Hoping, praying for the best, she wrote her letter, and sent it on its way.-- Constance Fenimore Woolson, Anne, p. 120
Unlike Louis Begley, who writes a fine introductory defense of The Other House, yet another Jamesian outlier in the master's long, illustrious, life, I do not immediately equate Rose Armiger with the more villainous Kate Croy, particularly as she is embodied by Helena Bonham Carter with a voluptuousness I do not always wish to see in James' works, which isn't to argue that it isn't present, as it certainly is for Isabel Archer's vitality, acknowledging that Portrait is one of James greatest hits, I simply do not envision sexual repression and its illicit fulfillment in the late Victorian era as being on parallel tracks with Hollywood's version of what James means to imply in his demands on his audience. The latter day daguerreotypes of Woolson betray her wan and downcast weariness, and it may have been the height of arrogance to assume that the aging James, no longer a young Twinkie, could have saved Cooper's niece, even if he had given in to traditional monogamy for the sake of propriety. James suffered intense depressions too, but would have never been so uncivilized as to jump through a window in Venice three stories up. On the immediate level, Woolson exemplifies her uncle's pioneering spirit in the manner of her death. It is the *American* thing to do, meeting suffering head on with like minded violence, take out your despair with a bang, fracture your skull on the border stones hemming in the waterways of sleepy Venetian canals, or perhaps that fracture hit a cement walk below, hard dirt, or even a stoop; perhaps she simply broke her neck, and oh my, an expert has surely set their eyes on Woolson's death certificate by a seedy Venetian coroner who with bafflement finds Americans inscrutable. But Armiger isn't an approximation of Woolson, as May Bartram might have been, towards the end.
There are, actually, many images of Woolson death certificates available on search, in the innocuous comforts hunting genealogy. Foucault, on a much different wavelength, (in retrospect, perhaps not so contradictory) was a fervent advocate for the genealogy, the illuminating detail, the comfort of arcane points in time. Begley makes an entirely legitimate comparison to James's late great master works which heralded the end of what the novel was, as art form. Croy, Stanton, do have designs which destroy innocence, but my comparisons, in order to justify the rescue of this "ugly duckling" narrative, is with the governess in The Turn of the Screw. Masterful authors always compete with themselves, and what the high Victorians didn't like in 1896 was this: James doesn't allow us into Rose Armiger's mind, and the clues that she will kill an innocent child under the age of reason are of scant brevity, whereas the governess of James's Christmas story, always lunging at Dickens, I write with an irritating grind of my failed 20th century salvaged teeth, loved her charges, seeking to protect them with a surmounting hysteria. We don't see this in the converted text of the failed play of 1896, only a mysterious, unwarranted combat for a widowed banker, haunted in the violence of a dead wife's prohibition and Rose's combat, within varying degrees, with the charming ingenue who is Jean Martle, and with Mrs. Beever, who wants things her way, for the best, without a hitch. I am more sympathetic toward Rose than many of James other heroines, not for what she does, but for what her acuity desires and demands to take shape, believing, if she succeeds Julia Bream she can transform Julia's husband into someone more refined. The Other House, is, on its face, the last of James's major fictions which I didn't know, perhaps a fitting jettison, whatever I, in turn, enact.
No comments:
Post a Comment