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impervious to the lite rary characte r of j ames's ac hi evement ([an Bell in
fact refers generously to Milli cent Bell 's work), but the sensibiliti es at play
in these two works are contrasting sensibiliti es. They offer us an oppor–
tunity to refl ect upon altern ative approac hes to literary study .
The argument of Milli cent Bell's study concentrates on the disparity
that j ames perceived between the potenti alities of self and the limiting
conditions of social existence .
[n
narrative terms, this translates into a dis–
sonance between charac te r and plot. j ames's pro tagonists (I sa bel Archer,
Hyacinth R obinson, Lambe rt Strether), surrogates for his own imagina–
tion of possibility, experien ce pl ot, which for Ari stotle is the very soul of
drama, as inimi ca l to their fulfillment, beca use plot threatens to degrade
the self to material and soc ial forms o r to confine it to a single outcome
and therefore rob it of its multifariousness. Bell notes how in reviewing
his notebooks james rediscove red possibilities and outcomes for his stories
that he had passed by, and how he regretted the suppressed alternatives
that chara cterize any individual life . But, as Bell convincingly demon–
strates, without the enac tment of character in a story, the potentiality of
character turn s into impotence and pove rty . john Marcher of
The Beast in
theJlIllgle
becomes, from thi s pe rspective, the
redllctio ad absllrdllm
of the
selfs effort to maintain the fullne ss of its potentiality. True to the spirit of
James, Bell does no t attempt to resolve this ambiguity:
... the gesture, the dream, the withholding of commitment
to
social
forms that reduced the soul 's best potential, this
is
a vision that takes
account - by rejection - of a redu cing reality, though th e vision of
freedom whi ch imbues an Isabel Archer is proven
to
be an illusion .
The ambiguity is sustained by a co ntinual and tantalizing d eferral of a
commitment to a parti cul ar o utcome, and by invitin g th e reader, so Bell
argues,
to
resist to tali zing interpretations and to make a "successio n of in–
terpretations based on instant sta tes." This corresponds to the drama of
Strether's consc io usness in
The Ambassadors,
but it should apply elsewhere
in James's work.
The James ian narrative, according to Milli cent Bell , thrives in the
tension between an Em e rso ni an asp irati o n for transce nden ce and a
European-inspired kn owledge of the limiting co nditions of existence.
The pathos of j ames's fi cti on de rives from the exace rbation rather than
the resolution of the tension. Milly Theale (o f
The Wings oj the Dove)
em–
bodies this tension:
It is Milly who must finally face the inevitability of her own dea th ,
