Lee Clark Mitchell

July 3, 2002

ABegun to show for conscious things@:

Objects and Ethics in Henry James

Towards the end of Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer returns to Gardencourt to wait in the drawing room where her first meeting with Mme. Merle determined so much of her life. Overpowered by revulsion at the room itself, she senses the objects come alive: AShe grew impatient at last; she grew nervous and scaredBas scared as if the objects about her had begun to show for conscious things, watching her trouble with grotesque grimaces.@ But then she realizes more distressingly that actually:

Nothing was changed; she recognized everything she had seen years before; it might have been only yesterday she had stood there. She envied the security of valuable "pieces" which change by no hair's breadth, only grow in value, while their owners lose inch by inch youth, happiness, beauty; and she became aware that she was walking about as her aunt had done on the day she had come to see her in Albany. She was changed enough since thenBthat had been the beginning. (614)

The charged relation here between self-conscious reflection and unchanging thing, between character and object, is one James never resolved through the course of a career in which he kept returning to scenes of physical possession and self-possession. And the most vivid instances of this irresolution occur at moments where, strangely enough, settings are animated, objects are imbued with sensory powers, acting (if only fleetingly) like characters in the plot.

Such a moment occurs in Spoils of Poynton as Fleda Vetch contemplates Mrs. Gereth=s precious collection, recently emptied out of Poynton and removed to Ricks:

In the watches of the night she saw Poynton dishonoured; she had cherished it as a happy whole, she reasoned, and the parts of it now around her seemed to suffer like chopped limbs. To lie there in the stillness was partly to listen for some soft low plaint from them. (85)

Subjectivity here has once again been dispersed into objects, suffused into a roomful of artifacts. Yet unlike Isabel, dismayed at a livening of consciousness in things around her, Fleda feels instant sympathy, not only attending to the groans of objects rudely deracinated, but pitying them their plight. And that capacity to value the sovereignty, even the phantom subjectivity of things, seems of a piece with readings of the novel that celebrate Fleda=s commitment to other people=s autonomy.

My last citation occurs in the second part of The Golden Bowl, as we are first ushered in to Maggie=s perspective:

This situation had been occupying for months and months the very centre of the garden of her life, but it had reared itself there like some strange tall tower of ivory, or perhaps rather some wonderful beautiful but outlandish pagoda . . . The great decorated surface had remained consistently impenetrable and inscrutable . . . She had knocked in shortBthough she could scarce have said whether for admission or for what . . . and had waited to see what would happen. Something had happened; it was as if a sound, at her touch, after a little, had come back to her from within; a sound sufficiently suggesting that her approach had been noted. (328)

This image of Maggie=s consciousness replays the animation of objects described in earlier scenes, once again a commodity fetishism in which objects are severed from social origins to (in Karl Marx=s words) Aappear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own.@ Yet here, the actual recedes before the object-as-metaphorBthe imagined pagoda that, normally inanimate, has become autonomous, even responsive, giving a sound Aback to her,@ suggesting Aher approach had been noted.@ Here, the suspicion is aroused that things have not only come alive but are actively taking notice of us. That animated edifice at Athe very centre of the garden of her life@ soon evolves into a series of other imagined, living things, all figuring forth for Maggie her having married without Abreaking, as she liked to put it, with her past@ (328).

It is, in fact, differences rather than similarities among the three scenes that define a transition in James=s conception of ethical possibilities, and particularly as he ponders desire in terms of object relations, actual and imagined. Over the course of his career, in fact, James reconfigures objects and settings as central determinants in the construction of subjects, transforming conventional narrative expectations in the process. For most novelists, consciousness exists as a consciousness not of ideas but of things, and James (who had a mind, Eliot famously claimed, Aso fine that no idea could violate it") dramatically heightens that pattern when characters feel hypersensitive about the objects that surround them; objects that in turn take on a correspondingly phantasmic and impossible consciousness, becoming displacements for human subjectivity and personal identity. Moments like these, rare as they are, highlight the central ethical consideration for James: the idea of consciousness itself as a thing to be possessed by another. The persistence of manipulative gestures in James=s fictional worlds, his own manipulative play with his reader, the frequent collectors who populate his novels from Christopher Newman and Gilbert Osmond to Lionel Croy and Adam Verver: all are symptomatic of this ethical obsession.

Let=s return, then, to Isabel Archer=s horror at objects personified, at the idea that subjectivity can be dispersed into things, which is the converse of her fear of being treated as a thing herself. And if her return to the drawing room at Gardencourt seems ironically to justify Mme. Merle=s Agreat respect for things,@ all of which are Aexpressive@ (253), the irony is only compounded by Isabel having had to face Athe dry staring fact that she had been a dull un-reverenced tool@ (598), which helps induce her hysterical horror at the House of Usher-like transformation of the drawing room, as sheBan object among objectsBin turn invests them with both autonomy and subjectivity. The novel itself seems appalled at this treatment of Isabel right up to her escape from the plot at the end, though ironically this sympathetic tone is reversed by James=s own later view of her as a Aprecious object,@ to be Aplaced in the imagination that detains it, preserves, protects, enjoys it, conscious of its presence in the dusky, crowded, heterogeneous back-shop of the mind very much as a wary dealer in precious odds and ends . . . is conscious of the rare little `piece' left in deposit" (47). The Kantian injunction plainly informing Portrait of a LadyBthat one should treat others as ends in their own right rather than means to one=s desireBthat injunction is undermined by the very alignment of James as author with Mme. Merle and Osmond (who delights in Isabel as Aa young lady who had qualified herself to figure in his collection of choice objects by@ declining Warburton [354]), or with Ralph=s view of Isabel as Aentertainment of a high order@ (116), or Mrs. Touchett=s view of her as an Aornament@ (96, transformed to a Aconvenience@ in the later edition, [499 for 47])Bin short, of Isabel as subject to anyone else=s imaginative ploys. From this perspective, the novel narratively subverts its own thematic agenda, revealing the impoverishment of ethical norms conventionally understood.

By The Spoils of Poynton sixteen years later, James had come some distance in rethinking the dynamics of mutual handling and mishandling, as evidenced in the transition not only from Isabel Archer to Fleda Vetch but from a melodramatically charged plot of simple victimization to a narrative where melodrama exists largely in Mrs. Gereth=s inflamed expectations. Fleda=s diminished fear of animated things corresponds to a more mature recognition of people themselves as refined objects of useBindeed, of people as things, both to each other and themselves. Isabel pointedly confesses how little she can judge Gardencourt=s beauty, and tragically fails to decode Osmond=s Florentine villa (which Alooked somehow as if, once you were in, it would not be easy to get out@ [529 for 217]). By contrast, Fleda instantly recognizes objects and places as not only Athe record of a life,@ but life itselfBor as Mrs. Gereth exclaims, "they were our religion, they were our life, they were us!" (53). Things represent a metaphorical currency in an economy of consciousness that itself allows character to come alive. If the novel is obsessed with the implications of possession, Fleda=s advance on Isabel is to be serenely conscious of how thoroughly a part of others= desires she is as embodied figure, just as they are the same to her. The Spoils of Poynton marks a break in James=s narrative assumptions, for the first time elaborating an ethos that commends our treatment of others as things, valuing our mutual possession of each other as a necessary, even benign and beneficent, process. The novel=s scenic method itself reinforces that ethos, establishing characters dramatically as externalized figures, manifestly physical beings, things in the world in love with other things, whether animate or not. This involves a more complex, contorted strain of moral reasoning than the relatively straightforward ethos illuminated in Portrait of a Lady. Now, means and ends, subjects and objects, persons and things are twisted inextricably together. We express ourselves to objects through objects, thus giving form to emotions and thoughts, helping to explain how Poynton can represent not only a collection of valuable Aspoils@ but a living monument to a valued marriage. It explains as well Owen=s final gesture to Fleda, offering her the best piece from Poynton. In short, the novel presents a more nuanced view of what it is like to be a body among other bodies, a self among other selves.

This radical reconception of Kantian ethics is elaborated in James=s three late masterpieces: the recognition that one is never simply an end but always a means, not only to others but to oneself. Objectification, and a corresponding instrumentalization of subjectivity, occurs with figures who regularly realize they are immersed in things, treated as things, who need to Atreat@ others in turn, as a gesture of self-conscious autonomy, even generosity. A few brief moments will have to stand for the whole, but consider the opening of Wings of a Dove, with Kate Croy already livid at being made to wait in her father=s sitting room, slowly realizing her independence from him in terms of the tacky room itself: AIf she saw more things than her fine face in the dull glass of her father=s lodgings she might have seen that after all she was not herself a fact in the collapse@ (22). And later, the plot finds its motive in the self-revelation that Kate Asaw as she had never seen before how material things spoke to her@ (35). She will of course realize the demanding terms of life at Lancaster Gate, where Aunt Maud defines a market ethos that dictates people and uses alike. Yet being so treated by others has its compensations, even delights, as Milly Theale appreciates: AMilly knew herself dealt withBhandsomely, completely: she surrendered to the knowledge@ (231).

The self-eroticizing tenor of this kind of experience is hardly accidental, emerging in Lambert Strether=s consciousness of his relations with Mme. de Vionnet, realizing as they welcome the Pococks to Paris that Ayes, positivelyBshe was giving him over to ruin. She was all kindness and ease, but she couldn't help so giving him@ (336). Just prior to this scene, Strether thinks of Chad Newsome as a figure literally transmuted by his experienceBlike Asome light pleasant perfect work of art@ (327)Beven as Strether allows that that physical metamorphosis may be only imagined, unapparent to others. Likewise in The Golden Bowl, Amerigo agrees he=s Aa pure and perfect crystal" (138). acknowledging that as Aa huge expense assuredly@ he is willing Ato behave beautifully enough to make the beauty well-nigh an equivalent@ (228-9) for Maggie and Adam VerverBto become, in short, like a work of art. It is Maggie however who most self-consciously defines this objectifying strain in late James, and in the process directly controverts conventional ethical notions of use. At her late April dinner party for the Castledeans, she

rose of a sudden to the desire to possess and use them, even to the extent of braving, of fairly defying, of directly exploiting, or possibly quite enjoying, under cover of an evil duplicity, the felt element of curiosity with which they regarded her. Once she was conscious of the flitting wing of this last impressionBthe perception, irresistible, that she was something for their queer experience, just as they were something for hersBthere was no limit to her conceived design of not letting them escape. (359)

Here as well as anywhere, James defines the terms by which Maggie will reassert control over her life and her marriageBterms notoriously different from any that Isabel temperamentally was capable of. And the reason generations of readers have clashed in their assessment of MaggieBviewing her either as ruthless emotional bully or as sympathetically imaginative heroineBis precisely because she embodies an ethics so at odds with convention.

James reconceives our understanding of mutual use not only by having characters treat things as vividly responsive, or having them treat others as things, but in having them bestow a kind of imaginative life on each other by ventriloquizing each others= thoughts. Regularly in the late novels, individuals presume to know what others are thinking, playing out mental possibilities as forms of dialogue that are never actually spoken or heard. In doing so, they control not only what others know, but what others are allowed to imagine, effectively depriving them of agency in a pattern that might be thought of as reducing them to the status of things. Those occasions in the late novels when references are provocatively misunderstood, or thoughts deliberately interrupted so as not to hear them expressed, reinforce a more general conversion of meanings themselves into things, of thoughts into physical entities. As Sharon Cameron observes of Maggie Verver, Aher need to be `impenetrable to others= depends on her treating meaning as if it were a surface, visible but impervious, not to be gone into. One might say, not to be read.@ Or, one might also say, not to be animated and responsive but rather something objective and impenetrableBa final transfiguration of the binary, person into thing.

It=s worth reminding ourselves at this point how radical James was in thinking through the implications of people treated as things, especially in fictional worlds where things come alive. Normally, after all, objects preclude subjectivity entirely, remaining mute, isolate, inanimate. And if they speak, it is metonymically, connoting the social, sometimes moral condition of characters (what Mme. Merle famously defines as the Acluster of appurtenances@ that are the Aexpression of oneself,@ [253]). More often, things simply serve as empty signs creating a Areality effect.@ Or as Roland Barthes claims:

just when the details are reputed to denote the real directly, all that they doBwithout saying soBis signify it; Flaubert=s barometer, Michelet=s little door finally say nothing but this: we are the real; it is the category of Athe real@ (and not its contingent contents) which is then signified; in other words, the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the very signifier of realism: the reality effect is produced.

Yet if this is trueBand I think that it isBwhat seems curious is the way the physical in James so often remains indistinct, failing of a general Areality effect,@ with stage sets left unseen and ungraspable. Rarely do we know what objects actually sit in a room, or how buildings appear, or what the spoils of Poynton are, or what exactly hangs in the gallery at Gardencourt. All we know of Christopher Newman=s Alarge@ rooms on the Boulevard Haussmann is that Valentin thinks they have Asplendour, and harmony, and beauty of detail@ (134). All we=re told of Chad Newsome=s Aperched privacy@ on the Boulevard Malesherbes is that it Adidn't somehow show as a convenience easy to surrender@ (125). All Strether acknowledges of Madame de Vionnet=s apartment on the Rue de Bellechasse is that he Aseemed at the very outset to see her in the midst of possessions not vulgarly numerous, but hereditary cherished charming@ (235). Dramatically unlike Edith Wharton, say, with her precise decoration of interiors, James invokes settings and objects as metaphors for states of mind, or metonymies for character. The Awilderness of yellow upholstery@ (357) in the hotel where Osmond proposes to Isabel tells us nearly all we need to know about the marriage yet to come, to a man who will wittily be described by a sadly married Isabel as having Aa genius for upholstery@ (436). Though James claimed apologetically of Portrait of a Lady that AI was myself so much more antecedently conscious of my figures than of their setting@ (44), his figures themselves, for all their rich interior life, are left as physically indistinct as their settings (perhaps, by the way, this accounts for a lingering dissatisfaction we feel with film versions of James, since in the novels optical details occur in a surreal, almost blurred space where convincing visual appearances are neither possible nor desired).

It may seem odd that even when things come alive in James, they are not particularized, but this is clearly of a piece with his characters. After all, we tend to think of our own subjectivities as incorporeal, idiosyncratic, disembodied, not evoked simply through our Acluster of appurtenances@ (and in this regard, Isabel=s idealistic denial that Anothing that belongs to me is any measure of me@ [253] more correctly speaks to the burden of James=s realist technique than does Mme. Merle=s rejoinder). While the conventional realist novel functions metonymically, thenBsiding with Mme. Merle in associating subjectivity with a Acluster of appurtenances@BJames defines an alternative vision not only at the level of character but of things in the world. Investing vaguely defined inanimate objects with subjectivity, he grants them the same distinction he grants his characters, defining the true relation between animate and inanimate things as one that lies not in their corporeal status but in their imagined sensuous life.

Another way to express this relation is as the oxymoronic idea of figurative things, an idea James develops most commandingly in his late novels to register a profound hesitation about conventional ethical ideals. Objects may actually Ashow for conscious things@ no more frequently in James than in any other novelist, but when they occur, what they signal is the apprehension that our moral life is not to be neatly boxed via objective means and subjective ends, ideal sensibilities and insensate things. For the unstable nature of a world where things refuse to be insensate has, as James understands it, the unsettling consequence of alerting us to the things we ourselves so often becomeBopaque, intractable, as predictable as stones. As well, consciousness of ourselves and each other as things, in a more general economy where things are imagined as having sensual lives of their own, makes us aware of the implausible flatness of Kant=s ideal vision to opt out of such an economy, to fly somehow free of our own desiring, embodied state in the world. This, I take it, is what links Maggie Verver with Kate Croy, even Fleda Vetch, over against Lambert Strether and Isabel Archer. But that, I=m afraid, is a discussion which must wait for another time.

Endnotes