Watch and Ward: James's fantasy of Omnipotence - Henry James

Style, Fall, 1995 by Michelle D. Nelson

In James's first novel, Watch and Ward (1871), the protagonist Roger Lawrence, whose recent marriage proposal to Miss Morton has just been rejected, meets and adopts an orphan, Nora Lambert, and raises her with the hopes of making her his ideal wife. James seems unaware of the sexual displacement he sets up in his plot. While Leon Edel, in his introduction to the 1959 Grove Press edition, notes James's apparent obliviousness to the text's eroticism, he views both the obliviousness and the eroticism as "harmless": "Watch and Ward contains a peculiar sexuality of its own. I refer to the book's persistent erotic imagery and innocent erotic statement which seems to have been set down with bland unconsciousness on the author's part" (6). Because Roger Lawrence never physically acts on his desire for Nora Lambert as she is growing up under his care, Edel concludes that Roger's desire for the girl as revealed in the text's imagery is unconscious and "innocent" because it is "Freudian" - natural, in other words. Of course fathers desire their daughters - if only unconsciously - just as daughters, in turn, cannot help but desire their fathers. Thus, Roger's desire is "understandable" - certainly not harmful to the child, at any rate. In fact, Edel does not even refer to the child's experience. Edel sees Roger's, and by implication the narrator's and James's, obliviousness to the relationship's inherent sexuality as endearing: "Watch and Ward is naive from beginning to end. . . . It is the utter innocence of this story which, in a way, endears it to us" (7). It is reassuring to note that most recent critics find this story to be anything but "utterly innocent," for if the plot of Watch and Ward is a narcissist's dream-come-true, it is also replete with all the destructiveness that such a dream entails.(1) But what is more, the novel shows that patriarchy is an especially fertile ground for pathological narcissism.

Current theory describes healthy narcissism as the playful indulgence of illusions (about life, ourselves, and others), combined with the understanding that they are illusions and that one might have to let go of them.(2) The healthy subject indulges illusions, recognizing their potential and that without them the subject cannot create, grow, or change, that as one illusion dies, another is born in its place. The pathological narcissist does not understand the tentative, precarious nature of illusions, and maintains illusions at the expense of reality, often addictively. Denial or despair becomes more and more a part of psychic life.

Whether or not a person will be a healthy or a pathological narcissist depends largely on one's early relationship with one's parents. The ideal parent can enjoy and play with the child's illusions - the child's overvaluations of self and others and feelings of merger with the parent - and with her or his own illusions. She or he can play with and let go of any or all of those illusions when circumstances call for a more realistic vision (Mitchell, Relational Concepts 196). A parent who must delude him or herself, whose own sense of security or specialness is shaky or grandiose, forces the child to maintain similar delusions. Because physical and emotional survival at this stage of development depends upon relatedness with the parent, the child will comply with the parent and the parent's delusions. It is too painful for the child to hold onto its own wishes and needs in this kind of environment with this kind of parent. The child will abandon its authentic true self - hide or repress it - and construct in its place a false self to meet the caretaker's needs and agenda. "Here illusions are no longer the spontaneously generated, transitory, playful creation of an active mind. Illusions are insisted upon with utmost seriousness by significant others, and they become the necessary price for contact and relation" (Mitchell, Relational Concepts 197). The child learns how it must be if it is going. to be with the parent at all, and in future relations it will try to be with others in the same way.

Jessica Benjamin's recent work on domination and submission offers insight into the dynamics of a narcissist's dream. Benjamin takes Winnicott's theory of the infant's need to be met and recognized by the mother and says that the process also entails the infant's need to meet and recognize the mother as an independent subject (23). According to Benjamin, relations of domination "result from a breakdown of the necessary tension between self-assertion and mutual recognition that allows self and other to meet as sovereign equals" (12). Of course, this parent-child relationship is unequal; the parent can exist without the child, can abandon the child's true self and survive, but the child cannot afford to abandon the parent in retaliation. So the child complies, repressing feelings of abandonment, endangerment, fear and rage; and to defend itself constructs a self that will hold the parent in place as a functioning, life-giving adult.