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

The parent-child relationships in Watch and Ward illustrate the dynamics of an unhealthy enmeshment - the parent's motives, the child's defenses. The earliest fact that we know about Nora Lambert is that her mother has abandoned her by dying, and has left her to a father who is "in great want of money" (41). This father (Lambert) isolates Nora and reduces her to complete dependency upon him: "she had no other kindred nor friends. Her father may have had friends, but she never saw them. She could indicate no source of possible assistance or sympathy" (32). Her father, somewhat crudely, does not hesitate to tell her that she has "not a friend in the world nor a person that cares" (33). In addition to being mirrored and affirmed, the child, in order to form a cohesive self, needs a strong and calm parent with whom to merge (Kohut and Wolf 419-20). Lambert's lack of "calmness," to say nothing of his insensitivity to Nora's needs and anxieties, is illustrated even prior to his suicide: "The father had come in early in the evening, in great trouble and excitement, and had made her go to bed. He had kissed her and cried over her and, of course, made her cry." His selfish intrusions into her bedroom continue: "Late at night she was aroused by feeling him again at her bedside, kissing her, fondling her, raving over her. He bade her good-night and passed into the adjoining room, where she heard him fiercely knocking about. She was very much frightened; she fancied he was out of his mind" (31). Yet Lambert's lack of strength and calmness seems trivial compared to his more serious misuse of his daughter. Through the events James describes and the language he uses, James strongly suggests emotional or covert incest. Certainly, insofar as Nora's father expects her to cope with very adult problems and responsibilities, he clearly oversteps generational boundaries.(3) But more than that, Nora's appearance suggests there has been emotional incest. There is something about her that is unnaturally adult, almost freakish. Roger describes it as "something undeniably vulgar" that makes her look "as if she belonged to a circus troupe" (32). Yet at the same time he notes something "too young" about her:

The common relations of things seemed quite reversed in her brief experience, and immaturity and precocity shared her young mind in the freest fellowship. She was ignorant of the plainest truths and credulous of the quaintest falsities; unversed in the commonest learning and instructed in the rarest. . . . Evidently she had sprung from a horribly vulgar soil; she was a brand snatched from a burning. (41-42)

Incest victims often manifest this duality: ignorance and immaturity arising from an arrested development, on the one hand, and, on the other, knowledge beyond one's years obviously resulting from the child's need to mirror the parent's illusions.

But the most damning evidence of Lambert's emotional, if not sexual, abuse of his daughter comes when he attempts to put an end to her life once he decides to end his own. "Suddenly he called her. She asked what he wanted, and he bade her get out of bed and come to him. She trembled, but she obeyed." He shoots, just misses her cheek, and then shoots himself. The landlady's subsequent remark to Roger reveals her own, Roger's, and probably society's blindness to the abuse of the child and its idealization of the father's actions by implying that they are somehow noble: "'He meant to kill her, of course,' said the landlady, 'that she mightn't be left alone in the world. It's a wonderful mixture of cruelty and kindness!'" (31). The remark also implies that without the father, the child is nothing, and so illustrates the very real dependency of the child on the parent.