232
PARTISAN REVIEW
there is a world of difference between the status of an ambassador
and the status of a fugitive,
James's all-inclusive choice is dramatised in his recurrent
story of the marriage of an eminent new-world bride to an equally
eminent old-world groom. The marriage is symbolic of the recon–
ciliation of their competing cultures; and if it sometimes turns
out badly, as in
The Portrait of a Lady,
or if it fails to come off
altogether, as in
The Wings of the Dove,
James still holds fast
to his scheme, continuing his experiments in matchmaking till
finally, in
The Golden Bowl,
all the parts fall into their proper
place, the marriage is consummated and bears luxurious fruit.
Observe, though, that this happy ending is postponed again and
again until the American wife, in the person of Maggie Verver,
has established herself as the ruling member of the alliance.
The advancement of this heroine takes on historical form
against the period-background of the American female's rise to
a position of cultural prestige and authority. She it was who first
reached out for the "consummations and amenities" of life while
her male relatives were still earnestly engaged in procuring its
"necessities and preparations." No wonder W. D. Howells de–
clared that "the prosperity of our fiction resides in the finer
female sense." Now James's so-called feminine orientation is to
be explained partly by this social fact and partly by his instinct,
the most exquisite possible, for private relations and for their
latent refinement of tact and taste. So estranged was he from
typical mascullne interests that he could not but fall back more
and more on the subject of marriage, a subject dominated, in his
treatment of it, by the 'social' note and meeting the "finer female
sense" on its own preferred ground.* Moreover, he could have
found no better framework of realistic detail for his picture of
"young American innocence transplanted to European air." And
if his stories of marriage are mostly stories, as he himself once
put it, about "very young women, who, affected with a certain
•In
The Point of View,
a story published in the early 80's, James inserts the
following ironic reference to himself into the Paris-bound letter of a French 'risitor
to New York: "They have a novelist here with pretensions to literature, who writee
about the chase for the husband and the adventures of the rich Americans
in
our
corrupt old Europe, where their primeval candor puts the Europeans to shame.
C'
est proprement ecrit;
but it's terribly pale." In later years he would hardly have
enjoyed any such ironic play at his own expense, for with age self-deprecation gave
way to portentousness in ·his estimate of himself.
