| I begin by exploring the various threads of Romanticism at work in The Portrait of a Lady. More specifically, I examine how, in developing his unique form of realism, James highlights the tragic consequences of his American heroine's Romantic imagination, in particular, her Emersonian idealism. In order to expose Emerson's blind spot, a lacuna at the very centre of his New England Transcendentalism, I show how James draws on the Gothic effects of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, thereby producing an intensification of Isabel Archer's psychological state, precipitating her awakening to a fuller, heightened consciousness. It is precisely here that Romanticism takes an aesthetic turn and becomes distinctly Paterian, unleashing queer possibilities that are further developed in James's subsequent fiction. In "The Art of Fiction," I pick up the Paterian thread, leading to "The Author of Beltraffio" and to Theophile Gauthier, thus establishing an important connection with French culture. Drawing on James's famous analogy between the art of fiction and the art of the painter, I explore a possible link to the Impressionist painters who were associated with the literary circle Emile Zola dominated, in particular, Edgar Degas and his close associate Edmond Duranty. I then turn to "A New England Winter," a tale about an American Impressionist painter, and find traces leading back to James's "initiation premiere." Finally, I discuss the possible sources of Kate Croy's "unspeakable" father in The Wings of the Dove and propose a possible intertext, one that provides direct insight into the Victorian closet. |
