Henry James's Fiction Of Psychological Realism And Its Influence

Henry James (1843—1916), an outstanding novelist, stylist and critic, was born in New York City of America, but spent most of his lifetime in Europe, and settled permanently in England. In 1915, he became a British subject. He did a lot of researches and experiments. He had a prolific literary career spanning over 50 years, which produced 22 novels, 112 short stories, 7 plays, numerous essays and a large number of lively correspondences. Partly because he spent most of his adult life in England, partly because his intricate style and choice of cultivated characters ran counter to the dominant American vernacular tradition initiated by Mark Twain, James attracted, in his lifetime, only a select company of admirers. His intrinsic importance, as well as his wide influence as a novelist and critic, was not recognized until the 1930's, when American literary taste reached a new level of sophistication. As a voluminous writer, James has a unique place in the history of the novel both in America and in England. His influence has been quieter, less spectacular, but more pervasive as compared with that of some of his contemporaries. As early as 1918, T. S. Eliot termed James"the most intelligent man of his generation"1. Philip Rahv called him"the America's greatest novelist'2, and Yvor Winters proclaimed him"the greatest novelist in English"3. The British critic F. R. Leavis rhetorically demanded:"What achievement in the art of fiction…can we point to in English as surpassing his?"4 It is generally accepted that he is one of the four or five most important English novelists of his times.In the years from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, when James lived and was engaged in literary creation, the major American and European capitalist countries entered the stage of imperialism. With the speedy development of capitalism, the various contradictions inherent in it became acute. In this period, realist literature which flourished in the middle and late 19th century began to decline. Discontented with their literary achievements of realism, many writers attempted to pave a new way by innovating and experimenting with subject matters and techniques, seeking other writing method to represent the complex social contradictions and profound spiritual crisis. This is the historical background for the rise of modernist literature. Modernism was introduced from the continent of Europe to Britain in the late 19th century. It was first reflected in the works of Oscar Wilde's aestheticism, those of decadentism and the poetry of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. In the English novel, James was one of the first explorers. His creative techniques of writing novels made him the key figure occupying a unique position in the development of fiction, in which he combined traditional heritage and contemporary attributes."Beginning in the familiar tradition of the novel, James increasingly turned his attention to aspects of fiction previously almost unnoticed, aspects which largely make him the inspirer of the modern experimental novel."1Those unnoticed aspects are the exploration and description of the state of mind of the character and the subtle changes of the character's psychology. The Portrait of a Lady is considered a book of great importance in the history of the novel. It was in this novel that James first completely broke away from the traditional technique of novel-writing. The character's significant actions were almost entirely embodied in terms of his inner life. Just as Michael Swan said,"This method is more or less taken for granted by the modern novelist, but in 1881 it was an unnoticed revolution of technique."2 Due to historical limitations, the psychological activity of the character was neglected by people, and this writing method was hard to be widely recognized and accepted. James made detailed analysis of the character's psychology and consciousness in his works. The technique he used was called"psychological realism", which reflected the characteristics of the method in novel writing in the transition from the traditional to the modern. He both inherited the tradition of realism and emphasized the analysis and description of the character's psychology, attempting to make a breakthrough in form of art and technique of expression.At the same time, Western psychology made much progress, which led to the clear recognition of man's inner self, and the innovation of literary creation in content and form. The theory of psychoanalysis advanced by Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud surely stimulated and propelled the development of the novel of psychological realism. People began to realize that literature and psychology have something in common: both are related to man's action and motivation, and involved in man's exploration of subjective mental world. The novelists, who were interested in the description and analysis of human soul, supposed that they could absorb sufficient nutrition from the study of modern psychology in its exploration of human soul, in order to create a series of psychological novels. Influenced and promoted by such ideological trend, psychological realism came into being. Therefore, the emergence of psychological realism is the outcome of the evolution of the novel itself, and the outcome of the development of modern psychology linking closely to it. Psychological realism is an important literary phenomenon in the course of transition from traditional realism to modernism which was against the tradition.Psychological realism consists of two aspects: psychology and realism. They are complementary and indispensable to each other and form an organic whole. On the one hand, it emphasizes the reflection of reality and the objective world through psychology of the characters; on the other hand, it stresses the necessity of the correspondence between the description of the psychological content and the objective reality, to achieve the organic unity of the objective world of reality and the subjective world of the mind. Psychological realism is a creative method of narrative literature and an important literary trend of the 20th century. Based on realism, it discloses the inner working of the characters'mind by means of psychological description and psychological analysis. This is a new type of principle in literary creation. James was, first of all, a realist. He held to fairly traditional notions of realism: the beauty of form is not pursued merely for its own sake but in the process of depicting a complex and authentic experience that rests on the contingencies of life. For him, the task of the novel was mainly to represent life. But unlike William Dean Howells and the naturalists, he was not interested in business, politics or the conditions of society. He was an observer of the mind rather than a recorder of the times. His realism was a special kind of psychological realism. Few of his stories include big events or exciting actions. In fact, the characters in his finest novels watch life more than they live in it. Things happen to them, but not as a result of their own actions. We readers are interested in how their minds respond to the events of the story. What do they see? How do they try to understand it? The changing consciousness of the character is the real story.The Jameses were endowed with an almost clinical curiosity about human behavior, which led his brother William James to become the founder of the science of psychology in America. Henry James was the first novelist to recognize clearly that the materials of the novel and those of scientific psychology were identical. He insisted that a novelist's primary duty should be to reveal exactly what went on in the inner world of a character. He condemned almost all preceding novelists for injecting their own interpretations into their books by explicit comments. James tried to be away from his novel except for explanations sometimes. Just as Flaubert required, the writer should be like"God in the universe, everywhere present but nowhere visible."1 And then he added:"the artist should no more appear in his works than does God in nature. Man is nothing, his work is everything."2As early as the late 19th century, most readers were not ready for such a new approach and so James's greatest novels were not very popular. But in the 20th-century literature, the"stream of consciousness"method became quite common. Thanks to modern psychology and writers like James, we are now more interested in the inner workings of the mind. We know that events inside one's head can be as dramatic as events in the outside world. And James has now firmly established himself as one of the major novelists and critics in the English world and as psychological realist of unsurpassed subtlety.The"stream of consciousness"technique was widely used in modernist writings. The"stream of consciousness"novel is a special type of the psychological novel. The term is traced back to a brilliant account of thought in Principles of Psychology (1890) by William James. The metaphor was introduced by William to describe the flux of the mind, its continuity and yet its continuous change. As the apex of modernism, the"stream of consciousness"novel is in consistency with Henry James's novels of psychological realism in their display of the conflicts in the inner life of human beings. However, the Jamesian novel and the"stream of consciousness"novel are different. Although his concern shifted from the external events to the internal world in subject matter, James used different techniques in creating the images of characters. He paid attention to the psychological activities on the level of consciousness rather than the subconscious. So Henry James can't be regarded as a"stream of consciousness"novelist.James's criticism on the novel is a component part of his literary creation. His works include, in addition to fiction, a substantial body of literary criticism. His outstanding contribution to the study of the novel lies in two separate parts of his critical writings: Prefaces to the"New York Edition"and"The Art of Fiction". James's 24 volumes of collected works were issued by Jamesian scholars from 1907 to 1917. James wrote a critical preface for each volume, yet only 18 of them were finished. These prefaces are surely among the most important documents on prose fiction, for they not only give an insight into the mind of a great writer, but also reveal the art of the novel. In 1884, James published his most influential essay"The Art of Fiction"in the magazine Longman's. It was written in reply to a lecture"Fiction as a Fine Art" delivered by Sir Walter Bessant. Bessant's lecture has been forgotten by all except literary scholars, but James's essay has remained one of the most important studies on the art of fiction.James developed a distinctive set of theory on fiction, so he was also an outstanding critic. At the very beginning of his writing, he set about to found a theory, to conceive novel as a form of art for literary creation—"the most magnificent form of art". In"The Art of Fiction", he expressed his opinions on the creation of the art of novel. James stressed the connection between the novel and the real life. He viewed a novel as"a personal, a direct impression of life"1 He pointed out,"The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life. When it relinquishes this attempt,…it will have arrived at a very strange pass."2 He emphasized the reality of the art of the novel, by saying"the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel—the merit on which all its other merits helplessly and submissively depend. If it be not there they are all as nothing, and if these be there, they owe their effect to the success with which the author has produced the illusion of life. The cultivation of this success, the study of this exquisite process, form, to my taste, the beginning and the end of the art of the novelist."3 He also attached importance to extracting typical things from life, and remarked,"Art is essentially selection, but it is a selection whose main care is to be typical, to be inclusive."4 The description of the psychology of the character is indispensable to the novel. James was intensely concerned for the psychological life of his characters and developed a novelistic technique that centered itself in the representation of the effect produced in the inner self by external events. The characters created by James do not act much. Their ideas, emotions and personality find expression in dialogues, in their thought and in the description of details. All the opinions advanced by James have made a great contribution to the development of the theory of fiction, and in his writing practice, especially in his earlier period, James always adhered to these theories, trying to make a perfect union between content and form, to express the ethic content in the highest form of art. Therefore, in The English Novel, Walter Allen said when commenting on James:"Ethics are one thing and aesthetics doubtless another, but it was James's principle the ethical could be rendered successfully in fiction only when the representation was aesthetically satisfying."1In the course of his change from tradition to reform, James made a series of explorations, experimentation and innovations in the representation of content and the employment of techniques. They are mainly embodied in the following four aspects:1. The"central consciousness"—a new narrative technique. As never before, James studied how a novel should be told. Former novelists employed two fundamental patterns—omniscient and autobiographical. James experimented constantly with"viewpoints"(or angle of narration). His favorite device was a story-telling line directed from and toward one character; nothing should enter the narrative but the perception of this character. James is always conscious of how the reader is hearing and seeing his story. Basically, he stays away from the omniscient narrator except for occasional comments. He usually attempts to tell the story from the point of view of a character in the work. For example, in Daisy Miller, the story is seen through the mind of Winterbourne. The reader can note there that the story is never seen from Daisy's point of view. The story is about how Daisy is seen by others, especially by Winterbourne. The Portrait of a Lady is also a good example for us to understand the mind, perception and reaction of the central character Isabel Archer. What Maisie Knew is a successful work in technique. Maisie is an innocent girl. Her immoral parents divorced. The whole story is unfolded in the maturity of the perception and recognition of Maisie. Through the eye of a pure na?ve girl, the reader can see the moral corruption and degeneration of the adult world. The experiments carried out by James opened the way to such later techniques as those of John Dos Passos and Morman Mailer.2. The purpose of the novel. The purpose of James's novel is different from that of the writings of the previous novelists. His novel has a completely new orientation. Unlike his predecessors he does not ask,"How does one get ahead in this life?"He demands,"What is the actual experience of living?"If the traditional novel is more socially implied, James's novel bears more meaning psychologically and philosophically. Purposely James makes his characters financially independent so that they can ignore the economic pressures usually felt by the character realistic novelists created. Many of his characters are therefore women, who are less likely to be wholly wrapped up in money-making than are men. Free from financial worries, the characters can concentrate on the exploration of moral perception. In The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer received a large amount of legacy unexpectedly, so that she could live a free, independent life as she wished. Only in this way, was she able to explore, perceive and discover life and understand the nature of human beings.3. The withering away of external plot. The shift from external events to internal spirit is the sign of an important change in the 20th century novel. From realism to modernism, the objects of reflection and subject matter of representation turned from exterior society to interior world, from objective environments to subjective mind. Readers of James have constantly complained that almost nothing"happened"in his fiction; a short story by Jack London or by O. Henry may display far more"plot"than any full-length James's novel. With James the arena of conflict has shifted from outside events to the inner life of the character. The fiction of James arises not from a sense of action but from a desire to present a"case"or a"situation". Like many of the modernist writers, James finds that the inner working of one's mind is complex, in unrest and in constant flow. In depicting the inner world of characters, he pays much attention to the description and analysis of their psychology and its shades of change. He makes use of various kinds of words, different grammatical and rhetorical devices to reflect vividly and minutely the subtle emotion and perception. His technique exerted great impact on the"stream of consciousness"novelists, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner and others. Psychological realism embodies the transition from the old to the new in James's literary creation."Realism"reflects his connection with tradition, and"psychology"indicates his exploration and innovation in subject matter and form. In this sense, he is a transitional figure from the traditional literature of realism to the literature of modernism. At the turn of the period, James's work acted as a prelude to modernist novels.4. The later style of James. In order to give an exact and lively expression of the observation and perception of the characters, James needed a new style. After years of consideration and practice, he developed a peculiar style, which is usually called"the later style of James". His refined language became as subtle and meticulous as the things and emotions he expressed. After repeated deliberation, he tried to seek the most exact adjectives to fit the need of expression. He liked to select abstract words to express obscure and ambiguous meaning. Sometimes he used French words. The complex sentence became longer and longer, often interrupted by parentheses, modified by different levels of clauses. As a result, a sentence is so complicated that you don't understand the meaning until you read it through. It seemed that James loaded his writing with fancy phrases, which made his works intricate, difficult to understand. The mere pursuit of elegance accounts for the loss of the freshness and beauty. In The Great Tradition, F. R. Leavis criticized James, saying that he sometimes made the readers too bored to go on reading. H. G. Wells gave a vivid description of James's style comparing it as"a hippopotamus rolling a pea"1. However, if we criticize the later style of James as his disadvantage, it is a complete failure; if we regard it as his peculiar advantage, it has poetic beauty. It requires patience to read James's works. Only an attentive reader can find the true meaning of his works and the beauty hidden in them and really appreciate his peculiar style. We must realize,"To accuse James of perverseness in forming his later style is entirely to misunderstand its purpose; the ideas, not the style, came first."1 James's style is his proper instrument for novel writing.Bearing the four points above in mind, the author of the thesis organized his ideas about Henry James to sketch out a basic structure for the dissertation, though it is an imperfect one. This dissertation consists of eight chapters. The introduction serves as the preliminary part which provides the basic information about James's writing career, his literary achievements, his novels and criticism on the novel, the review of the study of James and the purpose of this paper. This introduction offers a general outline of James as a great novelist and a famous critic.Chapter 1 gives a detailed analysis of the characteristics of the traditional novel, illuminates the ways employed by the traditional novelists to describe the psychology of the characters and their important functions in literary creation so as to form a striking contrast with James's novels of psychological realism.Chapter 2 deals with James's techniques of psychological realism. It specifically explains the difference of his techniques from those of the traditional novel. It analyzes in detail his"central consciousness", the purpose of his novel, the withering away of his plot, and his later style. It mainly emphasizes James's inheritance of the methods of psychological description in the realist novels and his influence on the techniques of the modern"stream of consciousness"novels.Chapter 3 discusses how James used his techniques to describe the psychology of the heroine in his best work The Portrait of a Lady. The novel is an important work in the history of the development of fiction, in which the novelist broke away from the technique of narration of the traditional novel for the first time. In the novel Isabel Archer becomes the central character, who is the embodiment of different points of view. From her different angles of narration, the reader can experience reality and perceive the truth of life. The novelist described in detail Isabel's perception of the environment and the characters around her and the heroine's psychological changes. The external world was fully reflected through the character's activities of psychology, and the plot unfolded naturally in the consciousness of the character. From Isabel's life experience the reader can see her free and independent character, her choice of her marriage and finally her suffering from the consequence of her choice. She accidentally received a large sum of legacy from her uncle, so the wealthy young lady Isabel became the object of the money-hunters. She was trapped by the plot of Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond. She became the victim of the tragic marriage. Through her adventurous experience, she finally recognized the true nature of her evil husband Osmond and Madme Merle. However, she did not escape from life in the end, instead she was bold enough to take her responsibility and made a commitment to life, which her unusual philosophy of life and sense of value.Chapter 4 provides a detailed analysis of the techniques James adopted in writing another novel The Wings of the Dove. In the novel, each of the three main characters Merton Densher, Kate Croy and Milly Theale respectively acted as the focal character of a certain stage in the unfolding of the plot. From their different points of view, the characters provided the reader with various and colorful experiences of social life. When a person is facing an important choice that has to be made at the crossroads of his life, he must have fierce mental struggle or conflict, and exhibit complex psychological activities. It was the complicated consciousness of the characters that James learned thoroughly and applied in his description of the character's mental world to reflect the truth of life. First, the novel begins with the narration of Kate. From her point of view, the reader learns about her family background and her present situation. Though she was in straitened circumstances, she longed for a luxurious life. She had to withstand various tremendous pressures that came from all sides. Her rich aunt required her to break off relations with her father and marry Lord Mark before she could get the opportunity to inherit a fortune. But Kate fell in love with Densher, a London journalist who came from an impoverished family. It was hard for her to make a decision in face of such a thorny problem. She made up her mind to possess both happiness and property. She was resolved to conquer the world through the money she could receive. Only in this way could she change her fate of life. And then the novel develops with the narrative of Densher. He related his love story and how he managed to deal with the relationship with Kate and Milly. He had deep affection for Kate and desired to marry her soon, but he painfully realized that their future life would be restricted by their objective financial conditions. Kate and her aunt planned that Densher should marry wealthy, dying Milly who suffered from a fatal disease, so that, after her death, they could share her money, marry themselves and enjoy a happy life together. When they practiced deception on poor Milly, Densher was aware of her innocence, purity and kindness. Now he had a guilty conscience. He was stricken with self-revulsion at his behavior, and revulsion against Kate. In the end he was determined to give up Milly's property. He would marry Kate without the money but not with it, while Kate would not marry him without it. Finally, the novel is narrated from the point of view of Milly, through which the reader can see her true inner world. The heroine Milly, a millionairess, came to Europe in search of experience in the widest sense, for a taste of conscious happiness before her death, as she was condemned to an early death by in an incurable disease. In London she got acquainted with Densher and Kate. She fell in love with Densher, but she did not know Densher had been secretly engaged to Kate. Compared with Kate, who was beautiful and experienced, Milly was simple and innocent. So she had a feeling of potential threat and psychological deficiency. She was determined to be isolated from society. She chose to escape from life and keep aloof from others. Having tolerated intangible depression and countless fear, Milly was totally disillusioned with life and indifferent to everything. She was unable to adjust herself to the new environments. She was reluctant to accept life. As a result, she was doomed to die. Before she died she had left her fortune to Densher. At last, she stretched her wings like a dove and flew away. On the stage of life, Milly played the role of a weak woman, who was only a dove; in morality, she was a great woman of strong character, who was an angel. In order to exert permanent influence on others morally, she chose self-sacrifice.Chapter 5 gives a concrete analysis of the unique narrative devices James employed in his masterpiece The Golden Bowl. In the novel, there are two characters represented as the central consciousness in its narration. The first part of the novel is presented through Prince Amerigo's consciousness, and the second part through Maggie Verver's consciousness. The former relates the relationship of husband and wife between Amerigo and Maggie and the further development of the adulterous relationship between Amerigo and Charlotte even after Amerigo's marriage to Milly and Charlotte's marriage to Maggie's father; the latter tells of the process of Milly's being in the dark and then gradually knowing the true relationship of Amerigo and Charlotte. From the different points of view of the characters, the reader can learn much about the complex and subtle relationships between the two couples in one family and penetrate the unintelligible psychology of the characters in a specific situation. The daughter Maggie married the Prince Amerigo, but she was still attached to her father Adam. After marriage she was unwilling to see her father's loneliness. So under her arrangement her father got married to Charlotte. Unfortunately she soon discovered the adulterous relationship between her husband Amerigo and her stepmother Charlotte. This aroused Maggie's jealousy of Charlotte, and awakened her sense of femininity. But the measures she took to deal with the situation were different from those taken by the former two heroines Isabel and Milly. She saw through Charlotte and Amerigo but kept silent about their love affairs by which to impose immense pressure on them. She struggled unyieldingly against them. Finally Charlotte broke down under such a great force so that she and Adam had to leave for an American city. Maggie won back the love of her husband. Maggie dealt with the complex relationships between her and Adam, daughter and father, between Amerigo and Charlotte, the old pair of lovers, in an unusual way. Maggie had more complex personal relations with other characters in the novel than Isabel and Milly, the two characters before her in James's two previous novels. She was the only heroine who possessed simultaneously a parent, a husband and a child. From the perspective of psychology, the novel explores the characters'personality and discloses the psychological change of the heroine through the relations of the characters. The transformation of Maggie from the beginning to the end reveals to the reader such a track of change: an individual attached to her father turning into a woman who knew how to protect herself and then gaining her independence. She was the only one of the three heroines Isabel, Milly and Maggie to repel the whole attack of life and won the victory in her struggle against her destiny. Finally she broke the bond with her father Adam and they were kept away by geographic distance. Maggie became free and independent. She realized her self-assertion.Chapter 6 studies the impact of James's techniques of psychological realism on the"stream of consciousness"novelists. Through comparison and analysis, this dissertation attempts to discover similarities and differences between James's techniques and the"stream of consciousness"techniques and search for the signs of James's influence on such great novelists as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, so as to make the air of modernism in the great master of fiction deeply felt.The conclusion is a comprehensive retrospect of James's great achievements in novel writing and literary criticism and the influence his psychological novels exercised on the"stream of consciousness"novelists. James's technique of psychological realism advanced along a clear line: he adopted the technique at the beginning of his writing career, it went through constant development in his writing practice, and finally reached its maturity. James's major novels The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl have both similarities and differences in content and technique. The heroines Isabel Archer, Milly Theale, and Maggie Verver share a common feature: they are all the American upper-class women. All of them explored society and perceived life through their own experiences, but their results were different. Isabel silently endured the painful life, and made a commitment to life; Milly could not bear the heavy burden of life and died, making her self-sacrifice; Maggie finally triumphed over the attack of life, and realized self-assertion. A writer must, according to T. S. Eliot's essay"Tradition and the Individual Talent", must respect and follow the tradition. He must learn from his predecessors writing techniques and make his own contribution to the development of literature by offering new themes, new techniques, etc. The technique of a writer's literary creation is not something that existed in isolation, he inherited the previous literary tradition and formed his own technique on the basis of the predecessor's experience. Besides, he had to do his bit to the development of literary tradition with his individual writing of literary works. In the description of the character's psychology, James absorbed the fine tradition, developed his own peculiar style through experimentation and innovation. He created his own technique of psychological realism and laid a foundation for the development of the"stream of consciousness"technique in novel writing. Therefore, he became the transitional figure between realism and modernism. James's concern with the psychology of the character and his improvement in subject matter and artistic form are imbued with the air of modernism. The works of the"stream of consciousness"novelists bear the mark of James's influence. To some extent, he is worthy the honour of the initiator of the modernist novels. After him, modernism in the Wes...