The man at the margins: Masculinity and Henry James

This study views Henry James as a pioneer of Modernism, particularly in his treatment of masculinity. His increasingly complex style in the latter part of his career allowed him to portray a range of masculine behaviors that defy the rigid forms of manhood imposed by European and American societies. James looks anew at language, sexuality, law, and the imagination in the lives of men excluded from patriarchal privilege.;While much critical attention has attended James's strong female characters, less interest has been directed toward his "timid males"--Lambert Strether, Hyacinth Robinson, Ralph Touchett, John Marcher to name a few--those non-aggressive men whose gazes are distracted from normative professional and sexual pursuits. James asks to what extent a man at the margins can imagine a vital masculinity based less on the social model of aggression and more upon androgynous alternatives.;Inasmuch as marginality is by definition abnormal, much of the marginal male's life must remain concealed, partially out of an impulse to elude censorship. In a verbal game of divulgence and concealment, of occasional indulgences and frequent deprivations, James eroticizes the field of marginality. Sometimes voyeuristic and autoerotic, and frequently homeoerotic, the marginal world drawn by James provides male characters with peripheral satisfactions judged non-sexual by society at large. The coded realm of the margins assumes the texture of desire only when interpreted by the marginal gaze.;James's concealment of the sensitive themes surrounding alternative masculinity implies a degree of submission to decorum. Indeed James has come to epitomize the writer of supreme respectability. That his writing should appear decorous at the surface while concealing less than acceptable behaviors implies duplicity in his treatment of marginality. It is exactly the space between propriety and impropriety that the marginal male inhabits, that narrow space momentarily unattended by those in authority.;That James took interest in this subject speaks volumes about his own life. His personal experience attests to the peculiar satisfactions and dissatisfactions of marginality that would find expression in the lives of his fictional characters.