'Poor fellow': Troubled masculinity in the works of Henry James

From Christopher Newman of The American to Lambert Strether of The Ambassadors, James's male figures exhibit certain deep tensions of Victorian Anglo-American masculinity: vocational uncertainty, emotional repression, anxiety about traditional male roles (or compensatorily zealous prosecution of these roles), and fascination with the hermeneutics of femininity, which is variously construed as riddle, spectacle, vessel, abyss, and dark continent. The dissertation traces James's increasingly skillful dramatization of male consciousness under "high pressure" through the cases of Newman (1877), Frederick Winterbourne ("Daisy Miller," 1878), Basil Ransom (The Bostonians, 1886), Peter Sherringham (The Tragic Muse, 1890), Merton Densher (The Wings of the Dove, 1902), and Strether (1903).;These works have often been read as a testing ground in James's self-construction as a bachelor artist, as the record of his gradual liberation from the ideology of "upright manliness," "real men of action," and so forth. But biographical reading have obscured the value of James's writings as documents of a much broader crisis in the culture. James's works are both personally confessive and indicative of a general distress in the gender norms and relations of his period.;The guiding methodological premise is that James's tales of troubled masculinity can be fully understood only through a blending and balancing of biographical, historical, literary, and theoretical emphases. The study therefore draws extensively on James's correspondence and nonfiction, especially The American Scene (1907) and the autobiographies (1913-14); on evidence of his complex relation to such sites of masculine trial as the marketplace and battlefield; and on his critical engagement with gender issues in the work of other authors, both American and British. James's dramas of men-in-crisis are also shown to anticipate the interpretative model and even the metaphors of psychoanalysis, turning especially on the power dynamics of the gaze.