For many readers, “stupidity” in Henry James signifies mental slowness, poor taste, or even moral delinquency. However, James also conceived of stupidity as a positive virtue because it promises to deliver the individual from the “ordeal of consciousness” associated with intelligence and its exercise. At its heart, Jamesian intelligence is characterized by “appreciation,” or the ability to “get most” out of a situation or person; consequently, stupidity offers an alternative dynamic that suspends interest in order to protect persons and things from knowledge, exploitation, or use. The moral purity of stupidity explains why, in the later works, James values the sexually innocent and the willfully naive, providing a key to solving some of his more puzzling love plots; aesthetically, it accounts for his fascination with symbols and inanimate objects, rendered beautiful by their inscrutability or lack of perceptiveness. Consequently, we may understand the opacity of the later style as embodying stupidity in verbal form while also stupefying readers into the idealistic condition of disinterestedness. However, as a principle of either ethics or art, stupidity remains limited by its incompatibility with adult knowledge and location in nonnarratable forms.

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Anthony Trollope is famous among realists for having a disappearing style that seems to provide unmediated access to the represented world. However, the moralization of Trollope’s style as honest and transparent leads to misleading accounts of his stylistic achievement. By recovering Trollope’s neglected philosophy of style as found in An Autobiography, Thackeray , and The Life of Cicero , and examining practical examples from the novel Can You Forgive Her ?, this essay shows how the “virtues” of Trollope’s style—namely ease, lucidity, and harmony—are often motivated by nonmimetic concerns that mark the style with uniquely aesthetic aspects.

This essay reconsiders the meaning and function of ambiguity in the work of Henry James. The first half traces how trends in twentieth-century criticism helped to transform ambiguity from a term of censure into one of approval. The second half reads James’s story “The Figure in the Carpet” as an allegory for a practice of critical reading that rejects ambiguity in favor of certainty, precision, and acuteness. By encouraging readers to shift their attention away from a text’s meaning and onto the facultative virtues exercised in interpretation, the story defends the critical impulse without necessarily endorsing its outcomes. The essay concludes by arguing that Jamesian ambiguity ought to be understood as an initial condition that legitimates the processes which invariably seek to eliminate it.

This essay offers a significant reconceptualization of Jane Austen’s influence on political novelists of the mid-nineteenth century by examining Elizabeth Gaskell’s extensive use of Pride and Prejudice (1813) in her novel North and South (1855). At a moment when the political dimensions of Austen’s fictions were fading to obscurity, Gaskell drew on Austen’s portrayal of domestic relationships to underscore their relevance to “public” problems. On this view, the Austenian courtship plot does not contain political anxieties so much as animate them, with the logic of complementary coupling providing a formal and thematic model for the dialectical engagements necessary for navigating social conflict. At the same time, Gaskell uses Austenian motifs to dramatize the “marriageability” of different generic frameworks during a time of regional fragmentation while also envisioning Austen as a parental figure whose legacy called for continuing negotiation.