Other Henry James, The

In his final chapter Rowe focuses on In the Cage and the transformed "scene of writing" (the telegraph) with which James experiments. Connecting James's depiction of telegraphy and his employment, beginning in 1897, of a secretary to take his dictation, Rowe emphasizes how the telegraph destabilizes class hierarchies by allowing workers to understand and "perhaps even seize what James had always understood as the primary mode of social production: discourse" (166). He even spots "hints" in the narrative that a new "working-class solidarity" might be built by service workers (167). Although Rowe discovers some aspects of Judith Butler's "postmodern understanding of gender" in James's text (173), he concludes that James finally offers only "peeks" at an "extraordinary diversity of new class and gender possibilities" (171)-for example, in the character of Mr. Mudge, who lacks the "phallic aggressiveness" of more conventional male characters and thus represents a "different role for men in his times" (172). Rowe steps lightly around the question of homosexuality here as elsewhere in this study Grounded in what he calls James's "rhetorical cross-dressing" (176), the final chapters of In the Cage simply reflect a "certain delight in the comedy of gender and sexual varieties" (177).

Rowe concludes with a short discussion of the classroom renaissance that "other" Jamesian studies (like his own) promise to bring about. Bent upon rescuing James from the obscurity to which his reputation as modernist Master has consigned him, Rowe has jumped enthusiastically on the critical bandwagon that has reinvigorated James studies and linked the Master's texts with problems that "students must address every day" (181). "Teaching the new Henry James in terms of his conscious and unconscious responses to the debates regarding race, class, gender, and sexual preferences at the turn of the century," he concludes, "certainly transforms him from a writer with an excessively narrow focus on bourgeois social life into a precursor of our own postmodern condition" (195). Rowe's synthesis of previous scholarship and the sometimes segregated issues of race, gender, class, and sexual identity and his exploration of these convergent questions in less critically popular texts make The Other Henry James more than just another critical study.

Leland S. Person

University of Alabama at Birmingham

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