Wensley, Christy;
(2022)
The Unseen Subject: Blackness in the Work of Henry James.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
In the Preface to The Ambassadors, James compares the thrill of looking for the ‘unseen’ subject during his writing process with ‘the dreadful old pursuit of the hidden slave.’ Instigated by this striking analogy, my thesis argues that Blackness is a crucial ‘hidden subject’ in James’s fiction, requiring sustained attention. Blackness, specifically in relation to America’s enslavement of African people, is as embedded in James’s work as it is in the psyche and literature of the nation. Considering James’s early critical writing on the Civil War and slavery, as well as the writings of his younger brothers, abolitionists and officers in the Union’s Black regiments, I argue that questions of African-American freedom and subjectivity inform his writing to a larger degree than has been previously explored. To recontextualize his work, I draw on previous scholarship on James and race as well intersectional Black studies, critical race, queer, and feminist theories to highlight a historically contingent relationship between race and sexuality. Chapter 1 looks at Blackness as the ‘subject’ of various art forms as symbolic gesture rather than affirmation of Black subjectivity through a close reading of Roderick Hudson (1875) and early critical works. My second chapter reads The Bostonians (1886) to more pointedly expose how the metaphorics of enslavement, even within the novel’s satiric posturing, affirm sentimental subject formation. In Chapter 3, I trace the presence of abstracted Blackness in the ‘major phase’ novels. Concentrated on The Golden Bowl (1904), this chapter reveals how an increasingly sublimated presence of Blackness in sexually charged metaphor describes and differentiates James’s American protagonists. My final chapter rereads The American Scene (1907) with its fictional precedents to argue that his explicit writing about African Americans follows a pattern of thinking about race that has been a career long concern for the Master.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | The Unseen Subject: Blackness in the Work of Henry James |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2022. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of English Lang and Literature UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10143445 |
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