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Risking the Cracks: The Mystic Self in Henry James's The Golden Bowl
Twentieth Century Literature, Jan, 1999 by Ann-Marie Priest
That this "interchange" is described in strictly negative terms - that is, as vampirism - reflects, I would argue, the conventional notion that the self should be inviolable. The ideal of mature selfhood is independence and self-determination,(2) and in the light of that ideal, permeability is a threatening concept. Banta writes that
[t]he possession by the self of what is not the self was a major sin in the tradition James inherited, whether drawn from Nathaniel Hawthorne's abhorrence of the desecration of the sanctity of the human heart or his father's denunciation of 'spiritual snatching.' (83)
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"Possession" is necessarily a danger and a threat in a culture that expects people to be "rational and self-conscious" (Plamenatz xx), to function as individuals with the power to think, act, experience, and decide for themselves.
There is no doubt that in James's novels the influence one person may have on another - which is at times described as "possession," or as a flow of some "essence" from one person to another - is often depicted as sinister, horrifying, and evil. In particular, the association of such an influence with sexual passion means that it tends to partake of the ambivalence so many of the novels display about sexual love. Nevertheless, the idea of selves in constant interaction and exchange with others, selves who develop and change through such encounters, is also a persistent feature of James's novels, particularly the later ones. And there is, alongside the "gothic" tradition Banta identifies, another tradition in which this idea of a permeable self, a self "in exchange" with what is around it, can be seen more positively. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) that sprang up in the last decade of the nineteenth century as a "scientific" response to the spiritualist movement, and which counted philosophers and scientists among its members, was primarily interested in the "scientific" study of those aspects of spiritualism that seemed to bear on the human psyche (Banta 9). The society's attitude to psychical phenomena seems generally to have been skeptical, but nevertheless there was a certain excitement in its approach to these phenomena, a willingness to consider the "reality" of things that, like mental telepathy, could not be explained by the laws of physics. In 1913, the philosopher Henry Bergson, assuming the presidency of the society, declared that:
It would be monstrous and inexplicable that we should be only what we appear to be, nothing but ourselves, whole and complete in ourselves, separated, isolated, circumscribed by our bodies, our consciousness, our birth, and our death. We become possible and probable only on the conditions that we project beyond ourselves on every side, and that we stretch in every direction throughout time and space. (qtd. in Banta 31)
This viewpoint is very much at odds with the "commonsense" (scientific) view of the self as, indeed, "separated, isolated, circumscribed." Bergson may have been thinking of telepathy or other psychological "powers" that seemed radically to challenge traditional ideas of the way the psyche functioned and what it was capable of. Nevertheless, his conception of a self that is not "whole and complete" in itself, that projects beyond itself "on every side," resonates with the "selves" of those characters in James's novels, particularly the lovers, who bear the visible imprint of their beloved, taking on their thoughts, feelings, and impulses, experiencing the other in "occult" ways. In such instances, the boundaries of the self are never absolute. Madame Merle, in Portrait of a Lady, seems explicitly to preempt Bergson's comment when she tells Isabel: "There's no such thing as an isolated man or woman. . . . What shall we call our 'self'? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us - and then it flows back again" (216).
