Rix, AC; (2014) Transport in Henry James. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This dissertation explores the relationship between transport and representation in James’s later fiction. Each chapter adopts a particular route: by carriage, boat, train, bicycle and automobile, examining its function and resonance within the Jamesian narrative. Texts discussed include What Maisie Knew (1897), The Sacred Fount (1901), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904), as well as lesser-known tales such as ‘The Patagonia’ (1888), ‘The Papers’ (1903), and ‘The Velvet Glove’ (1903). The thesis assumes a historical basis, addressing the considerable developments in transportation that occurred between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their appreciable impact upon manners and readerships. James’s texts are read alongside the bicycle’s association with media and print culture, the literature known as ‘railway reading’, and the cabby’s superior knowledge of geographical and sexual ‘relations’, as enlisted by the detective story and divorce-court narrative. At the same time, the project seeks to draw attention to the consonance between transport and the Jamesian, countering longstanding treatments of the author’s characters, person and aesthetic as implicitly static. As I argue, transport is not only materially crucial to James’s fictions, but informs aspects of style or subject deemed characteristically Jamesian: a preoccupation with belatedness (for the train traveller), an aversion to exposure or publicity (for the cyclist), and the cab journey’s association with a local and costly knowledge. Above all, I will argue, transport articulates James’s complex preoccupation with relationality, an investment which ranges from the intense subjectivity of his fictional worlds to their series of transatlantic encounters.

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