Content provided in partnership with
Watch and Ward: James's fantasy of Omnipotence - Henry James
Style, Fall, 1995 by Michelle D. Nelson
Nora's next "parent" is Roger Lawrence, a man with many qualities considered by nineteenth-century Victorian society to be more "feminine" than "masculine." Theorists agree that gender identity is more of a problem for men than women because most child-rearing is done by women.(4) In the child, there is a preoedipal sense of identification with the mother - with femaleness and all that it seems to entail - that the male must renounce if he is to become a "man." Women do not need to renounce that original identification with femaleness. Thus, men have an investment in difference that women do not have; they must deny aspects of themselves that culture perceives as "feminine" - especially feelings of dependency and need for relation, but also emotions in general. Women do not have a similar problem determining they are female - their problem, given the culture's arrangement of power between the sexes, is that "female" is not a particularly good thing to be. A woman learns that being female entitles her to less, particularly in terms of autonomy, and that she is not allowed to protest that smaller entitlement. She thus learns to repress aspects of herself, particularly her aggressions, that would help her to become more like an agent. Aggression, a biological response to endangerment, can, if integrated, powerfully energize and transform. If it is disowned and hidden, it constricts and sometimes destroys (Mitchell, Hope and Dread 157-72).
- More Articles of Interest
- Henry James' paradoxical bowl: the reinstatement of doubt in fin-de-siecle...
- Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes: Thirteen Artists in His Work. - book...
- Technologies of vision in Henry James's what Maisie knew
- Henry James's "organic form" and classical rhetoric
- Reading into Henry James
Roger, when we meet him, is in a precarious position in terms of his masculine identity. He is described by the narrator as "fastidiously neat in his person, extremely precise and methodical in his habits, which were of the sort supposed to mark a man for bachelorhood" (20). He is "oldmaidish," in other words, devoted to detail, to small, measured, "precise" movements, as opposed to more spontaneous, bold, and decisive moves. Rather than being independent, self-sufficient, detached, distant, he yearns emotionally and even sentimentally for relationship. He is not openly aggressive, nor do we learn that he is particularly competent at his job (we never even learn what his job is - only that he gives it up when he takes over the guardianship of young Nora). Most important, he is having trouble competing for a mate. We understand why the narrator describes him as an "undervalued man" (20). He dreams that his hidden qualities will someday become visible, betraying underlying feelings of inferiority and causing us to further suspect that he feels less than manly. His offers of marriage are repeatedly rejected by Miss Morton, yet she tells him that she "esteems him more than any man she has known" (25). She implies that her rejection is on monetary grounds, but we learn later in the text that Roger is well-off financially, so her implication can only be a consolatory move to salve a wounded ego, for to "esteem" someone of the opposite sex insinuates a lack of passion.
