The desire and anxiety which permeate the same-sex attractions portrayed in Henry James's fiction afford a fascinating glimpse into an evolving sexual consciousness which was coming of age during the emergence of homosexual identity. Rather than taking a New Critical approach to James's writing or become confounded by the question of whether or not James himself was homosexual, I wish to reconstruct queer experiences which are offered in James's fiction. As I read James, I am not searching for evidence of his homosexuality, nor am I looking for homosexual content. Instead, I will look at how James's fiction relates, informs, and lends itself to a queer reading.

By "queer reading" I mean an analysis of the text from the point of view of a gay or lesbian reader. Traditional representations of same-sex love, romance, and sex have greatly under- and misrepresented these experiences. In a collection of essays about the politics of queer studies, entitled Professions of Desire, George E. Haggerty elucidates the need for readers to revisit texts from a queer perspective in order to gain an appreciation of how gays and lesbians have been affected by traditional readings which marginalize or silence their experience.

Critics in every field are rereading texts and opening canons in just such a spirit of rediscovery, as this volume affirms [which views them from a queer perspective]. As professors of literature, moreover, we need to approach all texts from the point of view of sexuality to learn from them the various ways in which the gay and lesbian "identities" have been brutalized and silenced. Haggerty 14

Haggerty raises two important points: readers, informed by a variety of experiences, are rereading texts; and gay and lesbian identities have been brutalized and silenced. Both assertions are of significant relevance to my (re)reading of James.

From the arch and socially caustic short stories of H. H. Munro to the hauntingly subtle poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, gay and lesbian studies, in the past twenty years, has grown into a dynamic genre of academic interest. While the late Twentieth Century has seen the increase in popularity of numerous previously marginalized groups of writers (i.e., women, people of color, etc.) due to the rereading Haggerty suggests, a cursory glance of canonical anthologies will easily reveal that these minority groups are still under-represented. Although achieving equal representation is a slow process, it is also an exciting one which has the potential to tell us as much about ourselves and our society as it does about these newly recognized and re-discovered writers. How and why our culture assigns worth to a text illustrates the priorities of our culture.

Those priorities are formed by cultural change. Queer theory, for example, is both a reaction to a change in gay and lesbian politics and to previous efforts to silence the queer experience. Such efforts are promoted in many forms, literary criticism not being the least. New Criticism, which disregards everything but the text itself, is an example of one of the ways gay and lesbian expressions have been silenced. Ironically, New Criticism has much in common with queer theory. New Criticism was also born out of an attempt to deal with major cultural upheaval. Terry Eagleton explains that New Criticism was

the ideology of an uprooted, defensive intelligentsia who reinvented in literature what they could not locate in reality. Poetry was the new religion, a nostalgic haven from the alienations of industrial capitalism. The poem itself was as opaque to rational inquiry as the Almighty himself: it existed as a self-enclosed object, mysteriously intact in its own unique being. Eagleton 47

The closed readings of New Criticism over the past fifty years and the banishment of authorial intent by critics such as John Crowe Ransom, T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards are reactions to their changing culture.

New Criticism is important to gay and lesbian studies for at least two reasons. First, New Criticism, like techniques used in queer theory, was originally motivated by social change; many of the New Critics, being from the South, were faced with a region which was left depressed after World War II. Similarly, gays and lesbians find themselves embroiled in their own battle for equal rights and representation. Secondly, New Criticism's banishing of authorial intent conflated with the culture's prohibition of open discussion of gay and lesbian sexuality provided an efficient erasure of gay and lesbian voices. Regaining that voice is a major catalyst of gay and lesbian studies.

New Criticism "attacked the notion of the work of art as the essentially private product of the internal experience of a particular individual," so that "[t]he poem is defined as a public text, and its meaning by what the public norms of language allow it to mean" (Richter 727). In other words, New Criticism disallows any intrusion of the author, political and social implications, or historical information, and it does so in order to deliver the text to the public. Such a position is important in that New Criticism champions the individual's ability to understand a text with nothing more than the text itself. Of course, "understanding" a text assumes a reader's participation with the text. By making the text the domain of the individual and not the exclusive province of professional academics, New Criticism, in a way, nurtured later developments in criticism. The accessibility to the text provided by New Criticism allowed for a greater body of readers.

These readers with their different backgrounds and ways of participating with the text eventually deviated from the tenets of New Criticism, developing new strategies (e.g., reader-response theory). The ontological approach to literature and poetry offered by New Criticism reflects the competitive environment in which critics found themselves. Now, as priorities of the culture shift, so does our view of literature. As we hurtle toward the end of the century, living in a global village, many barriers which once seemed inflexible now appear more elastic. Access to texts is not longer restricted to works which can gain favor with publishing houses. The use of electronic media, such as the Internet, has removed many barriers of traditional publishing, allowing more individual voices to be heard than at any other point in history. Because we live in a new age, one of individuals speaking for themselves, trends in literary criticism have shifted once again. This time the shift is toward self-representation and the questioning of accepted views of texts. The importance of such a shift is especially vital for gay and lesbian studies. In an environment which recognizes the importance of both the writer and reader, the text is no longer an isolated and static object. Once we take into consideration the lives which influence and create the texts, issues of sexual orientation can finally be expressed.

While this shift towards the personal has greatly affected previously ignored authors and texts, it has also played an integral part in the rereading of traditionally successful works (i.e., canonical) by authors who previously were presumed to be straight, white men. Henry James is an excellent example of how authors are being reread, redefined, and reinterpreted. No one would argue that James is not one of the major figures in American literature. Perhaps because of James's acceptance into the canon, redefining him in a non-heterosexual context is a process which is met with great resistance from many critics. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick asserts that

[i]t is possible that critics have been motivated in the active incuriosity [of James's homosexual potential] by a desire to protect James from homophobic misreadings in a perennially repressive sexual climate. It is possible that they fear that, because of the asymmetrically marked structure of heterosexist discourse, any discussion of homosexual desire or literary content will marginalize him (or them?) as, simply, homosexual. It is possible that they desire to protect him from what they imagine as anachronistically gay readings, based on a late twentieth-century vision of men's desire for men that is more stabilized and culturally compact than James's own . . . Any of these critical motives would be understandable, but their net effect is the usual repressive one of elision and subsumption of supposedly embarrassing material. In dealing with the multiple valences of sexuality, critics' choices should not be limited to crudities of disruption or silences of orthodox enforcement. Sedgwick 197

Such "silences of orthodox enforcement" are not difficult to find; they are what Haggerty describes as the brutalizing and silencing of gay and lesbian identities. The extent of these hostilities toward queer interpretations should not be underestimated. As an example of brutalized identities, I offer "Oh Henry! What Henry James didn't do with Oliver Wendell Holmes (or anyone else)," an article which was published in the on-line magazine Slate. Written by renowned Jamesian scholar, Leon Edel, the article illustrates the way queer identities are still being, to use Haggerty's term, brutalized.

The article takes issue with assertions regarding James's sexual experiences suggested in the latest of James's biographies, Henry James, The Young Master, by Sheldon M. Novick. At issue for Edel is whether or not James, as Novick suggests, had a sexual experience with Oliver Wendell Holmes (or any other man). The catalyst for Edel's ire (and dressing down of Novick by comparing him to such poor biographers as Van Wyck Brooks) is a single interpretation of a single passage from one of James's notebooks. Novick's now infamous passage about James and Holmes follows:

In that epochal spring, in a rooming house in Cambridge and in his own shuttered bedroom in Ashburton Place, Harry performed his first acts of love. Years later, while on a visit to America, he recorded the memory in his journal: "How can I speak of Cambridge at all . . . . The point for me (for fatal, for impossible, expansion) is that I knew there, had there, in the ghostly old C[ambridge] that I sit and write of here by the strange Pacific on the other side of the continent, l'initiation premiére (the divine, the unique), there and in Ashburton Place. . . . Ah, the ‘epoch-making' weeks of the spring of 1865!" It was his first initiation, the premier, his "prime," as he was to say discreetly, so many years later, in his cosmopolitan Parisian English. In a secret act, in a private place, his long passivity had ended. Novick, Henry 109

Even though Novick states in a footnote that "Holmes, of whom HJ plainly was very fond, was someone with whom he might have been intimate . . ." (Novick, Henry 472 [my italics]), Edel feels the need to come to James's "defense." Edel bases his assuredness, suggested by the title of his article and illustrated by his heated argument in Slate, only on the fact that James never concretely refers to engaging in any sexual activity. It is important to note that James does not ever concretely refer to himself as being celibate either, only a confirmed bachelor. In fact, in his rebuttal to Edel's article, Novick points out that James "repeatedly described celibacy . . . as a perversion when voluntary, and a living death when not" (Novick, "Love," Message 5 3).

Novick does not cite this description. If true, it does shed light on Edel's homophobia about James's sexuality. Edel quotes a doctor who described James as being a "firm bachelor" with a "low amatory coefficient" (Edel, "Oh Henry!" 2) in 1905. This euphemistic phrase right on the heels of "firm bachelor" seems to only weaken Edel's case. To rely on such a "diagnosis" to prove James's celibacy is tenuous, at best, and, at worst, specious. In his rebuttal to Edel's article, Novick counters that Edel only partially quotes James's doctor. Novick points out that the quotation Edel offers is

a bizarre, homophobic pronouncement by a doctor who examined James once when he was ill and away from home, then announced to a breathless world that the famous novelist was badly hung. (You [Edel] omit the more bizarre and self-discrediting portions of the announcement.) Novick 1, 2

More is at issue than the evaluation of James by a doctor who may have been a quack; Edel states in the passage given above that Novick, not James, is hinting at a sexual connection between the novelist and the justice. In defense of his position, Edel asserts that "Henry looked at Holmes with a certain aloofness" (Edel, "Oh Henry!" 4). Using such a statement to support claims of James's celibacy merely raises more questions. Upon what is Edel's characterization of Holmes's and James's interpersonal relationship based? How does such a characterization illustrate the impossibility of James and Holmes having had the sexual encounter Edel refuses to allow? Undocumented argumentation such as this gives Edel's assertions a false ring. For decades he has been the unchallenged voice in Jamesian scholarship (and not without reason), but when faced with the relatively new concepts of sexual (especially homosexuality) and identity (especially homosexual) politics of contemporary criticism, Edel falters. He flatly refuses to hear Novick's assertions and attempts to misrepresent them.

Upon losing ground in regard to Holmes, Edel abruptly changes fronts to deny a romantic relationship between James and Paul Zhukovski, son of a Russian poet who tutored Alexander II. In his response, Novick points out that he never asserted such a relationship; Edel is merely constructing a straw man argument. Edel claims that after a period of close friendship, the two young men parted after Zhukovski entered the circle of composer Richard Wagner. Edel tells of a number of letters James wrote after parting with Zhukovski, how James "fled from Zhukovski and a nest of young homosexuals" (Edel, "Oh Henry!" 6). Again, the reader is left to wonder to whom does the homophobic phrase "a nest of young homosexuals" belong, James or Edel? In a desperate attempt to shore up his argument, Edel gives a number of quotations from letters James had written which portray Zhukovski negatively. Again, Edel seems unable to hit the mark. The existence of letters in which James calls Zhukovski an "impracticable and indeed ridiculous mixture of Nihilism and bric-á-brac" (Edel, "Oh Henry!" 7) does not prove a flight from homosexuals. Whether James and Zhukovski (or Holmes) actually had romantic or sexual relations is completely beside the point; what angers Edel is Novick's suggestion that James had physical love affairs with other men. Edel is obviously deeply invested in there being no evidence of these relationships, even though James's own letters to men such as Jocelyn Persse, Hendrik Andersen, and Morton Fullerton certainly pose the possibility of intimate relationships. And why, Edel continues, does Novick go to the trouble of giving James a sex life (besides the obvious boost to book sales)? Novick "simply wants us to know that James was a sexual man and a loving person. Biographers often develop strange attachments to their subjects" (Edel, "Oh Henry!" 5). Edel's words are easily turned against him. It is his own, not Novick's, attachment to James that disallows Edel to conceive of the possibility of James acting on his passionate feelings toward other men. Edel is working under the outmoded belief that homoerotic feelings are permissible as long as they are not acted upon. This belief is the catalyst for Edel's lashing out at suggestions that the subject of his decades of research is somehow cheapened by what Edel himself considers a mental disorder.

Edel's denial of James's sexuality also contributes to what Haggerty refers to as the silencing of gay and lesbian identities. An example of this silencing is evident in Miranda Seymour's approach to James. Seymour, a Jamesian biographer as well, complements Edel's position on James's sexuality in a significant way. While Edel attempts to restrict James's experiences, Seymour attempts to reconstruct them according to her personal bigotry. Seymour's approach to James's sexuality illustrates the extent to which some scholars are willing to go in order to distort James's sexuality while advancing their own homophobic agenda. In her 1988 biography A Ring of Conspirators (the title alone intimates criminal activity) Seymour demonstrates the homophobia which she shares with Edel. In the chapter entitled "Living Prudently: James's Friendships," Seymour makes the following claim:

The Victorians and Edwardians were more sophisticated than we are today in understanding and accepting that a man can love and physically worship one of his own sex without seeking any closer contact than an embrace or, at most, a kiss . . . . [I]t is more important to remember that there was an immense chasm between the voracious sexual appetites of men like Wilde and the near non-existent ones of men in James's mould whose loves were of a romantic nature, with the yearning more passionately expressed in words and looks than in actions. Seymour 187

Seymour's choice of words is particularly illuminating. Her use of "mould" is especially interesting because it implies something that determines and restricts one's growth and development. This mold (perhaps the most pernicious form of homophobia) is made of fear, confusion, or possibly lack of interest in physical relationships, and prevented men from openly acting on their homosexual feelings. Scholars like Seymour and Edel want to both experience and explore James's writing while not merely denying but refuting one of his major influences, his sexuality.

Seymour willingly ignores that men like James—whose "yearnings [were] more passionately expressed in words and looks"—could merely have been reacting to a legal and social environment of the time. Seymour herself describes this environment as one where "homosexuality . . . was treated as a criminal act to be punished with imprisonment and social ostracism" (Seymour 187). So much for being "more sophisticated . . . in understanding and accepting that a man can love and physically worship one of his own sex" (Seymour 187). Fear of legal and social repercussions for one's homosexuality is the mold to which Seymour refers, a mold she continues to empower by admiring closeted men who left no record of their physical, homosexual acts (such as, possibly, James) and condemning men who were caught (such as Wilde).

While Seymour and Edel take different approaches toward James and homosexuality (Seymour by attempting to silence James with in her homophobic prudery, and Edel by denying obvious homosexual influences), neither can totally deny the homoeroticism in James's life and writing. The first sentence in Edel's concluding paragraph in Slate illustrates his outmoded beliefs: "So Novick is deprived of the happy romance he wanted to chronicle at Posilipo" (Edel, "Oh Henry!" 7). The "happy romance," with its suggestion of open and culturally approved status, is a heterosexist construct which was not available to James nor his contemporaries (witness the Wilde trials). That Edel evokes such a construct merely illustrates how unqualified he is to act as a defining voice on same-sex relationships of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century. Because his only sexual and romantic models are heterocentric, James, of course, does not fit them. Since James does not fit Edel's nor Seymour's heterosexist models, they, to their great relief, proclaim James as never having had sex.

The struggle to claim James as heterosexual or homosexual, while historically and culturally interesting, detracts from why James is still widely read and adapted into contemporary films, operas, and theatrical performances. In his life and fiction, James presents a fascinating study of the evolution of desire and anxiety. What (or who) James did in his bed is certainly not as important as the way his fiction still speaks to a socially and culturally diverse audience.