Showing papers on "Love marriage published in 1986"

Love, Marriage, and Divorce: The Matter of Sexuality in The Portrait of a Lady

Abstract: For its first half, TAe Portrait of a Lady is a courtship novel; the second half, however, is a marriage novel, marriage closely observed and tellingly questioned. In bodi sections, tiie matter of human sexuality is repeatedly brought forward, overtly and covertly, and die matter of sexuality is intimately entangled in tiie novel's denouement, in Isabel's decision to return by \"a very straight path\" to the Palazzo Roccanera. In order to read Henry James's novel properly, we must be attuned to die literary and social contexts of a past century, the vanished world to which it addressed itself. We must be attuned to die terms, die vocabulary, of die discourse on sexuality that hummed all about Henry James—as a small boy, young man, and maturing artist. As it happens, one of the chief contributors to nineteenth-century discourse on sexuality was Henry James's father. I am not suggesting that the son necessarily agreed with the father, that he was \"influenced\" by die paternal thunder, but I do contend tiiat the elder James's writings on marriage and \"die woman business\" provide highly pertinent instances of nineteenth-century notions about relations between the sexes, obviously illustrative examples of die lexicon employed to talk about such relationships. Since the two Jameses were writing to and in die nineteenth century, we should not read TAe Portrait of a Lady witii eyes bunkered by post-Freudian, post-Marcusian assumptions; we would also be well advised to pay careful attention to the nineteenth-century text of the novel, not be diverted from an appreciation of the nature and magnitude of James's 1881 achievement by the brilliance of his revisions of the novel a quarter-century afterward. In tiie introductory volume of his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argued that our accepted notions about the place and valuation of sex in the Western world from the seventeenth century on are quite misleading, tiiat this was not so much a period of repression and censorship as an age in which there was, increasingly, \"a veritable discursive explosion\" witii regard to sexual matters: Rather tiian die uniform concern to hide sex, radier than a general prudishness of language, what distinguishes these last three centuries is the variety, the wide dispersion of devices that were invented for speaking about it, for having it be spoken about, for inducing it to speak of itself, for listening, recording, transcribing, and redistributing what is said about it: around sex, a whole network of varying, specific, and coercive transpositions into discourse. Rather than a massive censorship, beginning with the verbal proprieties imposed by the age of reason, what was involved was a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse. (Foucault 34)