Stereoscopic Vision in James’s “A New England Winter”

Stereoscopic Vision in James’s “A New England Winter”

Elaine Pigeon

Université de Montréal

David Hockney recently created a major stir in the art world with his new theory of art and optics, which he illustrates in Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters. “From the early 15^th century,” Hockney argues, “many Western artists used optics – by which I mean mirrors and lenses (or a combination of the two) – to create living projections. Some artists used these projected images directly to produce drawings and paintings, and before long this new way of depicting the world – this new way of seeing – had become widespread” (12). These artists include van Eyck, Vermeer, Caravaggio, Titian, Raphael, Velázquez, as well as the renowned draftsman Ingres, and the American painter, Thomas Eakins.[1] All of these painters, “Hockney suggests, knew the magic of photographic projection. They saw how good these devices were at projecting a three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface” (Boxer). In other words, these optical devices facilitated the creation of stunningly realistic effects.

Although a writer, Henry James is also renowned for his painterly eye. He too was concerned with producing realistic effects, or as he preferred to call them – impressions. Critics in fact often comment on the exquisite Impressionist descriptions that can be found in The Bostonians, yet rarely do they take into account the references to photography that are sprinkled throughout the text, which after all represents James’s attempt to provide a kind of document, or tale characteristic of the social conditions in New England in the 1870s.[2] However, almost six months before The Bostonians graced the pages of Century Magazine, James’s short story, “A New England Winter,” announced his new direction: his experiment with literary naturalism and his acceptance of its counterpart, French Impressionism, a shift that signalled the reversal of an earlier position. As much as “A New England Winter” draws on the fine arts, its relevance lies in James’s unique application of contemporary optics. Although there is only one photograph mentioned in this amusing tale, it seems that James drew on the underlying principles of the stereoscope to create a story that can be read from two divergent points of view. On the surface, “A New England Winter” appears to hinge on a straight but somewhat racy romance – an infatuation with a married woman, but when viewed from a slightly different perspective, we can perceive the outline of a queer subtext. Thus far, no such reading has been given to this neglected tale.

More specifically, the structure of James’s short story appears to owe much to the eminent Bostonian, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who in 1859 developed a compact, hand-held stereoscope. The basics of how a stereoscope functions “were first laid out as far back as ancient Greece when Euclid explained the principles of binocular vision. He demonstrated that the right and left eyes see a slightly different version of the same scene and that it is the merging of these two images that produces the perception of depth” (History). During the Renaissance, experiments with stereo drawings were made; however, the advent of photography really made widespread stereoscopic viewing possible.[3] “After Queen Victoria took a fancy to the stereoscope at the Crystal Palace Exposition in 1851, stereo viewing became all the rage in Britain” (History). Some ten years later, in the United States, “Oliver Wendell Holmes and Joseph Bates came out with the Holmes stereopticon, which soon dominated the world market and became the standard stereoscopic device for decades” (History). While expensive, up until WWI stereoscopes could be found in almost every middle-class American home.

As Lyall H. Powers remarks in Henry James and the Naturalist Movement, Holmes’s influence on James “is of peculiar significance” (9). Besides Dr. Holmes’s interest in modern technology, science and medicine, he was also a popular literary figure, best known for his series in the Atlantic Monthly, “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table,” which ran from 1857-8. In the 1860s, Holmes also published two “scientific” novels, Elsie Venner and The Guardian Angel, in which he considered “the determining influence of heredity.” As Powers notes, “Holmes was in a sense anticipating Emile Zola’s theory of le roman expérimental” (10). More pointedly, Holmes broached the subject of same-sex desire in his novels, a subject James’s story also hints at.

In “A New England Winter,” a young American expatriate with the outrageous name of Florimond Daintry goes home to Boston to visit his mother. For the past six years, we soon learn, Florimond has been living in Paris, where he has become an Impressionist painter of some repute. In creating his American Impressionist, it seems that James was inspired by John Singer Sargent, a remarkably Jamesian character. Somewhat ironically, Sargent’s biographer Stanley Olsen reports that “James was mesmerized by John, as one is mesmerized by an exotic flower. John had all the high gloss of cultural confusion that James relied on in his fiction” (106). Although Sargent’s parents were American, they lived a nomadic life in Europe, moving from Italy to Switzerland to France and back again. As a result, Sargent was born in Florence in 1856; he first visited America in 1876, but he did not actually set foot in Boston until 1887.[4] However, in 1884, the year that concerns us, Sargent had become disillusioned with Paris, where he was currently living, and visited England for the first time upon James’s urging. When Sargent arrived in London, James immediately took him to the Royal Academy and to visit the studios of “the giants of English art,” including Burne-Jones. James even “hosted a dinner for John at the Reform Club…. James’s entertainment,” Olson remarks, “was the closest thing to courtship. Their relationship was strangely, though not clearly, chaste” (107). Although Sargent soon came to be known primarily as a fashionable portrait painter, at this point he was calling himself an Impressionist.[5]

Another possible model for Florimond Daintry is the French Impressionist, Edgar Degas, whose mother, was also an American – a Creole from New Orleans. In contrast to the other Impressionists, Degas was not interested in painting fleeting sensory impressions received en plein air. Paradoxically, critics often singled out Degas’s paintings for their ability to create impressions. Like James, Degas was interested in narrative, as he often played on the implication of things, suggesting that which lies behind the immediate, surface impression. Like the Jamesian impression, the scenes Degas evokes impress themselves on the viewer’s imagination, where they often reverberate with sexually charged significance. Curiously, information on Degas’s sex is even more heavily guarded than on James’s, although Degas’s famous ballerinas and female nudes, along with his lurid illustrations for Guy de Maupassant’s La Maison Tellier, suggest a distinct heterosexual bent; but like James, it seems Degas was given to scoptophilia.[6]

Evidently inspired by Baudelaire’s idea of “the painter of modern life,” Degas turned to the urbane life of Paris where, like Florimond, he “memorized” scenes from the street; for Degas recreated and perfected his impressions in the studio, where he also experimented with his box camera. Indeed, the influence of both Japanese prints and photography can be found in his work, most notably his radical cropping of the human figure. For instance, in La Place de la Concorde, painted in 1876, le compte Lepic and his daughters are cut off on the bottom right of the frame, while another man on the far left is almost completely cut out of the frame. While such a composition no longer strikes us as unusual, at the time the public was outraged.

Of course, James’s narrator subjects Florimond to all the usual objections to Impressionism: “His power of rendering was questioned, his execution had been called pretentious and feeble; but a conviction had somehow been diffused that he saw things with extraordinary intensity. No one could tell better than he what to paint, and what not to paint, even though his interpretation were sometimes rather too sketchy” (114). Remarkably, precisely that which distinguishes Florimond as an artist can also be identified as the hallmark of aestheticism. Yet Florimond’s intense impressions differ markedly from those of the aesthetes. For the most part, British aesthetes like the author of Beltraffio, Walter Pater, Simeon Solomon and Burne-Jones were devoted to the pursuit of beauty and cultivated a pronounced love of sensuous detail, all the while maintaining an idealized fascination with the past, in particular, with Medieval Europe, the Italian Renaissance and Classical Greece. In France, in contrast, artists like Degas, Manet, and Renoir had turned from antiquity to the present, to the spectacle of modernity: a vibrant and pulsating Paris, at the time the cultural capitol of Europe.

Having adopted the habits of the “perfect flâneur”, Florimond is also a “passionate spectator” who can be identified as a variation of Baudelaire’s “painter of modern life” (9). Very much like Baudelaire’s Monsieur G.,[7] who “marvels at the eternal beauty and the amazing harmony of life in the capital cities” (10), Florimond gazes upon the landscapes of the city of Boston, all the while taking note of distinct external details with his painterly eye:

He perceived that even amid the simple civilisation of New England there was material for the naturalist; and in Washington Street of a winter’s afternoon, it came home to him that it was a fortunate thing the impressionist was not exclusively preoccupied with the beautiful. He became familiar with the slushy streets, crowded with thronging pedestrians and obstructed horse-cars, bordered with strange, promiscuous shops, which seemed at once violent and indifferent, overhung with snowbanks from the house-tops; the avalanche that detached itself at intervals, fell with an enormous thud amid the dense procession of women, made for a moment a clear space, splashed with white snow, on the pavement, and contributed to the gaiety of the Puritan capital. Supreme in the thoroughfare was the rigid groove of the railway, where oblong receptacles, of fabulous capacity, governed by familiar citizens, jolted and jingled eternally, close on each other’s rear, absorbing and emitting innumerable specimens of a single type. (140)

Of course, this type corresponds to James’s distinct perception of Bostonians. His narrator, moreover, emphasizes, “It was not important for [Florimond] that things should be beautiful; what he sought to discover was their identity – the signs by which he should know them” (115). Yet, in James’s impressionist tale, the signs by which we can identify Florimond’s “type” are contradictory. Consider James’s choice of detail, for he describes Florimond as “a little vain, a little affected, a little pretentious, a little good-looking, a little amusing, a little spoiled, and at times a little tiresome” (117). Indeed, one might say this is a little queer for a naturalist description. For the most part, French literary naturalists and impressionists assumed a scientific stance, emphasizing distinct physical characteristics or physiognomy in order to distinguish various types, which of course James does from time to time; at this point, however, he does not draw attention to Florimond’s American physiognomy. Rather, James focuses on Florimond’s general appearance and attitude, insisting that nothing stands out.

Of course, James piques our curiosity when he insists that Florimond is “not very remarkable,” then immediately adds, “you would never have guessed from his appearance that he was an impressionist. He was neat and sleek and quite anti-Bohemian” (117). James, it seems, did not want his critics to confuse Florimond with the sexually ambiguous aesthete, since James differentiates between the impressionist painter and the author of Beltraffio with notable precision, so that the near perfect symmetry of the contrast belies a certain irony. For in his initial description of Mark Ambient, James remarks: “There was a brush of the Bohemian in his finesse; you would easily have guessed his belonging to the artistic guild” (32). Not only is James’s author “addicted” to the aesthete’s telltale velvet jacket, unlike the well-groomed Florimond, Mark Ambient looks “a little dishevelled” (32). In addition, we are informed that Florimond’s “figure was much more in harmony with the Boston landscape than he supposed” (117). Thus it appears that Florimond bares traces of Edgar Allan Poe’s “man of the crowd,” whom Baudelaire glorified: “To … feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world – such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define” (emphasis mine 9). Indeed, what does Baudelaire mean by a “passionate, impartial nature”? And James – what is he insinuating by insisting that Florimond can in fact pass for a Bostonian. Is our author not signalling his more discerning readers that what remains hidden is Florimond’s queerness, while at the same time forestalling this very possibility in order to silence his American critics? Of course, one could argue that James merely wanted to stress Florimond’s national identity, but then James is rarely transparent. In fact, turning back to Poe’s tale, we find “the man of the crowd” compared to an actual text, “a certain German book that ‘er lasst sich nicht lesen’ – it does not permit itself to be read” (388). James’s tale, in contrast, permits at least two readings.

Unlike the ambiguous Mark Ambient, or that tale’s nameless narrator, who openly gushes over his idol while displaying a notable aversion to the opposite sex, Florimond quite enjoys the company of women, “many of whom,” we are told, “thought him wonderfully sympathetic” (118). Acting on this knowledge, Florimond’s mother – a lonely widow who conspires to prolong her only son’s stay – arranges for a poor, distant cousin, the independent Rachel Torrance, who happens to paint flowers, to come and stay in Boston for the winter. Since Rachel spent a good deal of time in Europe when she was young, she acquired an “artistic” background and learnt to speak French and Italian. Mrs Daintry hopes that these assets, along with Rachel’s striking good looks and lively company, will entice Florimond to stay until summer, when Mrs Daintry plans to accompany him safely back to France. Predictably Florimond’s mother is much dismayed when she discovers that her son has accepted Rachel “in the spirit in which she had been offered” (133), for Rachel reminds him “of a celebrated actress in Paris” (125) and proves a great social success: “the girl was universally liked and admired; she was a new type altogether; she was the lioness of the winter” (126). In fact, Rachel is so popular that she is often out when Florimond goes to visit her at Mrs Mesh’s, yet another cousin with whom Rachel is staying. But Florimond does not mind, since he thoroughly enjoys Mrs Mesh’s company and finds her “drawing-room better than any other corner of Boston” (125). On her part, Mrs Mesh is delighted “to have a young man of her own – fresh from Paris – quite to herself” (147). Together they fancy “they are making a ‘celebrated friendship’ – like Horace Walpole and Madame du Deffand” (147). Of course, when Mrs Daintry finds out, she is mortified, since she assumes that Florimond is making love to a married woman. In the interests of propriety, Mrs Daintry promptly whisks her son off to Paris.

As you can see, a straight, first reading of “A New England Winter” fosters the impression that Florimond is indeed a lady’s man, while a closer, second reading raises other, more intriguing possibilities, possibilities that the text supports, but never actually confirms. Why, for instance, does James mention that Florimond often goes to see a friend in Cambridge? “In this little excursion he often indulged; he used to go and see one of his college-mates, who was now a tutor at Harvard” (142). And why does Florimond find it necessary to keep these visits a secret from his mother, who he well knows thinks he is with his cousin Rachel? And why does the narrator repeatedly insist that Florimond’s relations with women are all perfectly innocent? Considering that James had just published “Georgina’s Reasons,” a tale about a female bigamist, it seems highly unlikely that he believed it necessary to be quite that fastidious.

Following the principles of Holmes’s stereopticon, which requires that the two slightly different pictures converge in order to produce a startling three-dimensional effect – the illusion of depth, what jumps out at us is this glaring omission: Florimond is not at Mrs. Mesh’s; he is off on one of his secret visits to Harvard. Why Harvard? First of all, Oliver Wendell Holmes was dean of Harvard’s medical school. Secondly, his son, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had taken a room in Cambridge in 1864 when he began attending lectures at the Harvard Law School. Sheldon Novick reports that James “frequently went out to see him” (106). Indeed, James’s story lends credibility to Novick’s claim that James “performed his first acts of love” with Holmes in his rooming house in Cambridge (109). Sheldon quotes a passage in James’s Notebook that was written many years later, in California in 1905: “How can I speak of Cambridge at All,” James writes, “The point for me … is that I knew there, had there, in the ghostly old C. that I sit and write of here by the strange Pacific on the other side of the continent, l’initiation première (the divine, the unique)” (109). Novick, however, omits the following comment by James: “Something – some fine, superfine, supersubtle mystic breath of that may come in perhaps in the Three Cities” (238). James’s Three Cities included “Lady Barberina,” “Impressions of a Cousin,” and “A New England Winter.” Thus, it seems, James’s tale memorialises his intoxicating and unforgettable experience, one that his recollections of Cambridge and O.W.H. inevitably renewed. Is it any wonder then that the very title of James’s tale forms the acronym “anew”?

This queer reading reveals how, in his engagement with literary naturalism, James was actually furthering the development of the sublime ambiguity of his late style, however paradoxical such a claim may seem, given the assumed transparency of naturalist writing. For James, of course, was not striving for transparency, at least not in the usual sense. Rather, it appears that his aim was to create a distinct but superficial impression, one that remained transparent enough to reveal the outline of a surprisingly different picture hovering just below the surface. Of course, one can only speculate, but then, as James understood so well, guessing the unseen from the seen is a temptation not every reader can resist.

Works Cited

“A Brief Stereoscopic History.” http://home.centurytel.net/s3dcor/history.htm 3 February 2001.

Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Trans. Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1964, 1995.

Boxer, Sarah. “Paintings Too Perfect? The Great Optics Debate.” The New York Times on the Web. www.nytimes.com 4 December 2001.

Graham, Wendy. Henry James’s Thwarted Love. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.

Gussow, Mel. “Old Masters Pursued by Artistic Gumshoes.” The New York Times on the Web. www.nytimes.com 29 November 2001.

“History of the Stereopticon.” www.bitwise.net/~ken-bill/stereo.htm 1 March 2002.

Hockney, David. Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters. New York, NY: Viking Studio, 2001.

James, Henry. “A New England Winter.” The Complete Tales of Henry James: 1884-1888 (Vol. 6) Ed. Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963.

---. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. New York & Oxford, Oxford UP, 1987.

Novick, Sheldon M. Henry James: The Young Master. NY: Random House, 1996.

Olson, Stanley. John Singer Sargent: His Portrait. NY: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1986.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Man of the Crowd.” Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales. New York: Library of America, 1978. 388-396.

Powers, Lyall H. Henry James and the Naturalist Movement. USA: Michigan State UP, 1971.

[1] Mel Gussow of The New York Times reports, “Recently, X-rays revealed that Thomas Eakins had traced projected images while doing some of his paintings in the late 1800’s.”

[3] Photographs for a stereoscope, or stereo pictures, are taken by means of a camera with two lenses that provide two separate pictures 2.5 inches apart, about the distance between the eyes. Significantly, because they are each taken from a slightly different angle, the pictures are not exactly the same. This discrepancy is what creates the optical illusion, or effect of depth, when the pictures are viewed through two prismatic lenses, as the images then appear to converge, one on top of the other (A Brief).

[4] One of the main reasons for Sargent’s going to Boston was to paint the portrait of General Lucius Fairchild, who “had had a distinguished career, from being first mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, to governor of the State. In between this promotion he served in the Union Army, became a colonel and finally Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic” (Olsen 139).

[5] Olson reports that “Sargent was in Paris at the height of the Impressionists’ revolution; he met Monet at the second Impressionist exhibition at Durand-Ruel in 1876.” (150). Their friendship spanned some fifty years. Sargent’s experiments with Impressionism began early in the 1880s with some of His Nice landscapes, the uninterrupted flurry started in the summer of 1887” in the English countryside (150-1).

[7] The French artist, Constantin Guy (1802-92).