The development of the idea of aesthetic value in the novels of Henry James

Abstract

James's lifelong preoccupation with different forms of aesthetic experience was a powerful shaping force in his fiction, conditioning technique as well as subject matter. His intense feeling for art makes the idea of aesthetic value a pervasive element in his novels. This idea remains materially unchanged throughout his career, though its field of application is steadily extended as it finds different modes of expression in successive novels. I am concerned to trace the development of this idea and the way it is embodied in his fiction by selecting one novel for detailed examination from the beginning, the middle and the end of his career. The study of Roderick Hudson and The Tragic Muse is designed to elicit James's basic convictions about art and the artist, and to show ways in which these ideas have influenced the form of the novels. In the earlier novel this involves detailed consideration of the view Rowland Mallet takes of Roderick Hudson, both as he relates to himself and to others. The first of the two chapters on The Tragic Muse examines James's change of stance in relation to his subject; his presentation of the dilemma in which art places the artist, a dilemma which is seen to test most strenuously the moral qualities of his three protagonists. The second deals with the way James's ultimate concern with the meaning of art, with the implications of artistic commitment, is mediated dramatically in the novel through Gabriel Nash; it looks too at the marks which imperfect assimilation of these ideas has left on the novel. Though The Ambassadors is not explicitly a novel about art, it exemplifies James's concern with the aesthetic adventure and offers a chance to examine closely his presentation of the response to aesthetic experience, particularly as a factor in the development of moral vision.