Max is certainly not the last narrator to tell a story which is unflattering to himself. In James's tales of literary detection such as "The Figure in the Carpet" and "The Aspern Papers," James's self-defacing narrators return. Unlike Max, the narrators of these two stories seem less aware of their unflattering self-portrayals. Instead, their belittling seems to be a treatment by the author of his narrators. Could this treatment simply be due to James's own homophobia? What motivates these narrators to act as they do? Could such behavior be considered anything more than base voyeurism fueled by childish infatuation? While, as we have seen in both "A Light Man" and "The Pupil," homoerotic desire is often followed by feelings of anxiety which are then remedied by the final twist of the plot (e.g., Sloan's will being burned or Morgan's death), I do not believe James's seemingly negative portrayal of his narrators (making then ineffectual and single-minded) stems from homophobia. And what of James's other tale of literary detection, "The Author of Beltraffio"? Again, an attempt is made to hide an author's work for fear of what it may contain. Are these secrets and restrictions symptoms of James's closetedness? I suggest otherwise. Rather, if the motives of James's characters in these tales seem out of place, it is because James remaps their understanding of desire onto another surface. In essence, his narrators' single-mindedness in regard to their literary pursuit becomes a fetish which controls their desire--a literary desire which stands in for the homosexual desire James cannot openly engage.

In his article "The Queer Politics of Michel Foucault," David Halperin discusses the politics and erotics surrounding the fetishism of S/M. Halperin asserts:

S/M detaches sexual pleasure from genital specificity, from localization in or dependence on the genitals. S/M . . . produces intense pleasure while bypassing . . . the genitals themselves; it involves the eroticization of nongenital regions of the body . . . . S/M therefore represents a remapping of the body's erotic sites, a redistribution of its so-called erogenous zones, a breakup of the erotic monopoly traditionally held by the genitals . . . . Halperin 320, my italics

The same re-landscaping of desire which Halperin describes occurs in both "The Figure in the Carpet" (1896) and "The Aspern Papers" (1888). Similar to Halperin's notion, James remaps the sexual onto the literary. James, however, takes the remapping of erotic sites one step further by completely removing the body (similar to S/M's removal or de-emphasis of genitalia in regard to sexual pleasure) from the erotic equation: James remaps desire onto the literary.

It is important to note the difference between James's remapping of sexuality and his simply using literature as a metaphor. For example, in the preface to The Tragic Muse (1890) James uses sexual language to confess his feeling of artistic failure. In "Sins of Omission: What Henry James Left Out of the Preface to The Tragic Muse and Why," Gregory M. Pfitzer documents how James slips into sexual metaphors in describing the condition of being an artist. Pfitzer asserts that James "characterizes himself as a 'charm-compeller', whose 'precious waistband or girdle' had 'practically worked itself' to a point 'perilously near the knees.' '[R]aised to intensity, swollen to voracity' by the desire to enjoy a meaningful relationship to his art, . . . James experienced a 'quite convulsive, yet in its way, highly agreeable spasm' while writing the novel. In the process, James noted, '[a]ll we . . . see of the charm-compeller is the back he turns to us as he bends over his work' " (Pfitzer 47-48). James's use of sexual metaphors raises the act of writing to the level of the sexual.

James's skillful use of sexual metaphor is especially interesting because it illustrates the connection in his mind between sex and literary experiences. This connection is amplified to the point where he is not merely describing sexual desire in terms of literary desire, but rather literary desire actually takes the place of sexual desire. Given this understanding, the narrators in both "The Figure in the Carpet" and "The Aspern Papers" seem less silly in regard to their actions. In a heterosexual context their pursuits of literary secrets are characteristic of a fetish, making their actions seem out of place or out of proportion. Once we understand that literary desire is standing in for sexual desire, the narrators' behavior becomes more recognizable. When the object of their search is interpreted as sexual (instead of literary), the narrators' dogged attempts to obtain their goals fit with what can be perceived as the reward for their efforts. Suddenly the lengths to which the narrators are willing to go (and not go) seem more plausible.

In "The Figure in the Carpet," James offers a young critic, our narrator, who is told of the "general intention" (James, Figure 313) in the work of an admired and revered author, Hugh Vereker. The intention, while Vereker claims it can be defined, is left tantalizingly beyond description--it is "the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet" (James, Figure 313). Try as he might, the narrator cannot decipher Vereker's meaning. The narrator's close friend, George Corvick, does manage to discover the meaning which is later confirmed by Vereker. Before the narrator can inquire about his friend's discovery, Corvick dies. When approached by the narrator, Corvick's wife, Gwendolen, makes it clear that she means to keep the secret to herself. In fact, before she dies she does not, to the narrator's utter disbelief, pass the secret on to her second husband.

The way the narrator pursues the secret (and the way James describes the importance of knowing the secret) is usually reserved for sexual pursuits. The bewildered narrator asks "Was the figure in the carpet traceable or describable only for husbands and wives--for lovers supremely united?" (James, Figure 306). Because William A. Cohen offers a complete and concise reading of such an interpretation in Sex Scandals: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction, I will not duplicate his efforts. I will, however, take issue with other aspects of his text.

Cohen describes James's remapping of sexuality as being in the "negative mode" (Cohen 229). He claims the narrator is keenly aware of his exclusion from the secret his literary idol, Vereker, claims is present in his work. I would argue that the narrator is not operating from a negative mode, but rather he is pursuing all of the logical options which are open to him. To portray these options as negative illustrates an almost subliminal homophobia. The narrator does not create the strained situation of which he is, in actuality, the victim. Because the secret seems to be transmittable only between husbands and wives, the narrator is excluded from gaining access to the knowledge. He is not barred access because of some negative mode of his own creating but, simply, because heterosexual routes are not an option for him. The narrator wonders if he "should have to marry Mrs Corvick to get what I wanted. Was I prepared to offer her this price for the blessing of her knowledge? Ah! That way madness lay--so I said to myself at least in bewildered hours" (James, Figure 306). The culture in which the narrator exists (a reflection of James's own culture) legitimizes and rewards the heterosexist tradition of marriage while imposing a position of subjugated sexuality (i.e., Cohen's "negative mode") upon any who do not fit into the heterosexual mold.

While the distinction of who is responsible for the negative erotics in "The Figure in the Carpet" may seem inconsequential, it is due to such misplacement of responsibility which had represented (and still does represent) homosexuality as a negative erotic expression in many contexts (e.g., the U.S. military). The act of homoeroticism or homoromanticism does not produce the narrator's exclusion; the lack of homoerotic/romantic opportunities isolates him.

Cohen makes another questionable assertion which can significantly change the perception of the story. He claims the narrator suggests:

even conventional heterosexual intercourse is bound up with the literary quest: "This was above all what I wanted to know: had she seen the idol unveiled? Had there been a private ceremony for a palpitating audience of one? For what else but that ceremony had the previous ceremony [the wedding] been enacted?" The usual wedding-night unveiling of sexual mysteries is subordinated to the disclosure of the literary secret--without, however, losing any of its erotic force. All the characters take for granted that marriage derives from a desire to apprehend and to convey the figure far more than it does from a wish to express passion or romance. Cohen 231

In fact, it is not all of the characters who have had to resort to the remapping of desire--Vereker has his wife and Corvick and Gwendolen have each other. No one but the narrator is forced to remap his desire onto a literary landscape. Although the sexually charged description of Corvick and Gwendolen's wedding night is certainly subsumed by the desire for the literary secret, the reader must keep in mind who is telling the tale; "This was above all what I wanted to know" (James, Figure 305, my italics). The reader's view of the wedding night is filtered through the narrator's imagination. The narrator who must remap his own desire does not have the means to even understand heterosexuality, let alone express it directly.

In another attempt to put hetero- and homosexuality on equal footing, Cohen avers that the passages in which the narrator dejectedly retires to his room and encounters Vereker in the hall as, "[i]n spite of all the suggestiveness of these passages, . . . amount[ing] to a repudiation of homoeroticism to the same extent that the explicit rejection of marriage does of heterosexuality . . . . When the narrator states . . . 'I sat up with Vereker half the night,' the line can only have reference to his reading, try as one might to bend its valence" (Cohen 230). One would not have to try too terribly much. If one simply keeps reading James's text, the reader encounters the following passage:

I can see him there still, on my rug, in the firelight and . . . his fine, clear face all bright with the desire to be tender to my youth . . . . I think the sight of my relief touched him, excited him, brought up words to his lips from far within. It was so these words presently conveyed to me something that, as I afterwards knew, he had never uttered to any one . . . . [H]e talked to me exactly as an equal and on the ground of what we both loved best. The hour, the place, the unexpectedness deepened the impression: he couldn't have done anything more exquisitely successful. James, Figure 279-280

The romantic scene suggested by the firelight in conjunction with Vereker's face being bright with the desire to be tender to the narrator's youth suggests that reading half the night was not foremost on either men's mind. What are the words which the narrator's "relief" had excited Vereker to speak? These words must be of great importance since they seem to come from Vereker's core; they are words that he had never uttered to any one else--not even to Mrs. Vereker. And on what ground, which they both loved, had Vereker been exquisitely successful? The absence of the answers to these questions while obviously in the realm of sexuality ("the desire," "touched him," "excited him," "we both loved," etc.) suggests homosexuality by the fact that it cannot be openly described.

I do agree with Cohen that "James's stories of literary detection belittle criticism by making the narrators' quests appear ridiculous and misguided, and reassert the priority of art over criticism" (Cohen 227). If a reader does not recognize the remapping of desire, the narrators do seem asinine. I do not, however, agree that "[t]he metaliterary aspects of these works . . . strives to shame readers into feeling that even an inquiry into the contents of these secrets is inappropriate" (Cohen 233). If James's intention was to warn against the prying into personal secrets, why, then, would he reward a reader who has discovered the remapping of sexuality with so much encoded eroticism? Is James simply poking fun at his readers, I know what you're thinking? Is he embroidering a figure merely so that one viewing the carpet can find it or is he offering another layer of complexity to his tale? Because of the assiduous attention James gives to constructing these tales, we can never know for sure his exact intention(s). We can, however, find a meaning which speaks to the queer experience which most suggests that the story is not intended to mock those who search for a secret meaning (i.e., the remapping of desire). Given this secret, the narrator's actions are understandable. His actions are recognizable to the queer experience in which marginalization by the dominant culture is always a condition that must be confronted.

The marginalization of the homosexual experience illustrated in "The Author of Beltraffio" can also be seen in both "The Aspern Papers" and James's personal life. He wrote "The Aspern Papers" in 1887 while in Florence, sharing a villa with Constance Fenimore Woolson. "The Aspern Papers" is another story with a literary secret and has many parallels with "The Figure in the Carpet." Seymour describes this time in James's life as a "halcyon period and one in which James found himself enjoying domestic life, the nearest he ever came to the experience of marriage" (Seymour 181). Seymour, always attempting to heterosexualize (sanitize?) James's interpersonal relationships, is correct, however, in establishing Woolson's importance in James's life. What Seymour unbelievably overlooks is the very tale James was writing while ensconced within a living arrangement Seymour is desperate to portray as heteronormative. Woolson's connection to "The Aspern Papers" goes far deeper than merely renting an apartment in the same villa as James at the time the tale was written. I submit that James and Woolson carried on a coded dialogue (similar to the way James codes sexuality with the literary) using literature as their medium. "The Aspern Papers" is, among other things, a coded, literary, disguised reply to a question Woolson posed in a short story of her own.

In 1880 Woolson published a short story entitled "Miss Grief" which inspired James's title for "The Figure in the Carpet." While it is disputed as to whether Woolson had influenced James with the image or whether she had borrowed it from him, there is little doubt that James and Woolson were intimately involved in each others' writings and lives. Edel reports that James and Woolson's relationship went far deeper than his social circle had suspected. Woolson's intimate understanding of James is well illustrated in "Miss Grief." The story is told in the first person by a literary man (just as both "The Figure in the Carpet" and "The Aspern Papers") who has many parallels with James.

First, the narrator mentions he models himself on Balzac, whose work James had been exposed to as a boy. Balzac's influence on James can be seen throughout his writing but is blatant in The Ambassadors. Upon reading the novel's protagonist's name, Miss. Gostrey "repeated however that she liked it -- 'particularly the Lewis Lambert. It's the name of a novel of Balzac's' " (James, Ambassadors 63). Not only is Lewis Lambert the name of Balzac's 1833 novel, it is the novel in which an intellectually gifted schoolmate goes insane on the eve of his marriage. Further, James's early tale "A Tragedy of Error" is described by Thomas Sargeant Perry as having heroines who "seemed to have 'read all Balzac in the cradle and to be positively dripping with lurid crimes' " (Edel, Untried 216).

Secondly, Edel points out an allusion to a tale of a buried god which resembles James's "The Last of the Valerii," in which a statue of Juno is uncovered. This allusion to Juno, Roman goddess of marriage, is significant because it begins to subtly identify Woolson's coded message.

The narrator of "Miss Grief" is pursued by an older woman writer (similar to Woolson), Miss Crief (whom the author nicknames "Miss Grief"). In the course of the story "she tells the great author, 'I have read every word that you have written,' and then recites his favorite scene by heart. 'She had understood me--understood me almost better than I had understood myself' " (Edel, Conquest 416). Certainly the parallels between Miss Crief and Woolson are apparent; she had read all of James's work and there is evidence, which I will elucidate, that she did understand James to a point which rivaled his own self-knowledge.

Miss Crief offers the narrator her text, which he compliments. After receiving his praise she tells him that had his criticism been contrary she would have committed suicide. Woolson's story transmits an encoded message to James, telling him that she not only had affectionate feelings for him beyond those of friendship, but also that she knew that for him literature stood in the place of sexuality. Therefore, Woolson uses literature to state her affection after countless letters and secret meetings failed to arouse James's more amorous attentions. Given the extent to which Woolson understood James and was able to communicate with him on a literary level, one must wonder what, exactly, she was offering James? Companionship? A platonic marriage which would satisfy society's curiosity about James's personal affairs? There are many possibilities (including Woolson being blind to James's lack of ardent interest in the opposite sex).

Tragically James did not see, or turned a blind eye to, Woolson's message in "Miss Grief." James did not return her affections beyond close friendship. Woolson understood James's literary answer--the impossibility of marriage expressed in "The Aspern Papers" (and later, after Woolson's death, in "The Figure in the Carpet")--to her literary question. Woolson carried out the reaction Miss Crief proclaimed she would have taken had she been rejected by the narrator in "Miss Grief." On January 24, 1894 Woolson threw herself from her apartment window in Venice.

James not only felt the loss of his dear friend; he also recognized the (indirect) role he had played in Woolson's death. While she must have understood the message James had left in "The Aspern Papers," the impossibility of marriage, James did not understand Woolson's message in "Miss Grief" until it was too late. In a letter to Woolson's cousin, James writes that Woolson " 'was so valued and close a friend of mine and had been so for so many years that I felt an intense nearness of participation in every circumstance of her tragic end and in every detail of the sequel' " (Kaplan 380). Knowing the nature of James and Woolson's relationship both at the end of her life and while they shared the villa in which he wrote "The Aspern Papers" illuminates for us the way in which James not only used literature to communicate sexuality in his fiction but also how his fiction communicated his sexuality in his life. James, like his narrator in "The Aspern Papers," is unable to accept the heteronormative role advanced by his female admirer.

The qualities of both James and Woolson which appear in "The Aspern Papers" are quite striking. The reader is offered another literary male narrator (as in "Miss Grief"). In "Miss Grief" it is a great author who represented James while in "The Aspern Papers" it is a great poet. Edel claims James identified with his fictional poet, Aspern (who, like James, is an expatriate). Edel goes on to say that James modeled the character on himself, "endowing him with the same qualities he possessed or wished to possess, the means 'to be free and general and not at all afraid; to feel, understand and express everything'; and he said, in his late preface, that he had 'thought New York as I projected him,' thereby conferring on him the city of his own birth" (Edel, Life 339). James's presence in the tale is clear.

As for Woolson's connection to "The Aspern Papers," the narrator somewhat unintentionally woos Tita, the grandniece to Mrs. Bordereau. James skillfully portrays how simple courtesies can be misinterpreted and innocent intentions misread. The narrator flatters Tita and fills the garden with flowers not to gain her affections but rather as part of an attempt to ingratiate himself to her in order to gain Aspern's letters. If this scenario is not an obviously enough parallel to James and Woolson's relationship, James drives the point home by naming his character, Tita Douglas, a character from Woolson's best known work, Anne.

While the obvious parallels to James and Woolson in "The Aspern Papers" are significant, they are not the only points of interest. The tale offers a further glimpse into the way James remaps desire. This time the literary secret takes the form of love letters written by the poet, Aspern, who is of a previous era. The narrator, under false pretenses, acquires lodging at the home of Aspern's former lover, Mrs. Bordereau, who is now very advanced in years. Most of the narrator's dealings are with Mrs. Bordereau's grand niece, Tita. In his attempt to gain access to the love letters the elder woman possesses, the narrator, somewhat unintentionally, woos Tita. When Mrs. Bordereau dies Tita makes the narrator an offer: Aspern's letters in exchange for a nuptial agreement. While the narrator has been willing to lie, be taken financially advantage of, and even attempt to break into Mrs. Bordereau's personal desk, he cannot bring himself to agree to Tita's terms.

As in "The Figure in the Carpet," James offers a narrator who, at first glance, seems to be portrayed as a single-minded character obsessed with obtaining the love letters of a dead poet. While the plot may seem similar to "The Figure in the Carpet," at least thematically, there is an important difference in the agenda of this narrator which makes him far less sympathetic than the other. In "The Figure in the Carpet," the narrator is in search of knowledge which will bring about a greater understanding of the works of the author with whom he is infatuated. In "The Aspern Papers," however, the narrator's motives are sinister. He is not concerned with the somewhat noble goal of pursuing knowledge (though there is some vague reference to the narrator's intention of publishing the letters); rather, he is solely concerned with acquiring another person's personal property (Mrs. Bordereau's letters from Aspern) in order to quench his own desire through invading another's privacy.

While the narrator of "The Aspern Papers" has darker motives, he is still maneuvering through James's remapping of sexuality. In A Common Life, David Laskin portrays the narrator as "a rather creepy voyeur, albeit a literary one, a 'publishing scoundrel' desperate to lay his hands on a packet of love letters . . . . [James] and his characters peep not simply out of curiosity about the sexual practices of others, but as a substitute for sex" (Laskin 130). I assert that the difference in characterization of the narrator from sympathetic (in "The Figure in the Carpet") to "creepy" (in "The Aspern Papers") is due to James's interpersonal relationship with Woolson at the time the latter story was written. James intended to send Woolson (after reading "Miss Grief") the message that marriage was not even in the realm of possibility. The narrator of "The Aspern Papers" plainly states "That was the price [the narrator marrying Tita]--that was the price! And did she think I wanted it, poor deluded, infatuated, extravagant lady? . . . Whether I had given cause or not it went without saying that I could not pay the price. I could not accept. I could not, for a bundle of tattered papers, marry a ridiculous, pathetic, provincial old woman" (James, Aspern 376-377). Such a damning evaluation and rejection could only come from a misogynist brute, one not worthy of Tita's (or Woolson's) affection. Going to the root of the tale, the narrator's greatest flaw is "his zeal for literary history," which makes him "an invader of private lives. In this sense the tale is a moral fable" (Edel, Middle 220). Edel, too, is aware of James's duplicitousness--warning the reader not to invade yet at the same time leaving, as it were, a figure to be found in the carpet (i.e., sexual feelings remapped onto literary desire). Edel describes this treatment of the text as how James "used his characteristic technique, that of having his hero be his own historian--writing his story with such candor and ingenuousness that he reveals his own duplicity" (Edel, Middle 220). However, Edel's final evaluation of "The Aspern Papers" casts the tale as "a defense of privacy and an exposure of the unfeeling egotist who exploits others' feelings for his own end (Edel, Middle 223). Like Cohen with his idea of the narrator in "The Figure in the Carpet" as working under or through the "negative mode" (Cohen 229), Edel also condemns this narrator too quickly. Although the behavior of the narrator of "The Aspern Papers" cannot be excused, it is understandable given the lack of non-heterosexual options which are available to him.