He waited, Henry James, until 1890 to realize his dream of writing for the stage. While the desire to be a dramatist had haunted him “from the first,” James had for some reason stalled. Contemplating the years of “waiting, of obstruction,” he sensed a certain resistance in his delayed start, as if realizing that it is in the nature of desire to postpone its satisfaction: “It is strange nevertheless that I should never have done anything - and to a certain extent it is ominous. I wonder at times that the dream should not have faded away” (James, Complete Notebooks [hereafter cited as Notebooks], 226). The melodramatic excess of this statement is balanced against a contrasting version of events: “When I was younger [the drama] was really a very dear dream with me - but it has faded away with the mere increase of observation” (quoted in James, Complete Plays, 44).

James's great short story, “The Pupil,”is, among other things, about something considered nearly unmentionable by the genteel - money. By an extinct code of manners and taste that James examines and turns inside out, refined persons were still, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, not supposed to talk much about money, even though their liberty to avoid its mention depended on its sufficient supply. The monetary sufficiency that silenced mention varied - a moderate amount would do if it enabled the possessor to appear to have no worries about his material basis. But the decorum of reticence about money implied, clearly, upper class security. A genteel appearance of indifference to such crude facts as income and expenditure probably implied also that one had never needed to “make”money, had never been forced into a daily preoccupation with it. Ideally, a gentleman's money arrived of itself in the form of quiet, automatic increments to his bank account, which was never overdrawn.

Henry James's literary critical essays, especially the Prefaces that he wrote for the New York Edition of his fiction (1905-7), have generally been regarded as the foundational documents for Anglo-American novel theory. When we look at the series of major books devoted to James's criticism - works ranging from Joseph Beach's The Method of Henry James (1918) and R. P. Blackmur's The Art of the Novel (1934) to James E. Miller, Jr.'s Theory of Fiction: Henry James (1972) - we can understand why. James's discussion of novels seems qualitatively different from what had gone before: James dignified fiction by talking about it as art. Although consumed by a popular audience in search of entertainment and written by anyone who could pick up a pen, although often hurriedly composed to meet a deadline for magazine serialization, although about virtually anything at all, novels and short stories could, in the right hands, James declared, be as aesthetically significant as poetry, painting, or drama. But had James merely proclaimed fiction to be capable of artistic greatness, novel theory might still have had to wait to be born. James is credited with inventing a new discipline because he not only deemed the novel worthy of critical analysis but also helped establish the terms for that analysis. In collecting the eighteen Prefaces to the New York Edition into one volume, Blackmur was moved to call these essays "the most sustained and I think the most eloquent and original piece of literary criticism in existence" (The Art of the Novel, viii; hereafter cited as Art). And in his even more comprehensive collection of James's statements about fiction, Miller marvels that James "remained remarkably consistent in his views from the beginning to the end of his career" (xv).

Why, after a hundred years, Henry James? At a critical moment so leery of traditional notions of literary and cultural value, so impatient with gestures of authorial self-aggrandizement, so suspicious of the prerogatives of class privilege, few writers would seem less likely to survive than one thoroughly embedded in the highest of high literary culture, driven by desire for canonical status, fascinated by the intensities of the drawing room and the mores of the country house. And few bodies of work would seem less likely to thrive in our MTV-mediated age of instantaneous apprehension. The thickness, the opacity, the ambiguous range of reference of Jamesian prose demand attention, focus, and, that rarest of contemporary commodities, time.

Yet persist he has: indeed, his work has managed to attract devoted readers and inspiring commentaries across and through the major critical shifts of the last fifty years. Each successive wave of theoretical and critical practice - New Criticism, deconstruction, feminism, marxism, New Historicism - staked their claims and exemplified their style of interpretation by offering powerful re-readings of James.

There is little or nothing going on in Henry James's mind that is not about social relations between women and men; every issue is ultimately gendered. Thus to think about gender in James is to think of just about everything he said and wrote. It is necessary, therefore, to draw some lines in this essay, to single out certain aspects and particular moments in time for specific consideration, with the understanding that all those other things are left unattended. The focus here is upon James's long novel, The Golden Bowl, published in 1905, and The American Scene of 1907, compiled from notes James gathered in 1904 and 1905 while roaming the America of President Theodore Roosevelt after an absence of twenty years. These two specimens cut loose from the living flesh of his extensive career are not anomalies. Both the fictive narrative and the text of social commentary forcefully represent the accumulative results of James's lifelong study of the self-limiting manner by which the gender-shaped society of his homeland imposed narrowly defined sexual, political, and cultural functions upon its men and its women.

Who is queer Henry, and how might he be described? The story of Henry James's sexuality has certainly held us sufficiently breathless round the fire, yet it remains as elusive and difficult (and as compelling and disturbing) as James's own Turn of the Screw, This tale's first (fictional) auditors aired what were to become unresolvable critical dilemmas even before they had heard the tale:

Like Mrs. Griffin, we might at this point feel, “Oh, I can't wait for the story!” Yet, of course, as Douglas insists, “The story won't tell. . . not in any literal, vulgar way.”Need this be the only way we ever understand?

It seems appropriate to begin an essay on “queer Henry” with a theoretical quandary embedded in The Turn of the Screw, if only to point out that the critical assumptions of a certain mode of twentieth-century life-writing, assumptions that the story of a subject's romantic and sexual life can be told in a literal way, are explored and questioned in James’s own fiction. Within the framework of The Turn of the Screw, the governess's tale has the status of a nonfictional autobiographical memoir, one which, notoriously, refuses even to give its subject's name. The prevalent mode of anonymous first person life narration in the late nineteenth century is, of course, the sexological case study, a mode of narration that might be seen to tell in literal, vulgar ways.

Henry James needed an imagination of Evil; it was a requirement of his artistic vocation as well as his personal identity. He had a huge ambition not only for his own fiction, but for the novel generally, which in his moment was still an adolescent inhabiting the outskirts of cultural respectability, where film (or “the movies”)lived twenty years ago. James worked as a propagandist for the genre, playing a kind of shell game by worrying in his essays or prefaces over various aspects of fictional composition, as though one could simply assume for it the serious stature of lyric, epic, and dramatic poetry. But when in his own work he wanted to connect allusively to these established literary traditions, the problem of Evil became his chief conduit. I want here to examine this process in two of James's most famous short works, Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw, and one of the great novels, The Portrait of a Lady, to question why Evil so dominates his imagination when the very concept had, by his own estimation, become creaky, suspect, lame.

Live all you can; it's a mistake not to”: every heart vibrates to that iron string, no doubt, but what on earth does it mean? As James emphasizes in the Preface, the “whole case” of The Ambassadors (1903) centers in Strether's tutorial effusion to his young painter-friend, Little Bilham, during Gloriani's garden party, but this is fortune-cookie advice at best: “It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life.” The key to Strether, apparently, lies in his belatedness - or better, his belated discovery of belatedness under the barrage of impressions that play havoc with his “categories” in Europe. It is “simply too late,” he feels, too late to repair “the injury done his character” by - well, by just about everything: his proverbial New England conscience, his botched job of parenting, his unbuilt “temple of taste,” his cobbled career of all strain and small gain, of much utility for others but meager identity for himself (A 131, AN 308, A 63). There is nothing obscure about his hurt - except, after all, in the kind of “Enjoyment” (that’s James’s capital E) that has eluded “poor fine melancholy, missing, striving Strether” (N 226, 383).

A bright, excited student reads Henry James's story Daisy Miller for an assignment. She especially likes one phrase, used by the wilful heroine's Italian companion, explaining Daisy's fatal exposure of herself to Roman fever in the moonlit Coliseum: “she - she did what she liked.” The quotation is going to be part of the title of her paper. But she leaves her copy of the book at home, and has to consult another edition in the library. In this other edition, for all her efforts, she can't locate the phrase she tagged; when she finds the relevant scene, it's different. There the Italian companion less resonantly says, “she wanted to go.”Our student thought, too, that she remembered the story's hero, Winterbourne, answering with a look down at the ground and a meditative echo of the missing phrase: “She did what she liked!” But here she finds the character behaving quite differently - querulous rather than thoughtful. To the Italian's “she wanted to go” comes back bluntly, “'That was no reason!' Winterbourne declared.” If our poor baffled student casts the book aside in sheer frustration at this betrayal, who can blame her? All she wanted was “the text” of the story.

Given his reputation as the impeccably patrician high priest of Art, Henry James would have seemed a prime target for demolition in the regime of multiculturalism that began in the 1980s. It sought to redefine literary criticism as cultural studies and to create an intellectual climate generally skeptical of both aesthetic value and canonical white male elitists. As a novelist said to regard Art as a saving consolation amid the vulgarity of modernity, Henry James would seem doubly damned. Yet his critical fortunes have held steady in the 1990s. Moreover, by and large, he has avoided serving as a nostalgic refuge for those in flight from the multicultural dispensation of race, class, and gender. Instead, cultural studies has in many ways been a tonic, stimulating revisionary readings that set aside his image as genteel aesthete to reveal the depth and originality of James's response to the social and cultural upheavals that marked his fin de siecle transatlantic world. Various aspects of the Jamesian sensibility and a number of works in his oeuvre can be, and have been, enlisted to argue for his continued currency. Here I examine only one of these aspects and works - James the cultural analyst, author of The American Scene - and argue that it has something especially important to contribute to ongoing contemporary debates about ethnicity, pluralism, and what it means to be an American in our era of identity politics.

In his 1907 preface to The American, on the subject of editing his own voluminous oeuvre for the New York Edition of his work, a meditative Henry James wrote that “it is as difficult... to trace the dividing-line between the real and the romantic as to plant a milestone between north and south.” The question of James's commitment to literary realism dogged him throughout his career, and it would continue to be linked (as his image suggests) with the problem of his commitment to national traditions and cultures. Some readers have argued that the whole body of James's work is marked by traces of the realist project; others argue that only specific texts stake their claims under the sign of realism, understood as an interest in contemporaneity and its psychic and social effects. The only point of consensus on this issue, it seems, concerns James's fiction of the mid-1880s, particularly The Princess Casamassima and The Bostonians. Taken together, these novels are said to instance the power and limits of James's experiments with realism, marking an “episode” in his evolving authorial practice.

The Confidence-Man, Herman Melville's last novel, was a critical and commercial failure when it was published in 1857. Critics panned it as an unreadable book. The reviewer in the New York Dispatch finished it “wondering what on earth the author has been driving at.” The London Literary Gazette called it “a book professing to inculcate philosophical truths through the medium of nonsensical people talking nonsense.” The London Illustrated Times commented: 'We can make nothing of this masquerade, which, indeed, savours very much of a mystification. We began the book at the beginning, and, after reading ten or twelve chapters, some of which contained scenes of admirable dramatic power, while others presented pages of the most vivid description, found, in spite of all this, that we had not yet obtained the slightest clue as to the meaning (in case there should happen to be any) of the work before us.'

Sexuality is a concept we owe to Melville's time. As the theorist Michel Foucault has argued, prior to some point in the later nineteenth century, there were no sexual identities, but only sexual acts that could be committed by anyone. What sexuality does is to associate acts and “tastes” with identity, to say, for instance, putting it simply, that there are those who prefer the same sex and those who prefer the other sex, and that these “preferences”are crucial to the construction of the self. The effect of the creation of this binary of sexuality is at once an enlargement of possibility and the assurance of an identity that may serve to create community, as well as an augmentation of the power of social discipline through the creation of manageable, confinable groups. Melville's career coincides with these developments, both reflecting them and participating in their elaboration. The Melville of the earliest travel writings still operates largely in a realm of undifferentiated sexuality, while his final work, Billy Budd, is an enactment of a drama figuring the exclusion and execution of the homosexual.

“He” in James's parable of authors and readers is novelist Hugh Vereker, “I” an unnamed young critic who gives himself to deciphering what Vereker calls “the organ of life” in his work (James 234). "A triumph of patience, of ingenuity" (James 231), Vereker's "figure in the carpet" is discoverably present in his novels, and among James's objects in the story is the professed one of rebuking a criticism that "is apt to stand off from the intended sense of things, from such finely-attested matters, on the artist's part, as a spirit and a form, a bias and a logic, of his own."