Henry James’s Dramas of Cultivation: Liberalism and Democracy in The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima

Abstract

Parallel structures in Henry James's anomalously political novels of 1886 have remained curiously unaddressed. Both The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima feature a wealthy woman whose ascetic rejection of the pleasures of art is part of her devotion to a revolutionary political cause. Both of these women more or less adopt a young, politically marginal person. As the plots play out, each of these young people undergoes a kind of education. Both books are, in this sense, dramas of cultivation. As such, they engage critically with a body of political thought that pervaded both James's intellectual milieu and the pages of the periodicals in which these novels were first serialized in 1885, the Century and the Atlantic Monthly. Because that body of thought has been disregarded and misrecognized, this engagement has gone unnoticed.These periodicals and the men who produced them-men such as Charles Eliot Norton, James Russell Lowell, William Dean Howells, and Richard Watson Gilderhave been associated with a "genteel tradition" that used culture to consolidate elite power, pursuing a project of social control. Recent scholarship, however, studies these men as active participants in the discourse of transatlantic Victorian liberalism and argues that their liberalism prized an ideal of broadly diffused culture that was distinctly democratic. Here "culture," or "cultivation," refers to an inclusive process rather than an elitist criterion for exclusion. It is not a possession that confers distinction but an ongoing, autonomous practice of learning undertaken through the experience of art and literature, among other means.