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Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity, by Leland S. Person; pp. vii + 206. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, $38.50.
Henry James's place in the roughhouse of twentieth-century American fiction has always been somewhat uncertain, his rococo style and claustrophobic psychological realism at odds with the stylistic swagger of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Indeed, as early as 1907 critic H. G. Dwight declared James a "woman's writer," who "no man was able to read." Leland Person's new book reads such crass judgments literally, as it were, in order to map the ways in which "James illustrates the ambiguities and confusions-the multivalence-of gender and sexuality" (7). "Repeatedly," Person asserts, "James demonstrates the instability of gender identities" (7). In contrast, the argument of Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity is itself remarkably constant, namely that "James delights in positioning his male characters in such ways that their gender and sexual orientations are reversed, ambiguous, and even multiple" (14).
Person's analysis follows in the footsteps of the work of Kve Sedgwick, Michael Moon, and Hugh Stevens, critics who have overturned traditional understandings of James as somehow "lacking" in masculinity. Such analyses, Person suggests, depend upon "a notion of normative male identity from which James . . . can only deviate" (6). Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity uses Kaja Silverman's psychoanalytic approach to James as its primary analytical model, though Person rightly criticizes the limitations of any model which "does not account for the playfulness and slipperiness - the verbal performance...