Passionate Possessions: Henry James’s Queer Properties

Abstract

The Introduction observed that the success of Henry James’s interior- izing ‘psychological turn’ in fiction and criticism at the turn of the last century has posed something of an obstacle to an appreciation of earlier links between the realist novel and the development of what came to be known as ‘psychology.’ As we have seen, mid-century Victorian mental science was still a rather chaotic intellectual scene, a not-yet-routinized amalgam of older schools of theology, philosophy, physiology, medicine, and biology. Indeed, James’s theory of the novel as interior formbar excellence does not even account fully for his own fictional practices. This disjunction is especially noticeable in a fascinating but relatively neglected novel, The Spoils of Poynton (1897), a work generally regarded as marking a transition to James’s final, most formally and technically innovative period and style. Whereas Meredith’s The Egoist offers a theory of consciousness by joining the innermost, secret part of the psyche to a comedy of bodily gestures, this key work by James looks even farther ‘outside,’ beyond the surface of the skin or even the animate world, to examine the forms of (inter)subjectivity mediated by habitual space and objects, especially fugitive forms of queer s elf-fashioning and desire.