TERRIBLE SOCIABILITY: THE TEXT OF MANNERS IN LACLOS, GOETHE, AND HENRY JAMES

A closed society with a rigorous code of comportment is the prerequisite for the subtleties of implication we associate with the novel of manners. Most of the critical attention the novel of manners has received has focussed upon the society represented in the novel. In calling the object of my study the text of manners, I am addressing the question of how those customs, mores and rules of personal intercourse with which the novel of manners is traditionally associated enable Laclos, Goethe, and Henry James to write about precisely those aspects of human experience which "manners" would seem to proscribe.;In Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Goethe needs the structuring cadre of the text of manners and its fiction of stable signification in order to make visible the trajectory of the destructuring and destabilizing effect of a figure, Ottilie, whose uncanny presence in the "world" catalyzes the denouement of a drama hidden beneath the veil of good manners.;Henry James makes the text of manners his principle of composition; the sociability which is the subject of the early works becomes in addition the compositional principle of the later novels. In my discussion of The American Scene, I show how James creates for himself a 'frame of manners' which allows him to write about the unwriteable. The crisis of composition in The Sacred Fount is a result of James' narrator's inability to accommodate his imagination to the discipline of the 'frame of manners.' Maggie Verver's and James' triumphs of reappropriation in The Golden Bowl are possible because both exploit the 'frame of manners' and the conventions of sociability in order to execute an intention which remains radically private and unsociable.;In Les Liaisons dangereuses, Laclos uses the conventions of the text of manners in order to demonstrate the fatal limitations the code mondain imposes even upon those characters who negotiate and manipulate it with the greatest virtuosity. In this novelistic summa of mondanite, the master-plot of epistolary eroticism is shown to be terrible for all members of the novel's closed society, but, I argue, it is fatal for women.