Enacting sexual difference: Re -visions of Henry James in the writing of Marguerite Duras and Emily Dickinson

This dissertation argues that Henry James's style may reflect the author's examination of linguistic sexual difference. In the last twenty years more traditional readings of James have been effaced by scholarship that explores the queer elements of his fiction. In part, I use this work to suggest that post-structural feminisms, particularly the work of Luce Irigaray, offer insight into equally-significant feminist possibilities in James's sentence-level writing. I begin by approaching James through theatrical adaptations of his work written by Marguerite Duras, the French author Helene Cixous described in an early essay as epitomizing "l'ecriture feminine," or a writing that inscribes femininity. Through adapting for the stage James's The Aspern Papers and "The Beast in the Jungle," Duras focuses the points in his work in which sexual difference is coded through untranslated Italian or French terms, unusual forms of punctuation, and silence. Duras underscores moments in which language fragments, breaking down the primary discourse into other forms of speech that function within and against that of male narrators.;Following the lead established by Duras in the readings that are her theatrical adaptations, I present an analysis of James's short story "Maud-Evelyn," in which a young man marries the dead daughter of a wealthy couple. Through their fantastic marriage, Marmaduke becomes Maud-Evelyn, as is indicated through changes in his body and speech. In the story, James presents a multiplicity of gendered possibilities through the character's relationships to their bodies and each other.;In the final chapters, I argue that Marguerite Duras's incursions into James's work have an American precedent. Emily Dickinson seems also to recognize his critical engagement with gendered language. Very little scholarly attention has been paid to the fact that Dickinson twice alludes to James and his novel The Europeans in her epistolary writing. The letters are addressed to her famous "Preceptor," Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and her friend Mrs. Susan Holland. Dickinson's letters seem to be gendered performances, carefully tailored to each recipient; they indicate a flexible engagement with femininity. I argue that Dickinson presents James as another American writer challenging normative categories of sexual and authorial identity.