In "The Pupil" James offers a love story that ends in tragedy. Because the two people in love are male characters, the sad ending seems almost mandatory for publication in the intensely homophobic times James was writing in. "The Pupil," a story so obviously about the love between a student and his teacher, was rejected by The Atlantic Monthly and is James's greatest attempt at writing a homosexual love story. Of course a reader must be prepared to decode Morgan and Pemberton's relationship. Because James is still not ready to fully deal with his homosexual feelings he puts a barrier between the two would-be lovers; Morgan is only eleven years old.

There are many strategic advantages, both public and personal, to making Morgan a child. Because of the age gap between the two characters, there is less suspicion of homosexual content. For there to be homosexual content, the relationship would have to be pedophilic. For James himself, by creating such an age gap, he can write about the love between two men without having to deal with or think about actual sex between men. (This is not to say that James does not use sexually suggestive language to describe Morgan and Pemberton's relationship.) James is writing about an adult relationship in the guise of student-teacher affection. The thinly veiled guise is partially lifted by James almost immediately. Within the first few paragraphs of the story James has Pemberton notice Morgan's "elderly shoulders" (James, Pupil 411). The apparent age of the boy's shoulders is a rather odd way of describing him. Yet, throughout the story James is constantly "aging" Morgan to the end of life. Besides indicating to the reader that Morgan is an unusually mature boy, ready for a mature relationship, he is also neither a boy nor an old man. Rather, Morgan is to be perceived as being a combination of a boy and an old man. Morgan's textual boyhood, when added to his metaphoric dotage, balances out to make Morgan an adult. This is the reason why Morgan's "face seemed to change its time of life" (James, Pupil 411).

Morgan's physical age is not the only facet of the boy which James attends to in preparing Morgan for a relationship with Pemberton. He also makes Morgan at least Pemberton's intellectual equal. Morgan's family constantly refers to the boy as a genius. He is characterized as being "supernaturally clever." Morgan is not just intelligent. Intelligence alone would not ready him for an adult relationship. He also possesses a wisdom beyond his years. James tells us that Morgan's wanderings through Europe have made him worldly. By leaving out the fact that Morgan did his wandering with his family, James further sets the boy up as an autonomous figure who does not need anyone but his lover, Pemberton. Like other Jamesian children (e.g., Maisie) Morgan knows more about the way the world works than the adults around him.

Morgan, not Pemberton, truly understands the situation his family has put upon the tutor. When Morgan talks of his family he "speaks with the wisdom of the ages" (James, Pupil 441). He urges Pemberton to leave him in order to save his loved one. Little in Morgan's actions and speech indicate that he is a child. He is perceived as such only because James constantly tells the reader it is so. Even while writing perhaps his most homoromantic tale, James is still unable to let his guard down. Because Morgan is the mean age of a boy and an old man, extremely intelligent, and wise beyond his years, Morgan is a suitable love interest for Pemberton.

Once James establishes that Morgan and Pemberton are potential lovers, he moves the action of the story towards that goal. Early in the story the two come to an epiphany about their relationship. In true Jamesian style, their revelation is ambiguously explicit. This realization comes after Morgan calls Pemberton a "jolly old humbug" (James, Pupil 420). Morgan sees through Pemberton's impersonation of the heterosexual bachelor, and the two see each other in a way that dramatically changes their relationship forever. Once we have the understanding that Morgan is metaphorically an adult, and that there is a spark between him and Pemberton, the following paragraph becomes a realization of their love. My italicized commentary explicates the text:

For a particular reason the words [jolly old humbug] made Pemberton change colour. --Morgan had discovered Pemberton's heterosexual deception.-- The boy noticed in an instant that he had turned red, whereupon he turned red himself and the pupil and the master exchanged a longish glance in which there was a consciousness of many more things than are usually touched upon, even tacitly, in such a relation. --We see here James's use of the vague. He does not tell the reader what the "things" are that he is referring to: to do so would be to include blatant homoromantic sentiment into the story.-- It produced for Pemberton an embarrassment; --Because he and Morgan acknowledged the homoromantic potential of their relationship-- it raised, in a shadowy form, a question (this was the first glimpse of it), --Again, James is intentionally vague. If "it" refers to the question, what is the question? The question that is raised is how will they escape Morgan's family so that they can have a life together.-- which was destined to play as singular and, as he imagined, owing to the altogether peculiar conditions, an unprecedented part in his intercourse with his little companion --James uses "intercourse" to show that their relationship is intended to be adult and physical--. Later, when he found himself talking with this small boy in a way in which few small boys could ever have been talked with, --in an adult and romantic fashion-- he thought of that clumsy moment on the bench in Nice as the dawn of an understanding that had broadened." James, Pupil 420

This is as close to the homoromantic that James ever gets in his fictional writing. Before the romance can be recognized, the relationships have to be decoded and the ambiguous sentiments must be explored. Some of the best conversations in James's writings are the ones that go unsaid.

Once a reader has decoded the relationship between Morgan and Pemberton, it becomes easy to see that Morgan's education is not, metaphorically, about an academic education. James suggestively tells how Pemberton "looked straight and hard at his candidate for the honour of taking his education in hand." (James, Pupil 409). Further, Morgan is not the pupil, Pemberton is. When Pemberton first meets Morgan, he comments that the boy might be cleverer than himself. Obviously James does not mean that a boy of eleven is better educated than a man who has been to Oxford. If we interpret Morgan as a young man who is in touch with his sexuality, then Pemberton's original observation makes sense: Morgan is more sexually informed. This is why Pemberton "could not calculate the information he was yet to gain from the boy" (James, Pupil 427). In fact, Pemberton himself exclaims, "One would think you were my tutor!" (James, Pupil 440).

When James's metaphors about Morgan and Pemberton's relationship are understood, other mysteries in the text start to become clear. For example, when Morgan's parents stop paying Pemberton he does not leave. His emotional attachment to his pupil would seem out of proportion if their relationship were merely academic. Of course it is not; even Morgan's mother can sense the true relationship. Why else would she believe that Pemberton was "paid, above all, by the delightful relation he had established with Morgan--quite ideal, as from master to pupil..." (James, Pupil 431)? This ideal relationship is the same kind of mentor-acolyte relationship that James endeavored to develop in his own life with young writers and artisans in his later years.

When sexuality is juxtaposed with academics, the reader is able to gain some deft descriptions of Pemberton's waking sexuality. He refers to Morgan as "puzzling as a page in an unknown language . . . . Indeed the whole mystic volume in which the boy had been bound demanded some practice in translation" (James, Pupil 414). James's use of academics and unknown languages as a metaphor for homosexual attraction can be found in other works as well. In his novel The Ambassadors, James's male protagonist, Strether, meets a famous artist named Gloriani who dazzles him, "a fine worn handsome face, a face that was like an open letter in a foreign tongue" (James, Ambassadors 199). Both Strether's meeting Gloriani and Morgan and Pemberton's relationship are areas where James's prose become exceptionally homoerotic. The idea that homoeroticism would be a foreign tongue is an accurate simile for James's struggle with his sexuality.

Given England's harsh penal code in regard to homosexuality, it is not surprising that James uses conspiratory language in talking about Morgan's education which one can read as sexuality. When Morgan thinks about going to Oxford where, "aided and abetted by Pemberton, [Morgan would do] the most wonderful things" (James, Pupil 445), James clinches the idea of academics standing in for a sexuality that would be a crime.

Clearly James's secular society was not the only influence in his duress about his sexuality. As in "A Light Man" where homosexuality seems incongruous to religious service, there is a similar notion in "The Pupil." After Pemberton leaves Morgan for a paying position tutoring a boy known only as the "opulent youth," Pemberton struggles with the idea of showing the letters he has received from Morgan to his current pupil in the hopes of encouraging him. Pemberton finally decides to keep the letters to himself for fear of "something in them that was profanable by publicity" (James, Pupil 450). Morgan's letters are not simple correspondences from a former pupil; they are love letters between two men. The romantic correspondence between two men is what James considers potentially profane.

If romantic letters could be construed as profane, how much more difficult it must have been for James to contemplate a physical relationship between his lovers. James certainly had difficulty with, both in his life and in his fiction, the idea of men being physical. His anxiety is portrayed through the relationships of his characters. Pemberton believes Morgan "would prove...a kind of excitement. This idea held the young men, in spite of a certain repulsion" (James, Pupil 411). Pemberton's attraction to the boy illustrates James's own sexual conflictedness. Just as Pemberton cannot deny his feelings, like James, he cannot reconcile them with the restrictive society that placed guilt-free love out of his reach until his later years.

Because of this sense of repression, Morgan's pleas take on great poignancy. When Morgan pleads "Take me away--take me away" to which Pemberton replies "Where shall I take you, and how--oh, how, my boy?" (James, Pupil 452), the sexual innuendo is evident. Pemberton wants to know how he can take Morgan sexually.

At the end of the story when Pemberton is faced with the reality of taking Morgan, Pemberton falters. In his moment of questioning, Morgan's heart gives out due to the emotional strain of the situation, conveniently giving Pemberton-- and James--an escape from having to deal with an uncontained homosexual relationship. As the story ends, all of the homosexual implications die with Morgan. The reader and the writer can go on without having to struggle with the notion of two men living and loving together.

Perhaps the difficulty of dealing with male homosexual relationships over a protracted amount of time kept James from adding more characters such as Theodore, Max, Morgan, and Pemberton into his other fiction. There are moments of homoeroticism in parts of his novels, but there do not seem to be male characters that have a consistently coded homosexual persona. Perhaps this is because of the very nature of the novel. In order for James to have a character that could be read as homosexual in a novel, James would have to live with the character for a sustained amount of time while developing the plot. Not surprisingly, James's characters, which can be decoded as homosexual, inhabit his short stories.

Stories such as "A Light Man" and "The Pupil" show an evolution and growth in James's comfort level with homosexuality. Not surprising, Max in "A Light Man" is James's first narrator to tell a story unflattering to himself. Although Morgan and Pemberton find a reciprocated love in James's later short story, their love is predictably cut short. The guilt James and many other gay authors have about same-sex love would be a cliché if the outcome both on paper and in life were not so tragic.