Acknowledgments List of abbreviations Introduction 1. Indiscreet anatomies and protogay aesthetes in Roderick Hudson and The Europeans 2. The elusive queerness of 'queer comrades': The Tragic Muse and 'The Author of 'Beltraffio" 3. The Turn of the Screw, or: The Dispossessed Hearts of Little Gentlemen 4. Masculinity 'changed and queer' in The Ambassadors 5. Gratifying 'the eternal boy in us all': Willa Cather, Henry James and Oscar Wilde 6. 'The other half is the man': the queer modern triangle of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and Henry James Coda: 'Nobody is alike Henry James': Stein, James and queer futurity Notes Bibliography Index.

Henry James and Queer Modernity

thinking that comprise the interpretive function. Interpretive speech requires sophisticated thought patterns and mature intellectual powers, so it is odd Regan's demonic language has so little of it. Perhaps Blatty meant to convey the demon's power through its efforts Functions of Child Speech 55 to control other people, as 13 percent of its speech is regulatory, or through its lack of questions, for it uses no heuristic speech. (Regan's normal talk is only 8 percent heuristic, whereas Miles [13 percent heuristic] and Flora [I9 percent heuristic] are more inquisitive.) Miles's language reaches unusual levels for a ten-year-old, not only in his interpretive speech (35 percent), but also in the connectedness of his discourse and in his ability to sustain conversations. His language grows increasingly complex at the end of the story, and his final conversation with the governess incorporates the entire range of communicative functions into most utterances, with interpretive speech predominating. After Miles's speech becomes almost entirely interpretive, he dies. Perhaps excessive interpretation can drain the life from any subject. In any case, Miles's dense and suggestive speech is unusual even for a Jamesian juvenile, drawing attention to the precocity and uncanniness which suggest his evil connection. Two similarities in the speech of Flora and Regan hint at a genderbased link. First, both rarely use language to manipulate the behavior of others; specifically, regulatory speech amounts to 6 percent of each one's total language function. Second, interactional speech accounts for 13 percent of each girl's linguistic output, more than either Miles's (8 percent interactional) or the demon's (7 percent interactional). As we will see in the chapter on gender differences, girls tend toward less assertive and less overtly manipulative speech and are generally more sensitive to the nuances of verbal interaction, usually bearing the burden of keeping conversations alive and moving. The speech behavior of Flora and Regan conforms to these patterns. Functionally, Regan's possessed speech has a more masculine aura because it is less interactional (7 percent) and more regulatory (13 percent) than her normal talk. It also contains some performatives (promises and bets) and numerous curses, both absent from her unpossessed ~ p e e c h . ~ Although Miles's discourse is the least regulatory of the children's-or perhaps he is just more subtle in his manipulations-it does have two gender-based connections to the male persona in Regan's possessed speech: a low proportion of interactional language (8 percent interactional for Miles, 7 percent interactional for the possessed Regan) and a similar use of performatives (4 percent performative for Miles and 4 percent perormative for the possessed voice of Regan), whereas Flora and the normal Regan utter no performatives. A character's gender influences how a writer portrays his or her speech, and gender apparently can supercede other factors in language characterization. Here, despite differences in the styles of Blatty and James and despite differences in the approaches they take 56 The Voice of the Child toward their topic of children possessed by evil, similar language patterns mark Regan and Flora as female and Miles and the demon as male. The masculine characterization of Regan's possessed speech also reinforces the conclusion that evil in The Exorcist is completely external to the child it attacks. In both The Exorcist and "The Turn of the Screw" child characters have individualized language, and examining the functions of that child language assists us in understanding the themes, characterizations, and styles of the fictions. Despite some similarities between The Exorcist and "The Turn of the Screw," the subject of possessed children receives dissimilar treatments by the two authors, and the two fictions create dissimilar effects in their readers. One is easier and more obvious. The other is richer and more shaded. One explains everything, while the other explains nothing. One is accessible to a mass audience, the other to a select audience. Both are frightening, but one neatly disposes with the terror in its conclusion, while the other allows nothing, especially not the cause of the terror, to be explained at the end. In one the child character, though almost a teenager, has limited verbal skills, while in the other the children are verbally talented. In one the evil causes the child to alter her speech behavior, while in the other the pervasive evil is not so easily expressed. In one the child's speech functions emphasize facts and information, while in the other the children's speech functions underline the importance of analysis and interpretation. In many ways, the two fictions and their presentations of child speech represent opposite responses to a similar literary impulse. Speech Functions and Other Artistic Considerations Various pressures shape an author's portrayal of speaking child characters. The individual personalities of the children determine much about the presentation of their speech. Also important are the children's relative status, that is, whether they are primary or secondary characters and what relationship they have to others in the fiction. The impact of personality and social status on fictional child language can be illustrated in an examination of the functions of child speech in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Though the message, style, and characterizations in Uncle Tom's Cabin have been harshly criticized, its memorable story nevertheless endures. The abundance of dialogue and the ease with which Stowe reveals her characters through their speech contribute to the novel's force and attractiveness. One of its most familiar scenes details the Functions of Child Speech 57 Table 9. Children's Speech Functions in Chapters 25 and 26 of Uncle Tom's Cabin

The Voice of the Child in American Literature

Halfway through chapter 3 of Philip Roth's American Pastoral (1997), its novelist-narrator Skip Zuckerman transitions abruptly but crucially away from the first-person voice in which he has narrated the first two and a half chapters and into the third-person limited omniscient perspective from which the remaining six and a half chapters will be written. Zuckerman has, at earlier moments in the chapter, alluded to the novel he would (im- mediately after the 1995 events being described) write about the character of Seymour "Swede" Levov on whom Roth's book has focused from its first words, but here the shift from meta-fiction to the fiction itself is much more complete and striking, and one that Zuckerman accomplishes in a single five-word sentence: "I dreamed a realistic chronicle." The next, much lon- ger sentence opens with "I began gazing into his life," and then shifts fully into that third-person limited omniscient representation of the Swede's perspective (as imagined by Zuckerman) which will comprise the whole of that chronicle, that novel within the novel. In fact, when Zuckerman writes in that same sentence "I found him in Deal, New Jersey," it marks the last time in Roth's book—which will continue for over three hundred thirty pages—that he uses the first-person pronoun or refers to himself and his role as novelist-narrator in any explicit way. 1

Novelist-Narrators of the American Dream: The (Meta-)Realistic Chronicles of Cather, Fitzgerald, Roth, and Díaz

Those [readers] who look for “and they lived together happily ever after” at the end of the last chapter of any of [Henry James's] novelettes will be disappointed. (Review of Roderick Hudson, New York Herald , 1875) It is now common to advance Henry James's first acknowledged novel, Roderick Hudson (1875), as also his first significant foray into the representation of different modes of masculinity and, indeed, of male homosexuality. Robert Drake has recently canonized this narrative of “sublimated desire” in The Gay Canon (1998), predicting that “the gay reader” (comfortably unproblematized) will discover in Roderick Hudson an unfulfilled “love story” between two young American men: the titular hero, an ill-fated would-be genius as a sculptor, and his wealthy patron, Rowland Mallet. Offering a more theoretical account, Hugh Stevens stakes his claim that James was “already a gay novelist ” in his early thirties (a literary not a biographical claim) on the ways in which Roderick Hudson begins “explor[ing] the workings of same-sex desire, and the difficulties of admitting such desires, within a cultural formation marked by homosexual prohibition,” albeit before the articulation of “the homosexual” as a pathologized, criminalized type in late Victorian science and jurisprudence.

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Henry James and Queer Modernity: Indiscreet anatomies and protogay aesthetes in Roderick Hudson and The Europeans

Henry James and Queer Modernity: Coda: “Nobody is alike Henry James.” Stein, James, and queer futurity

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice.@@@The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism.

IN one of the saner commentaries concerning My Antonia, Terence Martin notes the twenty-year gap between Books IV and V. He does not elucidate the hiatus, but he does inadvertently suggest its importance when he states that Jim's absence from Nebraska and the intervening life "afford little but material for conjecture and inference."' The narrative blank space is more important than Martin makes it appear, but indeed we do conjecture and infer when faced with the missing decades. Primarily, we ponder the superficially simple but ultimately complex question of what exactly is the process Jim undergoes, and consequently, what does the entire novel "mean?" We watch Antonia change substantially-see her experience times of searching calm, bitchy hoydenism, sexual debauchery, physical and psychic pain, and maternal tranquility. These changes are graphic in the narrative design: Antonia's screaming attack on Jim in chapter XVIII, Book I; her dehumanizing labors in chapter III, Book IV; and her serene beauty throughout Book V. In contrast, we notice very little commensurate growth or change for Jim. Viewed against Antonia's near epic struggles, he appears strangely flat, peculiarly immutable. Since his place in the narrative is at least equal to hers and since Cather does not typically offer contrastive characters without giving each adequate stature (as with the bishops Latour and Vaillant), Jim's apparent lack of development does perplex. Evelyn Helmick tries to solve the riddle by tracing Jim's personality back to "primordial matriarchial mysteries."2 She explains My Antonia generally and the pivotal Cuzak section particularly in terms of these ancient Greek rites and locates Jim's gradual

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2926154.pdf

Patrick W. Shaw

Papers

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice.@@@The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism.

My Antonia: Emergence and Authorial Revelations