Chapter III

The presence of the narrator

“The novel is of all pictures the most comprehensive and the most elastic. It will stretch
anywhere- it will take in absolutely anything. All it needs is a subject and a painter. But for its
subject, magnificently, it has the whole human consciousness.”(Henry James, 1956)
Based on James’s statement regarding the novel, I would say that morality, for the writer, meant
consciousness. His most convincing characters are endowed with a consciousness capable not
just to reflect their and others experience, but also to meditate on it. The “drama of
consciousness” becomes, even from Roderick Hudson, the big human adventure that captivates
the writer. In his critical work, the most often used word, together with “impression”, is
“consciousness”, a word with special connotations for James, meaning, among other things, the
capacity of gathering and understanding life impressions. Characters who observe themselves
and each other populate the universe from his novels. The narrator himself disappears, leaving to
other characters, even secondary ones, whom he calls ficelles, the gift of observing and
analyzing the others. Quoting James, I would say that through consciousness we should
understand “that aria of our intellect, that field from our usual mental activity, which is reserved
for identifying and solving the moral conflicts”(Henry James, 1963) Being rather bounded with
rationalism than with instincts, this Jamesian consciousness is conducted by some principles,
including those of ethics. From here, its opening toward the world of fundamental values- of
culture and civilization- being always in James’s attention. The supreme value admitted by
James in his novels, short stories and critics, is life. Moreover, among life, maybe beyond it, is
art. However, he never confuses literature with life, the first one being built on selection and
judgment and the second being “a splendid waste”.
In an essay on Balzac, James makes a comparison between life and literature: “Literature is an
objective, a project result; it is life that is the unconscious, the agitated, the struggling,
floundering cause.”(Henry James, 1905) To explain this passage, I will further quote the critic Ross
Labrie who says: “Trough his description of ‘life’ in this passage, together with the antithetical
structure of the statement, the reader is invited to infer that James regarded ‘literature’ as
somehow bound up with the phenomenon of consciousness. He does not say that literature is
conscious, but he does speak of life as being ‘unconscious’ and he is contrasting the two. The
word ‘objective’ in relation to literature can be understood in two senses. The first meaning
would be that of a goal sought; the associated phrase ‘project result’ seems to support this
meaning. The second meaning of the word is more subtle than the first. The word ‘objective’
initially suggests something that exists apart from an individual subject. On the other hand, the
word ‘project’, which James associates with ‘objective’ in the passage, suggests something that
proceeds from an individual subject. The two are reconciled by the implied idea of something
that both proceeds from the writer of literature and transcends that writer at the same time. Both
meanings are relevant to his idea of consciousness, just as, for him literature represents the
flower of man’s consciousness.”( Ross Labrie, 1968) Continuing his explanation Ross also says that
“’life’ is seen metaphorically as ‘the agitated, the struggling, floundering cause’. Just as it was
seen in examining the first part of the statement, there is a strong suggestion of a pattern of
crosscurrents of meaning between parts of the second half of the statement. The inference is that
life is ‘floundering’ because it lacks a goal which would order its activity; in this way, life
contrasts with the ‘projected’ quality ascribed to literature. This is the basis of life’s

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‘unconscious’ state. It is ‘agitated’ because it is ‘unconscious’ of how to organize its energy and
of how to provide a goal as a basis for organization.” (Ross Labrie, 1968)
It seems obvious that James regarded consciousness as being one of the most important centers
of life. Associating the term of ‘consciousness’ with several metaphors, his favorite was, that of
“throb”, which suggested the center and the source of the body’s life. In many of his prefaces,
James wrote about the consciousness of his characters, for example in the Preface of the New
York edition of What Maisie Knew, he spoke of his heroine’s “small expanding consciousness”.
His heroes were not the writer’s only concern; he also put an emphasis on the writer’s
consciousness and the “growth of his whole operative consciousness” which was regarded both
qualitatively and quantitatively. For sustaining my statement about the qualitative growth of the
consciousness, I will cite from a letter written by Henry James himself: “The mere power to
work in such a measure as I can is an infinite help to a better consciousness- and though so
impaired compared to what is used to be, it tends to grow, distinctly- which by itself proves that I
have some firm ground under my feet.” (Henry James, 1920) In James’s mind, the idea of
consciousness was often a state of motion, a metaphorical framework which reinforced that
growth. On some occasions, James spoke explicitly of the “movement of consciousness” (Henry
James, 1908), and on other occasions, he wrote about the “stir of consciousness” (Henry James, 1913).
However, as Ross Labrie says in his work regarding Henry James, “it was the movement in
consciousness which made possible the drama of consciousness in the lives of his characters. He
made this clear when he wrote of the heroine of the story he planned: ‘She has, in a word, a
wholly changed consciousness, and the change is what I chronicle’”. (Ross Labrie, 1968)
As I said before, James often metaphorically associated consciousness with other words like
“vessel”, “chamber” or even “spider-web”, which can be understandable if we analyze the
consciousness of his characters from this point of view. His characters could be endowed with
“vessels” which are deeper and larger than the “vessels” of other characters. This means that
some of the Jamesian characters are endowed with a deeper and more profound consciousness
than others.
For a clearer understanding of the other two metaphors I enumerated above, I will further cite
from the most relevant Jamesian work in this problem, The Art of Fiction: “Experience is never
limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the
finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every airborne
particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative-
much more than it happens to be that of a man of genius- it takes to itself the faintest hints of life,
it converts the very pulses of air into revelation.”(Henry James, 1884)
In many Jamesian novels the drama is actually the encounter of two characters with different
“vessels” that is the encounter of two different consciousnesses. These kinds of characters are “at
different levels with respect to the filling of the chamber of consciousness even though their
capacities of consciousness may be similar”. (Ross Labrie, 1968) In the field of novels and not just,
persists the idea that a character with a high-leveled consciousness is more capable to lead his
life successfully. This high-leveled consciousness was also James’s idea for his character. In the
preface to The Wings of the Dove, James says: “The building up of Kate Croy’s consciousness to
the capacity for the load little by little to be laid on it was, by way of example, to have been a
matter of as many hundred close-packed bricks as there are actually poor dozens.” (Henry James,
1908)He was preoccupied by his characters’ high-leveled consciousness, even if their behavior
did not always measure up. Being also a critic, Henry James was not just the first in using the
idea of self-consciousness in his novels but he was also one of the leading keys in explaining,

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throughout his work, the idea of consciousness. This is the reason why I will further continue
with another cite from his work Is There a Life after Death?: “What had happened, in short, was
that all the while I had been practically, though however dimly. Trying to take the measure of my
consciousness- on this appropriate and prescribed basis of its being so finite- I had learned, as I
may say, to live in it more, and with the consequence of thereby not a little undermining the
conclusion most unfavorable to it. I had doubtless taken thus to increased living in it by reaction
against so grossly finite a world- for it at least contained the world, and could handle- criticize it,
could play with it and deride it; it had that superiority: which meant, all the while such successful
living that the adobe itself grew more and more interesting to me, and with this beautiful sign of
its character that the more and more one asked of it the more and the more it appeared to give. I
should perhaps rather say that the more one turned to it, as an easy reflector, here and there and
everywhere over the immensity of things, the more it appeared to take; which is but another way
of putting, for ‘interest’, the same truth.”(Henry James, 1910, p.128)
In this passage, James talks about the function of consciousness as containing the “world”
outside, assimilating it, interpreting it and manipulating it in a number of ways. For James, the
world was evaluated in its assimilating state and not in its raw state, outside of the consciousness.
A supreme interest for him is the”adobe” of the consciousness because it contains and transforms
the environment. The consciousness is also called “reflector” and he uses this word often in his
critical writing, when he refers to the filtering of the environment through the eyes of the
protagonists.
In another essay on Mathew Arnold, the writer talks about the power of consciousness to
interpret and to assimilate the environment: “He discharges an office so valuable, a function so
delicate, he interprets, explains, illuminates so many of the obscure problems presented by
English life to the gaze of the alien; he woos and wins to comprehension, to sympathy, to
admiration, this imperfectly initiated, this often slightly bewildered, observer; he meets him half
way, he appears to understand his feelings, he conducts him to a point of view as gracefully as a
master of ceremonies would conduct him to a chair. It is being met half way that the German, the
Frenchman, the American appreciates so highly, when he approaches the great spectacle of
English life; it is one of the great luxuries the foreign inquirer can enjoy. To such a mind as his,
projected from a distance, out of a set of circumstances so different, the striking, the
discouraging, I may even say the exasperating thing in this revelation, is the unconsciousness of
the people concerned in it, their tacit assumption that their form of life is the normal one…This
unconsciousness makes a huge blank surface, a mighty national wall, against which the
perceptive, the critical effort of the presumptuous stranger wastes itself, until, after a little, he
espies in the measureless space, a little aperture, a window which is suddenly thrown open, and
at which a friendly and intelligent face is presented, the harbinger of a voice of greeting. With
this agreeable apparition he communes- the voice is delightful, it has a hundred tones and
modulations; and as he stands there the great dead screen seems to vibrate and grow transparent.
In other words, it is the fact that Mr. Arnold is, of all his countrymen, the most conscious of the
national idiosyncrasies that endears him to the soul of the stranger.”(Henry James, 1884, p.241-242)
The act of seeing was associated with consciousness. “In one of the prefaces James wrote of the
chief ‘source of interest for the artist’ as residing in the ‘strong consciousness of his seeing all for
himself.’ The accuracy and comprehensiveness of perception depend, of course, to a large extent
on the strength of the mind which is conscious at any one moment; this point to the role of
heredity in the drama of consciousness.” (Ross Labrie, 1968, p.522.) Consciousness can also be the
power which allows perception to occur and often takes the form of a “seeing into and behind the

3
polished world of appearances which greets the ‘stranger’”. (Ross Labrie, 1968, p.522.) The
environment is metamorphosed and intensified by the “human consciousness that entertains- and
records, that amplifies and interprets it.”(Henry James, 1910. p. XIX) The fact that the central
“reflector” characters evaluate date from their environments as well as simply assimilate date,
could become a strain on the reader’s willingness to accept as accurate the stories about other
people which emerge from their consciousness. In his work, James tried to ensure the fact that
the reader would accept the reflector characters as reliable observers on the whole. The writer
thought that the reader must feel that there is a similarity between the reality as he saw it and the
reality as the reflector character saw it. James’s most gifted characters perceive the reality as
something more that it really is and shaping this kind of characters was not an easy job for the
writer, as he points it out in the preface to Roderick Hudson:”The centre of interest throughout
‘Roderick’ is in Rowland Mallet’s consciousness, and the drama is the very drama of the
consciousness- which I had of course to make sufficiently acute in order to enable it, like a set
and lighted scene, to hold the play. By making it acute, meanwhile, one made its own movement
in the particular connection-interesting; this movement, really being quit the stuff of one’s thesis.
It had, naturally, Rowland’s consciousness, not to be too acute- which would have disconnected
it and made it superhuman: the beautiful little problem was to keep it connected, connected
intimately, with the general human exposure, and thereby bedimmed and befooled and
bewildered, anxious, restless, fallible, and yet not to endow it with such intelligence that the
appearances reflected in it, and constituting together there the situation and the ‘story’, should
become by that fact intelligible. Discernible from the first, the joy of such a ‘job’ as this making
of his relation to everything, involved a sufficiently limited, a sufficiently pathetic, tragic, comic,
ironic, personal state to be thoroughly natural and yet at the same time a sufficiently clear
medium to represent a whole. This whole was to be the sum of what ‘happened’ to him, or in
other words his total adventure; but as what happened to him was above all to feel certain things
happening to others, to Roderick, to Christina, to Mary Garland, to Mrs. Hudson, to the
Cavaliere, to the Prince, so the beauty of the constructional game was to preserve in everything
its especial value for him.”(Henry James, 1910, p. XVI-XVII) Like most of James’s reflector
characters, Mallet maintains a pole of balance between subjectivity and objectivity. However, the
reader judges the consciousness of the reflector characters based on their ability to record facts.
Their ability of evaluating the environment is related to their ability to expose the facts. On
some occasions, the facts are difficult to determine, and in these situations, the reader judges the
characters based on the ingenuity of their guesses.
In the Jamesina novels, there is a distinction between his idea of consciousness and knowledge.
This distinction is well explained in Ross Labrie’s book. He says that “one of the most important
differences is a quality of immediacy which is crucial to the role of consciousness and relatively
unimportant to knowledge. Consciousness is perceiving things- now. With respect to knowledge,
on the other hand, there is no reason to postulate this immediacy; it is possible to know and to
remember things without having them in mind at the moment. When such knowledge fills the
mind at this moment, the mind becomes conscious of this knowledge. The characters know a
great deal more than they are conscious of at any given moment.” (Ross Labrie, 1968, p.524.)
Faithful to live, the characters are interested in various things, and so they have different kind of
consciousness. Each has his own prototype of interests, and each views his environment
selectively, choosing for attention those objects, which are compatible with their interests. In The
Principles of Psychology, William James observes that “every creature has a certain selective
interest in certain portions of the world, and that this interest is as often connate as acquired.”

4
(William James, p. 320) William continued his idea giving as example some hypothetical group of
people on tour in Europe about whom he said: “Each has selected out of the same mass of
presented objects, those which suited his private interest and has made his experience
thereby.”(William James, p. 287)Henry James also showed an interest in the selective consciousness
of his characters. He identified the major kinds of consciousness with specific cultural patterns:
Americans and Europeans and in this way, he suggested the strong influence of environment in
most of the fiction. But, like William, he did not try to establish sources of selectivity by singling
out heredity or environment.
In an essay on The Drama, Henry James wrote: “is there any very tangible relation between the
working consciousness of people in general?”(Henry James, 1874, p.755.) He often referred to
“historic consciousness” and to “esthetic consciousness”. (Henry James, 1914, p.321) On other
occasions he spoke of “civic consciousness” (Henry James, 1888, p.234) or “national consciousness”.
(Henry James, 1892, p.37) But in his fictional work, he referred to two kinds of consciousness:
aesthetic and moral. Most of his key characters tend to have patterns of interest and
consciousness which stress ether the moral or the aesthetic. Even from the beginning of his
career, James thought that it is interesting to create characters endowed with moral and aesthetic
consciousness. And in this way he will create the drama from his books: the characters with
moral consciousness are contrasting the characters with aesthetic consciousness. In an article
dated from 1872, James talks about this: “to our minds a juster, or at least a simpler, expression
of the prime intellectual difference between the English and French is to be found in their
unequal apportionment of the sense of form and shape. The French possess that lively aesthetic
conscience which, on the whole, is such a simplifier…but in English imaginations it is the moral
leaven that works most strongly.”(Henry James, 1872, p.60) The characters experience major
progress when they “take on another” consciousness, when there is an improvement in there field
of interest and a subsequent development in the comprehension of their background.
Consciousness was for James, the mind selective assimilation, interpretation and evaluation of its
environment and even of itself. It was the basis of most of his novels and also critical work,
being the father of this concept. He did not just gave to this term an important use, but he also
gave some connotations and to demonstrate this, I will cite from a letter James wrote: “I did not
know why we live- the gift of life comes to us from I don’t know what source or for what
purpose; but I believe we can go on living for the reason that (always of course up to a certain
point) life is the most valuable thing we know anything about, and it is therefore presumptively a
great mistake to surrender it an illimitable power, and though at times it may seem to be all
consciousness of misery, yet in the way it propagates itself from wave to wave, so that we never
cease to feel, and though at moments we appear to, try to, pray to, there is something that holds
one in one’s place, makes it a standpoint in the universe which it is probably good not to forsake.
”(Henry James, 1883, p.100.) From this passage, it is obvious that James regarded consciousness as a
term he could substitute with ‘life’. The power of man’s consciousness to ‘propagate’ its ability
of improvement was seen as the measure of life in man. He regarded consciousness as the sign of
the presence of human life. The human relationships he portrayed are of a “conscious living
kind”.(Henry James, p.50)
For him, consciousness was the key to immorality; each man must win an afterlife through
raising his level of knowledge in this life: “The weight f those who don’t react may be felt, it is
true, in one of the scales; for it may very well be asked on their behalf whether they are
distinguishable as ‘living’ either before of after. Only the special reaction of others, or the play of
their speculation, however, will, in due consideration, have put it there. How can there be a

5
personal and a differentiated life ‘after’, it will then of course be asked, for those for whom there
has been so little of one before?- unless indeed it be pronounced conceivable that the possibility
may vary from man to man, from human case to human case, and that the quantity or the quality
of our practice of consciousness may have something to say to it.” (Henry James, p. 26) The allusion
to the ‘practice of consciousness’ underlines his view of consciousness as an extremely dynamic
process of improvement, rather than a inactive environment of consciousness. James concluded
on the relationship between consciousness and immorality with the following consideration:
“And there are those- I take them for the constant and vast majority- to whom it [i.e. life] in the
way of intelligible suggestion says nothing.” (Henry James, p. 26) To this, Ross Labrie says: “His
conscious and therefore immoral elite seems somewhat analogous to the religious ideas of
American Puritans like Jonathan Edwards. In this light, it is not surprising that some of James’s
characters, like Mrs. Brooke in The Awkward Age and Charlotte Stant in The Golden Bowl, go to
excess in worshiping at the shrine of consciousness. For them, it is the altar of the living.”(Ross
Labrie, 1968, p.529)
Being not just a representative writer among his contemporaries, but also a good critic, Henry
James was followed by other critics in his writing. One of the most significant was Percy
Lubbock who analyzed his work and wrote theories based on it and not just. One of the ideas
analyzed by him was that of the “point of view” in fiction, as we will see in the followings. He
reduced fictional method to “point of view”, presenting the compositional technique of novels. In
his work, The Craft of Fiction Lubbock analyzed James’s narrative technique using a dual
meaning of “point of view” and James’s own meaning from his critical works, particularly from
the prefaces. But the concepts behind the “point of view” are corresponding aspects of any
narrative. It is to be said from the beginning that what Lubbock has called “point of view” in
James’s novels is not quite similar with what James calls “point of view” in the prefaces. James’s
meaning for “point of view” is not the same as Lubbock’s nor as that of contemporary criticism.
The two meanings of the term are knower of the narrative-story and speaker of the narrative
words. Henry James stress was on the knower whereas the modern criticism emphasis the
speaker. This second aspect, the voice structure, is the most essential and evident component in
narrative. It is an issue quite simply of what voice inside the fictional construct relates the story:
a character involved in the action itself, a disinterested character observing the action, an
unidentified voice either limited in knowledge or omniscient. That ‘speaker’ is a principal note in
the modern use of the term “point of view” reveals itself over and over again both in analyzes of
work of fiction and in formulations of critical theories. In the appendix to The House of Fiction,
“point of view” is analyzed as being a matter of the authority by which the story is told,
distinguishing omniscient narrator, effaced narrator, first person narrator, wandering narrator.
Manuel Komroff, in the Dictionary of World Literature, defines “viewpoint” as the “relation in
which the narrator stands to the story, considered by many critics to govern the method and
character of the work.” For Lubbock, “point of view” is systematically bound up with teller of
the tale: “the novelist as novelist the spinner of his yarn (‘the reader faces the story-taller and
listens’, p.251); the teller a character within the story(‘Such is the first step toward
dramatization…The spokesman is there, in recognizable relation with his matter; no question of
his authority can arise’; p.252 ); the refined combination of these two in which the author-
narrator restricts himself ordinarily to the consciousness of the character, to the use of the “eyes”
of the character (‘the seeing eyes is with somebody in the book, but its vision is reinforced; the
picture contains more, becomes richer and fuller, because is the author’s as well as his creature’s
both at once’; p.258).”( Kristin Morrison, 1961, p.247) In this issue a confusion can be made because
Lubbock mentions the character’s point of view and afterward he mentions the reader’s point of

6
view. What he intended to stress in these two uses of the term is not the voice that speaks, nor the
narrator, but the knower, the mind that apprehends. The progress toward drama is not in fact an
exclusion of the narrator, but rather an exclusion of an obvious narrator and knower from a self-
intrusive interpretative narrator to the reader who must interpret and understand for himself. In
addition, for Lubbock “point of view” has two meanings: knower and sayer, and in some
situations, he uses one meaning in others, he uses the other meaning and sometimes he uses both.
Reading Lubbock’s analyses on James’s novels, the reader would be tempted to say that his ideas
about the term “point of view” are pliable in James’s work. But after a deep observation in
James’s own critical work, and especially in the prefaces, it can be stressed the difference
between his and Lubbock’s “point of view” due to the fact that James’s novels contain just the
former meaning.
First, it has to be mentioned that in James’s critical work the term “point of view” appears rarely
and when it appears, it has its ordinary sense, not a critical one. This kind of usage of the term is
in the preface to the Awkward age (“an informed and enlightened point of view”). The term takes
a critical concept when he uses it in connection with the artist’s vision of his subject and in this
context his “point of view” is similar to Lubbock’s (and yet different). For a better
argumentation, I will cite from The House of Fiction: “What I should say to the nymphs and
swains who propose to converse about [the novel] under the great trees at Deerfield is: ‘Oh, do
something from your point of view; an ounce of example is worth a ton of generalities; do
something with the great art and the great form; do something with life. Any point of view is
interesting that is a direct impression of life. You each have an impression coloured by your
individual conditions; make that into a picture, a picture framed by your own personal wisdom,
your glimpse of the American world. The field is vast for freedom, for study, for observation, for
satire, for truth.’”(Henry James, 1957, p.47) In this phrase, point of view is not associated with the
teller of the tale, in the narrating voice sense (omniscient, first person narrator, effaced through
which the artist renders his art.
More often than he uses “point of view”, James prefers to use visual, special metaphors for
illustrating the artist’s “view” of life and of his subject. An important passage to illustrate the
idea mentioned is from the preface to The Portrait of a Lady where James talks about the house
with many windows and the point from which to view the subject: “They are but windows at the
best, mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they are not hinged doors opening
straight upon life. But they have this mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure with a
pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique
instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other…The
spreading field, the human scene, is the “choice of subject”; the pierced aperture, either broad or
balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the “literary form”;but they are, singly or together, as
nothing without the posted presence of the watcher- without, in other words, the consciousness
of the artist.” (Henry James, 1948, p.46) The idea behind these ‘windows’ is James’s inclination to
think in terms of picture and visual art, to illustrate a comparison between the spatial frame of
picture and the limit of subject in the story: “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the
exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle
within which they shall happily appear to do so.”(Henry James, p.5)
Instead of “point of view”, James uses the term center and it has two meanings. First, it can be
the central intelligence, the character who knows, evaluates, appreciates the situation, or it can
mean the citadel of interest, the “interest-center of the situation itself as it appears to the artist
and to the reader”. (Kristin Morrison, 1961, p.250) In some situations, these two are combined, as it is

7
the case of Strether of The Ambassadors or, as ironic centers in Maisie. In other situations, they
can be entirely separate, as in The Wings of a Dove where the interest-center is Milli’s case, the
knowing-center varies from one character to another; or an interest-center can exist without any
particular knowing-center, as in The Awkward Age. It is important to mention that one of these
centers has to do with a character’s “view” of the situation, and the other with the artist’s and
reader’s view of the total situation. So, without doubt the last mentioned is “a look at life through
the windows or art, the artist’s own interpretation of life.” (Kristin Morrison, 1961, p.250)
In the preface to The Wings of a Dove James says: “There was the ‘fun’, to begin with, of
establishing one’s successive centers- of fixing them so exactly that the portions of the subject
commanded by them as by happy points of view, and accordingly treated from them, would
constitute, so to speak, sufficiently solid blocks of wrought material, squared to the sharp edge,
as to have weight and mass and carrying power; to make for construction, that is, to conduce to
effect and to provide for beauty.” (Henry James, p.296) It is the only passage in which James
coupled point of view with center. Reading further the same preface, we see that James states:
“For the moment we proceed by ‘centers’-and I have never, I confess, embraced the logic of any
superior process- they must be, each, as a basis, selected and fixed; after which it is that, in the
high interest of economy of treatment, they determine and rule. There is no economy of
treatment without an adopted, a related point of view, and though I understand, under certain
degree of pressure, a represented community of vision between several parties to the action when
it makes for concentration, I understand no breaking-up of the register, no sacrifice of the
recording consistency, that doesn’t rather scatter and weaken.”(Henry James, p.300)
However, James never explicitly associates the two meanings. In the first quotation, he merely
states one is like the other, and in the second he suggests that point of view and center are matter
of registration, the consciousness that knows, evaluates, appreciates. In the preface to What
Maisie Knew, speaking of the death of her childhood, he implies that a character’s point of view
is his “outlook” on life, relation to the situation, and that a change in this point of view will effect
a change in center. It is in this use of center as a character’s “outlook” on life that most resembles
James’s primary, critical use of the term point of view: the one is the artist’s view of his subject
from outside the novel, the other is the character’s view of the situation from within the novel.
Moreover, in this sense there are two points of view involved, although James ordinary uses the
term “center” from the latter.
Of the “felt beauty and value” of the “Things” that formed the center of Isabel Archer in The
Portrait of a Lady: “Place the center of the subject in the young woman’s own consciousness, I
said to myself, and you get as interesting and as beautiful a difficulty as you could wish.”(Henry
James, p.51) In the different uses of center, the elements of anxiety, evaluation, the register of
situation on a sensibility dominate. This is the common note among all them. The question is
now to see what is the narrator’s relation to each of these stories. If the relation is different in the
various novels, than certainly Lubbock’s definition of point of view will not fit James’s centers
and the difference between the two terms is more than insignificant.
Novels like The American, The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors or Roderick Hudson are
third person narratives. In The Spoils of Poynton, “Fleda’s understanding of the interest-center,
the ‘Things’,is certainly the concern of the narrator but the actual telling of the tale is not in
terms of her understanding, is not conditioned through her sensibility as to a certain extent
Maisie’s story is shown through Maisie even though in the third person.”(Kristin Morrison, 1961,
p.253) For Newman, Isabel Archer and Strether, mutual knowing-center and interest-center, there
are different levels of the narrator’s closeness to them: sometimes scene, sometimes what James

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referred to as “going behind” to interpret or to summarize. In these novels, about which James
has most detailed discussed his concept of “center”, there are a several examples of relations
between narrator and story, narrator and characters: first person narrator, neutral omniscient
narrator, selective omniscient narrator, effaced narrator. For James, there is something else in his
concept of center, a concept, which he only says, is like what he explicitly calls point of view,
something different from what Lubbock has called the narrator’s relation to the story and it has
to do with appreciation. About the novel’s role, he says in the preface to The Princess
Casamassima:”…the affair of the painter is not the immediate, it is the reflected field of life, the
realm not of application, but of appreciation- a truth that makes our measure of effect altogether
different. My report of people’s experience- my report as a “storyteller”- is essentially my
appreciation of it, and there is no “interest” for me in what my hero, my heroine or any one else
does save through that admirable process…. I then see their “doing”…as, immensely, their
feeling, their feeling as their doing… “(Henry James, p. 65) in that case, the artist, to provide
experience must appreciate it. Defining experience, James says: “Experience, as I see it, is our
apprehension and our measure of what happens to us as social creatures- any intelligent report of
which has to be based on that apprehension.”(Henry James, p. 64-65) The artist’s appreciation is
based on apprehension of the character’s apprehension and appreciation of his own situation.
This is what is behind James’s concern with the character who is “finely aware”, as the most fit
kind of subject. Therefore, it is the character’s “point of view” as an appreciation, which
represents the Jamesian knowing-center, in spite of whether or not the story is standing as first
person or some kind of third person narration.
And, as a negative confirmation, in James’s apparent scenic work, provided “objectively”
without any inserted sensibility or knower, the word “aspects” is used for different aspects of the
situation, rather than the term points of view. Regarding the novel The Awkward Age, James
states: “The central object was my situation, my subject in itself, to which the thing would owe
its title, the small rounds [each a single social occasion in the history and intercourse of the
characters concerned] represented so many distinct lamps, as I like to call them, the function of
each of which would be to light with all due intensity one of its aspects.”(Henry James, p.110)
Regarding The Tragic Muse, a novel of scenic condition, he states “through scenic conditions
which are as near an approach to the dramatic as the novel may permit itself and which have this
in common whit the latter, that they move in the light of alternation. This imposes a consistency
other than that of the novel at its loosest, and, for one’s subject, a different view and a different
placing of the center. The charm of the scenic consistency, the consistency of the multiplication
of aspects, that of making them amusingly various, had haunted the author of The Tragic
Muse.”(Henry James, p. 90) The “aspects” of the scenic novel are not “views” because there is no
knowing-center, no character who understands. The “different view” that such a subject demands
is that of a knower outside the novel. And it is here that James’s utilizes of the only word
“center” for both center interest and knowing-center clearly connect: both centers are a matter of
appreciation. The center of interest is the novelist’s and maybe the reader’s appreciation of the
life-subject pointed by the novel, the extra-narrative point of view and the knowing-center is the
character’s appreciation of the circumstances for his own point of view in the novel.
As shown above, point of view and center are for James a matter of appreciation, and although
he was concerned with the voice technique of narration, discharging the first person narrative as
free, moving ahead the “scenic” appearance as a kind of model, his work shows a diversity of
narrative structures, yet in each of them an only concern: appreciation.

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For James prefaces to interconnect with Lubbock’s analyses of the James novels, for James’s
term “point of view” and “center” to narrate significantly to current terms such as first person
and omniscient narration, it is essential that the reader understand James’s “point of view” refers
primarily to a knower, Lubbock’s “point of view” to both a knower and a sayer. For James, the
novel was above all a picture to be apprehended, for latter critics and writers concerned by the
steam-of –consciousness like Joyce or Faulkner, it has become more a voice to be heard.

To continue my chapter, I will talk about the stile from The Portrait of a Lady, and precisely
about the revisions made by the author for a more comprehensive, clear and concrete
understanding. There is much similitude as there is difference between his early and late
revisions and also, far from complicating the style of his early work, James’s late revisions show
him making a constant attempt to gain greater clarity and concreteness, and at time greater
economy and a essence of informality in his style.
Being first published in magazine and than in book, James had time for adjusting the edition
published in magazine. The first revision of the novel was remarkably fine and close, but it
brought about no changes in the themes or in the essential structure of The Portrait. Somewhat
fewer than 200 passages were touched and no single revised passage go over two sentences. At
this point James was mainly concerned in separating his style to adjust the expression of
individual thoughts. Rarely he would try to develop their broader suggestions. Consequently, in
the first revision the reader may examine James’s stylistic decisions in a rather pure condition. In
majority of cases James replaced a detached, general reference with a particular one. Instead of
Isabel Archer’s wanting Ralph Touchett to understand that she wished “to see as many
specimens as possible, and specimens of everything” (Mc, XLIII, p.10); “she wished to see English
society illustrated by figures” (First British Edition, I, p.80) Most of the first revision is applied on
just such a small level as this. However, the changes are very suggestive, for “figures”, here is in
line with the pointedly aesthetic terms James used during the novel and introduced so richly in
the New York revision. A similar replacement, for both individuality and aesthetic tone, arises
when Ralph says to himself that Isabel’s admirers “were not rivals of his and were perfectly
welcome to act their genius.”(First British Edition, I, p. 169). “Genius” had previously been “their
peculiar temperaments”. (Mc, XLIII, p.99)
When Ralph came to Rome to see with his eyes in what way marriage affected Isabel, he saw
that “the free, keen girl had become another person” (First British Edition, II, p.244), which eliminates
the abstraction and alliteration of the original: “the free, keen girl had suffered a marked
mutation.” (Mc, XLIV, p. 102) As Ralph observes the tension and the edgy of her act, James
transforms the general suggestion to “her proceedings” to the more appropriate and particular
“experiments” (Mc, XLIII, p.102). In Europe, Isabel assumes the role of an experimenter in life. Her
most remarkable “experiment” was her marriage to Gilbert Osmond, which was a deplorable
mistake, and she could not allow Ralph to see. Still, he observes, “There was something fixed
and mechanical in the severity painted upon [her face].” In the magazines this was not “an
expression…it was an invention.” (Mc, XLIV, 101)
The first British edition maintains the metaphor of the painted mask and names it more properly
a “representation” (First British Edition, II, p.243). There is sarcasm in Isabel’s using art to cover her
deep disappointment. She had wanted to try to be like Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond, only
to realize finally that theirs was an art of facades only. Isabel’s “representation” is consequently
the type of thing she would most probably demonstrate under Osmond’s captious eye.

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In many cases like these what appears a simple change in sense has a instructive result which
goes beyond the individual passage in question and holds essential issues of theme and structure.
In the New York revision, Henry James cautiously transformed his saying in many places to
obtain just the words that would carry the best thematic evocativeness. For instance, Gilbert
Osmond likes to diminish people to little, smooth pieces of art so he can better take control of
them and use them, without the difficulty of getting his will involved with theirs. In one New
York revision, Isabel becomes “as smooth to [Osmond’s] general need of her as handled ivory to
the palm.” (NY, II, p. II) Originally, the writer had the cliché, “as bright and soft as an April
cloud.” (Third British Edition, II, p.115) In another revision, referring to Madame Merle, James
observes that Osmond “seldom consented to finger, in talk, this roundest and smoothest bead of
their social rosary.” (Third British Edition, III, p.5; NY, II, p.158) On the other hand, once the Contess
Gemini has sprung her big revelation, Isabel in a revision perceives herself as “an applied
handled hung-up tool, as senseless and convenient as mere shaped wood and iron.” (NY, II, p.2379)
James seldom went as far as this in his first revision, but on a smaller level, his receptivity to
suggestions was just as delicate. With her revelation, the Countess Gemini “had expected to
kindle a conflagration and…had barely extracted a flash [from Isabel].” In the first revision by
making the “flash” explicitly a “spark”, James gets a more clearly metaphorical allusion to the
new knowledge Isabel obtained, and in addition, he carries out the hyperbolic distinction
between the great reply the Countess had expected and the insufficient one she thought she got.
(Mc, XLIV, p.411; First British edition, III, p. 185)This kind of revision, in which the writer was
concerned in keeping connotative simplicity, is well demonstrated with certain early revisions
having to do with Madame Merle. To keep up the facade of innocence was the principal of
Madame Merle’s value. Therefore, James removed several attributions of morality to Madame
Merle and added terms that better fitted her standards. The Countess had been sustaining that
Madame Merle and Osmond had always been bound to one another, “even after she became
virtuous.” “Virtuous” becomes “proper” in revision (Mc, XLIV, p. 413; First British edition, III, p. 190)
In her relationship with Osmond, Madame Merle has at last “lost her pluck”, and instead of
seeing before her “the phantom of the shame”, she saw “the phantom of exposure” (Mc, XLIV,
p.416; First British edition, III, p. 196). James avoided an equally wrong insinuation by calling
Madame Merle “a brilliant fugitive from Brooklyn”, rather than “a brilliant fugitive from a
sterner social order”. (Mc, XLIII, p.252; First British edition, I, p.245) In the New York edition this was
changed to “a perverted product of their common soil”. (NY, I, p.271) PG 6

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