGERS ADMITTED UNLESS LED BY A STRING,” but not one animal seems leashed, although a boy is fish-hooked by the seat of his pants and dangles above a crocodile. The snake and toucan enjoy each other’s company, while the serene communion of the lion, tiger, and bear belies the return of their appetites. Another boy (at the scene’s center) faces us with his hands in his pockets and his eyes downcast in a precocious halcyon daze, unfazed by our interest. The second Du Maurier drawing, “Probable Results of the Acclimatisation Society. – The Streets,” transposes the Serpentine’s array of wild life to picture the bustling traffic of London’s urban center (Figure 2). The man being trotted about in his zebra-drawn rickshaw returns our inquiring gaze with a flat stare of weary tolerance, as if we are the curiosity or an unwarranted distraction. Perhaps our concern is for the

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Figure 2: George Du Maurier, “Probable Results of the Acclimatisation Society. – The Streets,” Punch Almanack for 1865, no page number.

bare-footed street sweeper who scurries at the cartoon’s center. His ragged little broom seems no match for the elephant, whose hind quarters are plastered with a bank advertisement. One hopes the boy will be paid by the pound. In both cartoons, Du Maurier crowds the landscape with an eclectic blend of potentially menacing animals, and yet the human inhabitants wear expressions of serenity, boredom, or tolerance.

As observers, we stand apart from the charivari, afforded a vantage from which to enjoy the orchestrated calm of the relaxing beasts. However, our Archimedean point is hardly secure. Not only are our eyes met directly by the man’s flat stare in “The Streets” (or pointedly ignored by the Serpentine’s boy with pocketed hands), but the wit of Du Maurier’s assemblage depends on gauging the balance of these antagonistic parts. As spectators, we sense both our distance from and witness to the scene’s improbable configuration. Du Maurier’s sketches are more than a lampoon of Regent’s Park zoo (or Francis Buckland’s culinary quirks), but an allegory of the United Kingdom’s struggle to subsume various climates, geographies, and cultures in an imperial gestalt of civilization.² His sketches manifest prescient analysis of what Martha Banta terms the “socially layered relationships” of the late nineteenth century’s international public sphere.³ James and Du Maurier find humor in England’s pretense to compose the tempestuous forces of global traffic, and to manage populations in an imperial frame that by 1883 included Afghanistan, China, Egypt, India, Ireland, and South Africa (among many others), each of which tolerated, endured, and broke the “strings” of British rule.

The following book considers the role of visual language in representing types of national culture, and, more broadly, in conceptualizing “culture” as the kernel of national cohesiveness. Alexander Pope tied visual experience to literal cultivation when he famously observed that “all gardening is landscape-painting.”⁴ In Pope’s axiom, painting demonstrates the centrality of representation in conveying a genius loci, or “genius of place.” By imagining global geography through metonymies of animal kind, Du Maurier consolidates a social category of Englishness, which encompasses glaring discrepancies in class standing, to capture (in James’s estimation) London’s locative genius. In providing the site and soil for acclimatization, Du Maurier’s Serpentine and Streets assume a distinct English culture that supports what James calls the “multitude of the vulgar who have not been cultivated like orchids and race horses.” In the midst of the franchise debates roiling over the Second Reform Bill, “London” seems a particularly volatile site on which to exhibit a cultural consistency. Without the cartoons’ beasts as a point of reference, the boy of the Serpentine, and the boy in “The Streets” (one with his hands in pockets; the other with an overmatched broom) might seem a world apart. What possible sense of community might the man in the rickshaw share with the top-hatted men riding the bank’s elephant, or with those strutting in the park? The whiteness of their cartoon complexions is one unifying feature. Noticeably missing from these drawings are any people whose phenotype, costume, or language signify the regions to which the animals are indigenous. The peoples’ phenotypic whiteness registers labor as a dark smudge, while harnessing antagonisms that emanate from the “interstices” of the vulgar “London world” in a portrait of a “facial queerness” distinctively “Anglo-Saxon.”

The subdued irony of James’s essay is representative of his style of cultural commentary. He addresses his reader almost tongue in cheek, pronouncing aesthetic judgment on cartoons of a popular monthly, and blending in tone Hippolyte Taine’s confident incisiveness with the moral equanimity of Mathew Arnold and John Ruskin. Yet, James’s nostalgic anecdote is relaxed and playful as he takes Du Maurier’s images seriously as criticism, claiming that “Many people … have gathered their knowledge of English life almost entirely from Punch, and it would be difficult to imagine a more abundant, and on the whole a more accurate informant” (DM 333). James is poking gentle fun at someone, including those who read Punch and Century Magazine to know “English life”; cartoonists who invest their drawings with the care of museum pieces; scientists and cultural commentators who purport to observe and formulate “English life”; and, at himself, a forty-year-old author who envies the illustrator’s popularity. He is also suggesting his own country’s deficiency of type. When James declares that “We have no such finished types as these in America” (DM 348), it is difficult not to sense his determination to provide them.

Given his deep concern with the integrity of the written word, James’s public appreciation of Du Maurier’s pictures might come as a surprise. In the 1907 preface to The Golden Bowl, James famously bemoans the “ ‘picture-book’ quality that contemporary English and American prose appears more and more destined, by conditions of publication, to consent, however grudgingly, to see imputed to it” (GB 23). He reprimands publishers who cater to lazy audiences unwilling to invest time and energy in the act of reading; his Arnoldian mission is to surmount the Philistine taste for the short-cut of illustration, and to reinvigorate the printed word. James’s ideal author is a “projector and creator of figures and scenes,” which pull the reader into a “state of hallucination.” Thus, “The essence of any representational work” should enable it to “bristle with immediate images.” In considering the republication of his work for the New York edition, James admits that he initially “looked much askance at the proposal, on the part of my associates in the whole business, to graft or ‘grow’, at whatever point, a picture by another hand on my own picture – this being always, to my sense, a lawless incident” (GB 23).

Alvin Langdon Coburn’s frontispiece photographs coordinate the pictures and text to avoid any unrestrained promiscuity. To acquire the photographic specimens, James accompanied the photographer through London’s streets, searching for the fitting scene. He later recalled the “pleasure of exploration” that transformed the city into “a field yielding a ripe harvest of treasure” (GB 24). The resulting frontispieces manage a compromise between the image and word in which James’s written language retains its primacy, as Coburn’s photos offer supplement in “as different a ‘medium’ as possible,” succeeding “Even at the cost of inconsistency of attitude in the matter of the ‘grafted’ image” (GB 25). It is as if James’s prose conjures the found scenes, thus maintaining the sacred aura of literary enterprise.⁵ Coburn’s pictures acclimatize to the plot of James’s “own garden,” upon which “the cultivation of [illustrators’] hands” risks encroaching as the proper “frame of one’s work no more provides place for [the illustrator’s] plot than we expect flesh and fish to be served on the same platter” (GB 24).

James’s comparison of the word and image to “fish and flesh” is telling for juxtaposing a language of manners (the presentation of a dinner platter) and a scientific rubric of classification. Generally, the agitation of word and image in James’s oeuvre triggers metaleptic effects, breaking not only the diegetic and exegetic frames of narrative and narration, but also the disciplinary frames of literary and scientific authority to put James in dialogue with contemporaneous scientists, such as Louis Agassiz, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, and Franz Boas, who were reinventing the rules through which social existence was recognized, observed, represented, and classified. In The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton (1995), Nancy Bentley draws compelling linkages between James and the twentieth-century legacy of ethnographic authority. The literary author and the ethnographer both stage the realization of critical limitations in their accounts of social interaction. Cultural authority hereby derives from the failure to be objective, as authors acknowledge truth’s relativity and insist on the partiality of any particular vantage on society, including their own.⁶ By linking James’s aesthetic to ethnography, Bentley explains the eloquence of cultural relativity in its anxious regard for Otherness – an eloquence that “provided a way for a literature of manners to capitalize on its own predicament.”⁷ The following chapters explore the extent to which James’s visual metaphors cultivate “lawless incidents” to dramatize crises in national manners, thereby challenging the categorical integrities of images and words, and of romance and realism.

In the title of this book I use the adjectival noun “visual” instead of the noun “vision.” By this I intend to emphasize sight as a process that is allusive and elusive in establishing meaning within and between social contexts. In The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James (1964), Lawrence Holland characterizes James’s fiction as a relationship that not only shows readers something, but also acts upon them, enjoining them to negotiate the intersecting imaginations and idealizations of a shared world.⁸ My sense of the visual follows Holland’s lead by probing how developing notions of cultural type structured the meaning of visual experience in the nineteenth century. The word “vision” does work to convey the sacred aura of James’s sense of cultural character; however, the precise nature and meaning of culture always depend on the tensions between those actors who communicate in the contested spaces that James conjures and represents. As an adjective, “visual” also suggests the technological innovations that changed the mode of vision in the nineteenth century, introduced photography and cinematography, and established systems of knowledge that relegated the eye to an instrument of inquiry when it had been a window to the soul.⁹ James’s sense of the visual addresses these technological shifts and the market relations that stand behind them, and does so by reworking a legacy of visual arts that Pope summarizes so pithily: all gardening is landscape-painting.

The idea for this book sprang from the curious ubiquity of the “picturesque” as both a theme and style in James’s fiction and travel writing. On a literal level, the picturesque derives from the French pittoresque and Italian pittoresco, designating the suitability of the earth for painted representation. It extends Horacian ruminations on ut pictura poesis, proposing that poetry’s written word best motivates the imagination to realize impressions, thus attaining an associative dynamism that exceeds literal pictures, a claim Edmund Burke advocates in Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Like the companion terms of the sublime and beautiful, the picturesque frames one’s visual sensations of the world in a landscape or scene; however, the picturesque effect is uniquely combinative, teasing difference to contain it finally in a larger configuration. In Biographia Literaria Coleridge famously defines the picturesque as “Where the parts by their harmony produce an effect of a whole, but where there is no seen form of a whole producing or explaining the parts of it, where the parts only are seen and distinguished, but the whole is felt.”¹⁰

Unlike the beautiful, with its emphasis on symmetry, regularity, and classical traditions of perfected form, the picturesque promoted innovations in style to foster more active roles of observation and artistic creation. David Marshall discerns a seed of the picturesque in the “paradoxical grounding of nature in the aesthetic experience,” emerging from the “renaissance art of gardening in which, theoreticians and practitioners display a complex ambivalence about art and nature.”¹¹ Generally, those who defined the term in the later half of the eighteenth century were either practicing gardeners (or “improvers,” such as Lancelot “Capability” Brown and Humphrey Repton), or gentlemen theorists, including William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight, who reacted against the monotony of the practitioners’ styles. Responding to the broader philosophies of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the trio of Gilpin, Price, and Knight differentiated the picturesque from the sublime, a term signaling a philosophical crisis in the subject’s incapacity either to apprehend the extent of the world’s phenomena and implicit awesomeness of God (Burke), or to orient one’s ensuing critical inquiry in the metaphysical quandary of knowledge that such perceptual limits implied (Kant). Whereas the picturesque signaled a break from the regiment of beauty, it also offered a foothold for recovering perspective on the vast whole, folding consciousness back from sublimity’s aporia and into the delight of orchestrating a visual gestalt.

Uvedale Price’s Essays on the Picturesque (1794) affords a useful summary. He characterizes landscape paintings “as a set of experiments of the different ways in which trees, buildings, water, &c. may be disposed, grouped and accompanied, in the most beautiful and striking manner.”¹² The “roughness, irregularity and abrupt variation” of these scenes are predicated upon “the picturesque effect of the whole” in which intricacy stabilizes to produce a “delight” that is “immediate and universal.”¹³ The picturesque thus feeds the “active agency” of a “curiosity” that pursues the landscape’s “wild” or the “most savage” elements. The excitement, “produced by the intricacies of wild romantic mountainous scenes,” “prompts us to scale every rocky promontory, to explore every new recess.”¹⁴ The act of contemplation reins in all this energy to promote the scene’s configured effect, and “Objects must have a mutual relation,” whereby “intricacy, variety, and connection” display the “character of the ground.”¹⁵ In Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty (1792), William Gilpin goes so far as to gauge the geographical propriety of a picturesque balance of variety.¹⁶ Anticipating the irony of Du Maurier’s cartoon, he advises that to maximize picturesque effect, artists ought to select animals appropriate to each geographical region, for the “speckled pard, / Or tawny lion, ill would glare beneath / The British oak; and British flocks and herds / Would graze as ill on Africa’s burning fields.”¹⁷

My particular concern is the function of people in James’s narratives of visual experience. Ann Bermingham argues in Landscape and Ideology (1986) that the picturesque fostered sympathy for peasant farmers in England who were unhomed as land became an increasingly marketable commodity. As such, the picturesque drew more from the tone of Virgilian removals in the Eclogues – where soldiers’ reward displaced citizens’ security – than from the serene pastorals of the Georgics.¹⁸ People figure as malleable elements in the larger composition, and Price proposes: “In our own species, objects merely picturesque are to be found among the wandering tribes of gypsies and beggars”¹⁹ – accordingly, beggars’ poverty and the gypsies’ “wandering” acknowledge and disavow the alienating effects of consolidating land as property in the nation’s “fair regions.”²⁰ The picturesque thus aestheticized the material struggles of those in an imperial landscape whose national middle ground was being framed amidst the violent contest of international traffic in goods and people.

By the time James engaged the picturesque, it had become somewhat passé in England, a banal grammar of the sightseeing bourgeoisie; however, in the United States it had a much more vigorous legacy, fueled in the first half of the nineteenth century by Emerson and Hawthorne, and, other popular figures, such as George Catlin, and, James’s friend, the famous British actor Fanny Kemble. The ubiquity of the picturesque in the United States during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries makes a comprehensive catalogue of its various revisions beyond the scope of this book. John Conron’s American Picturesque (2000) provides a compendium of the term, weaving a plethora of texts into a virtual sourcebook.²¹ In the national legacy that James extends and reconfigures, the picturesque suggests an underlying organization to variety, composing the “E Pluribus Unum” of American civic identity by framing post-Revolutionary crises regarding class hierarchy, slavery, and Indian removal in a republican process of Constitutional amendment. In the American frame, England’s picturesque “peasants” and “tribes of gypsies” become America’s picturesque savages and slaves, whom writers aestheticized in drawing forth expansive frontier horizons and plantations. In the late nineteenth century, the picturesque rebounded from the country to the city. As Nancy Armstrong, Amy Kaplan, and Carrie Tirado Bramen have argued, the picturesque helped writers frame urban space and made national sense of the class conflicts that suffused an industrial capitalism sustained by waves of immigration, which James, and his friends William Dean Howells and Paul Bourget, feared were beyond any nation’s capacity of acclimatization.²²

Some critics dismiss the picturesque as evidence of James’s overwrought style and Eurocentric elitism.²³ Nevertheless, it is a crucial means through which he leverages credibility as an American author and cultural critic in the intersecting public spheres of transatlantic publication. In a basic sense, the term generates for James an often ironic sense of aesthetic integrity through which his narrators cling to their established social codes while facing the threatening consequences of modernity: the rapidly changing modes of production and consumption, and new configurations of aesthetic value and cultural capital implied by the entrance of American industrial muscle on the world stage. James does not cling to the past as an Old World irredentist, but rather invokes the picturesque to signal moments when the pride of his characters balances precariously on their management of insecurities regarding how to recognize, classify, and, ultimately, respect national identity in the international marketplace.

To James, culture is intensely relational in its expression. In his literary criticism – of Du Maurier, but also of Taine and Balzac – James evaluates the authors’ representations of cultural manner as culturally expressive. For example, he looks to Du Maurier’s cartoons as evidence of his mix of French and British heritage, averring that his friend’s illustrative “gift” springs from a “combination of sources,” and reminds us that “[Du Maurier] has French blood in his veins” and that his humor has a “very Gallic element” (DM 341, 342). James’s appreciation of cultural mixture is not a shell game of cross-cultural reference, but echoes the relational condition of what becomes Du Maurier’s quintessential Englishness. In an 1897 tribute to his recently departed friend, James differentiates Du Maurier’s “international mixture” from a “cosmopolite” in whom “we find Paris under London, and Florence under Paris, and Petersburg under Florence, and very little … under anything” (DM2 881). Conversely, Du Maurier’s brand of “international mixture” substantiates James’s sense of British identity.

To convey the stakes of cultural respectability, James often juxtaposes competing grammars of aesthetic apprehension in conversations that are humorous, tense, or even deadly serious. Consider “An American View of Swiss Scenery” from Punch of 15 June 1878 (Figure 3), another of Du Maurier’s sketches, which James mentions. The “Fair American” exclaims to the “Britisher”: “O my! An’t it rustic.” If she were properly schooled to meet a Continental standard, the Fair American would remark “How beautiful!,” “How sublime!,” or even “How picturesque!” But, she has not read John Ruskin, who regards rusticity as a counterfeit of ideal beauty, enjoyed by small or untutored minds. The Fair American’s notion of “the rustic” may reflect her national optimism about frontier development. Of course, the joke depends on understanding that “Swiss scenery” is not the American frontier. The Alps are supposed to elicit universal pronouncements, not to imply the potential for national expansion. Despite depicting the young woman’s faux pas, the picture does not sacrifice her to the urbane Britisher’s notice of her ignorance; after all, she holds his gaze and captures his interest. In a novel by James, her comment would salve the Britisher’s jaded sensibility. Depending on her yearly income, she would be an ideal pupil for his aesthetic education, culminating in an Anglo-American romance that tempers her New World energy with his Old World wisdom. It is fitting that Du Maurier signs the picture on the fence (to the left of the Britisher’s umbrella), owning in this gesture not the Swiss scene itself, which looms indistinctly in the background, but instead the tension of cultural exchange between the carefully sketched characters in the

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© Cambridge University Press

Table of Contents

Introduction: the cultural varieties of visual experience; 1. Classifying Donatello: the visual aesthetics of American exceptionalism; 2. A 'dark spot' in the picturesque: the aesthetics of polygenesis in Henry James's 'A Landscape-Painter'; 3. Rules of engagement: the arch-romance of visual culture in The American; 4. The scarlet feather: racial phantasmagoria in What Maisie Knew; 5. Pullman's progress: the politics of the picturesque in The American Scene; Epilogue: America seen; Bibliography.

Editorial Reviews

"From the opening sentence of the book...[Johnson] makes a convincing case for the resonance that he identifies between the visual languages of these pictures and James's own visual language."
-Susan Griffin, University of Louisville, New England Quarterly

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