Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 267with reference to all responsibilities and probable consequences. In choosing to go
back, Isabel transcends her circumstances by accepting them, keeps her word and
keeps faith with herself – accepting her responsibility for her past and future. The
choice on which the novel ends depends on a subtle balance between self and
circumstance, in that it involves the recognition that expression of the one properly
depends on awareness of the other: that freedom is a matter of responsible, realistic
self-determination. And that same balance is at work in its narrative texture. James,
as he meant to, does not yield to the determining nature of circumstance here,
although he admits its irreducible reality. Nor, while emphasizing the power of
consciousness, does he present that power as separate and inviolable, somehow
superior to the circumstance it encounters. What he does, in his fictional practice, is
what he preached in his criticism. He enters into a complex series of negotiations
between the “moral” and the “felt life,” the meaningful structures organizing
experience and the contingencies, the fluid processes in which those structures are
embedded. He asserts the authority of authorship, the strength of his own individual
will as writer, but he also accepts the authority, the reality of the “living thing,” the
imaginative experience that constitutes the story. Not only that, he shows that
assertion of the one depends precisely on acceptance of the other: that, like any other
living organism, the meaning of the novel is its being.
James returned to America in 1882, shortly before the death of his mother. His
father died in the same year, and then in 1883 his younger brother, Wilky. His sense
of attachment to his place of birth was drastically reduced by these deaths. And the
second period of his writing career, broadly from the middle of the 1880s to 1900,
was marked by an attachment to English settings in much of his fiction. The Princess
Casamassima (1886), for instance, is set in London and deals with all social classes,
exploring the tension between private sensibility and political belief. Other works of
this period include The Bostonians (1886), a satirical study of the movement for
female emancipation in New England (“the situation of women,” James explained,
“the decline of the sentiment of sex, and the agitation on their behalf ” was the most
striking aspect of American life of the time); The Aspern Papers (1888), a collection
of stories; and The Spoils of Poynton (1897). James made a venture into writing plays
at this time, which proved disastrous. It came to a humiliating end when his play
Guy Domville was given a riotous reception on its first night in 1895. The venture
did, however, encourage him to develop dramatic techniques for his fiction. If the
first period of James’s career could be described in terms of moral realism, and
the third in terms of psychological realism – although these are, necessarily, labels
that do less than full justice to the sophistication of his art – then the second could
be called a period of dramatic realism. James used careful manipulation of point of
view, elaborate patterning of contrasting episodes and characters, and a focus on
dialogue and dramatic scene to achieve here what he always sought: “the maximum
of intensity,” to use his own words, “with the minimum of strain.” The results are
powerfully evident in a novel like What Maisie Knew (1897) that explores adultery,
infidelity, and betrayal. The entire story, although written in the third person, is told
from the point of view of the perceptive but naive young girl Maisie, who is justGGray_c03.indd 267ray_c 03 .indd 267 8 8/1/2011 7:54:21 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 21 AM