Invalid Relations: Queer Kinship in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady

Luciano, Dana

doi:10.1353/hjr.2002.0011

Cited by 10 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 20 publications

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“…As much as Ralph harbors a queer kinship to his cousin Isabel, one could say Matthiessen feels such a kinship to Ralph. 24 He quotes James's eccentric appraisal of Ralph: "His serenity was but the array of wild flowers niched in his ruin." 25 Through James, Matthiessen confronts us with a duplicitous and highly paradoxical ascription: Ralph's ruinous state of mind offers an impression of calmness, but what would otherwise be most likely called apathetic resignation to fate here harbors the opposite of desolation and death, namely the eccentric beauty and uncontrolled energy of wild flowers, however much hidden they may flourish.…”

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confidence: 99%

"Huck Finn at King Arthur's Court"

Poole

2020

JAAAS

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F. O. Matthiessen was a key player in an event which took place at Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg in the summer of 1947 and which launched the legendary Salzburg Seminar and may be considered the birth of American studies in Europe. Matthiessen's reflections on this remarkable session, From the Heart of Europe, remains outstanding in its conjuring of a humanist vision amidst ruins. This travelogue, his last major—if largely forgotten—work published shortly before his suicide, has been variously reassessed as an elegiac document of his tragic failure, as a politically deluded scholar, and as a groundbreaking foray into sketching out a radically alternate transnational understanding of American studies avant la lettre. These highly diverging perspectives on Matthiessen's final book, in particular, and on the professional and personal troubles during his last years, more generally, account for the lasting myth-making fascination with Matthiessen, which has left its mark not only on academic discourses ranging from socialist criticism to queer theory but may also be found in the novels of May Sarton (Faithful Are the Wounds) and Mark Merlis (American Studies). Hence, this article reflects on Matthiessen's impact on the 1947 seminar and traces the legacy of this controversial founding father of American studies.

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confidence: 99%

"Huck Finn at King Arthur's Court"

Poole

2020

JAAAS

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‘An ado about Isabel Archer’: Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009) and Kirsten Tranter’s The Legacy (2010)

Layne

2020

Henry James in Contemporary Fiction

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Embodied Interdependencies of Health and Travel in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Anderson

2023

Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture

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As embodiment plays a central role in Victorian novels exploring women’s journeys, the interdependence of health and travel comes expressly to light in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). In both novels, protagonists navigate possibilities and perils of motion while embarking on international voyages and rural wanderings. On the one hand, the mobility of Isabel Archer and Tess Durbeyfield merges a focus on the proliferation of transportation technology and medical tourism in Victorian society with depictions of movement as an enabler of female autonomy. On the other hand, the heroines’ exertions are contrasted against their family networks, male characters suffering from illness, and infant deaths intertwined with immobility. In this respect, the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty provides insight into the embodied enactment and somatic sensation of physical motion. Centred around three elements of movement, the ailing body, and maternity connecting James’s and Hardy’s publications, Natasha Anderson’s chapter examines Isabel and Tess navigating interdependencies of illness and mobility as the young women encounter freedoms and limitations of health in the familial sphere alongside gendered allowances of movement spanning physical activities and transnational travel.

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Invalid Relations: Queer Kinship in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady

Cited by 10 publications

References 20 publications

"Huck Finn at King Arthur's Court"

"Huck Finn at King Arthur's Court"

‘An ado about Isabel Archer’: Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009) and Kirsten Tranter’s The Legacy (2010)

Embodied Interdependencies of Health and Travel in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles

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