Poetics of Love in Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle”

Mohamad Mosavat; Tahereh Rezaei

doi:10.24071/joll.v22i1.4088

Poetics of Love in Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle”

Mohamad Mosavat^(1*), Tahereh Rezaei⁽²⁾,

(1) Department of English Language and Literature, Tehran, Iran
(2) Department of English Language and Literature, Tehran, Iran
(*) Corresponding Author

Abstract

May and Marcher in Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” pursues an odd relationship interpreted by James’s critics as fraudulent, self-victimizing, or queer. While May is reduced to a witness to Marcher’s psychosomatic complexities, an evidence reliable to justify Marcher’s troubled heterosexuality, Marcher is deprived of any romantic yearnings for her. This article, departing from simplistic psychosexual interpretations having ended up demoting May to an inferior position and Marcher to a homosexual character, suggests the main problem of their relationship is the contrast between their love styles. In this relationship, the communication is prevented not so much by May’s subordinate silence/assent as by Marcher’s narcissism. John Allan Lee’s typology of love helps individually explicate each character’s psychological traits and romantic advances under Lee’s comparing terms of eros/ludus and storge/mania. The result of this case-by-case analysis is to prove their relationship is nothing but the obsession Dorothy Tennov redefines in her limerence theory based on such terms as idealization, crystallization, and intrusive thinking. After proving May and Marcher as limerent lovers, each pursuing a love style fundamentally at odds with the love style of the other, this article finally, based on Sigmund Freud’s notion of cathexis, concludes it is Marcher’s narcissism or self-cathexis that bars the doors of proper communication and mutual recognition.

Keywords

Limerence; Cathexis; Love; Narcissism

Full Text:

PDF

References

Anesko, M. (2008). What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Love: Henry James’s Last Words. In G. W. Zacharias (Ed.), A Companion to Henry James (pp. 231-248): Wiley-Blackwell.

Berlant, L. (2012). Desire/Love. New York: Punctum Books.

Bettelheim, B. (1983). Freud and Man's Soul. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Bobé, D. (2003). Re-Defining Meaning in Henry James’s “the Beast in the Jungle” (Senior Thesis). Haverford College, Pennsylvania. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10066/5109.

Claggett, S. (2005). Narcissism and the Conditions of Self-knowledge in James's “The Jolly Corner". The Henry James Review, 26(2), 189-200. doi:https://doi.org/10.1353/hjr.2005.0010

Edel, L. (1985). Henry James, A Life. New York: Harper & Row.

Freud, S. (1957). On Narcissism: An Introduction (J. Stratechy, Trans.). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works (pp. 67-102). London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.

Geismar, M. (1963). Henry James: "The Beast in the Jungle". Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 18(1), 35–42. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/2932332

Goodheart, E. (2003). What May Knew in "The Beast in the Jungle". The Sewanee Review, 111(1), 116–127. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/27549310

Griffiths, J. (1993). James’s Stories and His Characters’: A Reading of "The Beast In The Jungle" and "The Bench Of Desolation". The Cambridge Quarterly, 22(1), 43–59. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/42967200.

Haralson, E. (2003). Henry James and Queer Modernity. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Izzo, D. (2001). Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

James, H. (1903). The Better Sort. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Kwon, T. (2015). Love as an Act of Dissimulation in "The Beast in the Jungle". The Henry James Review, 36(2), 148-162. doi:10.1353/hjr.2015.0012.

Lee, J. A. (1977). A Typology of Styles of Loving. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 3(2), 173-182. doi:10.1177/1524838011426014.

Lindholdt, P. J. (1988). Pragmatism and ‘the Beast in the Jungle. Studies in short fiction, 25(3), 275-284.

Macdiarmid, D. (1989). Self-Cathexis and Other-Cathexis: Vicissitudes in the History of an Observation. British Journal of Psychiatry, 154(6), 844-852. doi:10.1192/bjp.154.6.844

McWhirter, D. (1989). Desire and Love in Henry James: A Study of the Late Novels. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Perluck, H. (1991). The Dramatics of the Unspoken and Unspeakable in James’s "The Beast in the Jungle". The Henry James Review, 12(3), 231-254. doi:10.1353/hjr.2010.0232

Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic. In Epistemology of the Closet (pp. 182-212). Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Tate, C. (2012). Interrogating the Legibility of Queer Female Subjectivity: Rethinking May Bartram’s "Bracketed" Character in "The Beast in the Jungle". The Henry James Review, 33(1), 17-29. doi:10.1353/hjr.2012.0007

Tennov, D. (1998). Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love. New York: Scarborough House.

Yeager, E. O. (2016). Love. In C. L. Shehan (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Family Studies (1st ed., pp. 1-7). Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781119085621.wbefs356.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.24071/joll.v22i1.4088