In the unfinished story “Hugh Merrow,” Henry James recounts a conversation between the eponymous artist and a young couple, the Archdeans, who want him to paint the portrait of a child. A surrogate rather than a replica, the portrait would serve as the child the husband and wife have been unable to conceive. Although in his first note for the story James had imagined the couple requesting that the child be a girl (Complete Notebooks 192), in the version James eventually wrote they ask the artist to make the decision himself, because they disagree about whether they want a boy...

Before launching into a largely favorable review of Roderick Hudson (1875) for the New York Times, the anonymous critic summarized James’s career—citing first the “Jr.” that connected him to his better-known father and then his esoteric appeal to the “more cultivated and thoughtful part of the reading public.” “He has shown no indications,” the reviewer complained, “of qualities of a robust natural growth” (Hayes 3). James’s lack of writerly virility hampers his ability to distinguish male and female characters from one another, and the critic cites his stylistic inability to differentiate between genders. Complaining that the characters in Roderick...

Looking back to the “Europe” he knew thirty or forty years ago in his New York Edition preface to The Reverberator, Madame de Mauves, A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Tales, James recalls an imaginative field dominated by American girls like his own Daisy Miller (NY 13: xvi). When he turns his attention to the men, “the non-European, in these queer clusters, the fathers, brothers, playmates, male appendages of whatever presumption,” such male figures resolve themselves—are “visible and thinkable”—into a single type: “the American ‘business-man’” (13: xvii). Even from the distance of thirty or forty years, a successful writing...

From the opening paragraph of The Portrait of a Lady, in which he notes that the persons concerned with making tea time “an eternity of pleasure” were “not of the sex which is supposed to furnish the regular votaries of the ceremony” (3), James opens up the question of male identity and performance. William Veeder uses this passage to claim that “no one in James is in fact ‘masculine,’” because “everyone is effeminated by culture and mortality” (“Feminine Orphan” 51), but I think James’s representation of manhood in The Portrait of a Lady is more complicated than such a masculine-effeminate...

In a brutal scene from his 1845 Narrative Frederick Douglass describes his Aunt Hester being whipped by the overseer Aaron Anthony. “It was the blood-stained gate,” Douglass says, “the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass” (51). Indeed, as he hides in a closet, afraid to “venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over” (52), Douglass has a revolutionary primal scene experience in which he identifies himself as a slave for the first time. But as Jenny Franchot and Eric Sundquist have argued, the scene also registers confusion in Douglass’s gendered and...

“You bewilder me a little,” says the narrator of “The Death of the Lion” to Lady Augusta Minch, “in the age we live in one gets lost among the genders and the pronouns” (296). The occasion for this provocative confession is the anticipated arrival at Mrs. Wimbush’s country estate of Guy Walsingham, the “pretty little girl” author (298) of the novel “Obsessions,” and Dora Forbes, the red-mustachioed, “indubitable male” (274) author of “The Other Way Round.” The narrator’s bewilderment offers a cryptic point of entry for this essay, because it so efficiently links—and problematizes—the issues of gender, sexuality,...

The “likeness” of Charlotte Stant’s “connexion” to Adam Verver, James comments in a famous passage, “wouldn’t have been wrongly figured if he had been thought of as holding in one of his pocketed hands the end of a long silken halter looped round her beautiful neck” (NY 24: 287). The “shriek of a soul in pain” (24: 292) that Charlotte utters in response to such bondage comprises not the only example of violent imagery in The Golden Bowl. Fanny Assingham describes Prince Amerigo as a “domesticated lamb tied up with pink ribbon” (23: 161), for instance. Maggie Verver later thinks...