444
PARTISAN REVIEW
cal fate. The personal significance of the war as opposed to its national
or external one is emphasized. The war serves merely as a screen upon
which the deeply private problem can be projected.
At this point one comes readily to see that this tale of the Civil
War and the author's description of his civilian injury at the time
of its outbreak are closely related. The correspondence which had
established itself in his mind between the wounded soldiers in Rhode
Isiand and his own impaired state is expressed imaginatively in
this
first story. But the author's view takes precedence over the soldier's
even in the fiction, since it is the implication of
the~
wounds for love
rather than for war that is stressed. The death of the hero in "The
Story of a Year" is thus a representation of James's own passional
death as implied in the
Notes of
a:
Son and Brother.
The dream of Elizabeth is one of the high lights of the tale and
clearly illustrates James's early mastery of certain psychological
processes which have been more formally described by professional
psychologists only recently. Not only is the dream prophetic-that
would be banal-but it portrays in clear images the conflict in the
dreamer's mind and the inevitable solution she will adopt in keeping
with her deepest wishes. Such a reading of the dream indicates un–
mistakably that the hero's fate was sealed not by the wounds he sus–
tained in battle, but by the psychological forces in
the~
situation.
Among such forces were not only the faithlessness of the girl but also
the opposition of the mother and the hero's own self-doubt. The ban–
ter with which his early conversation with the girl is embellished–
the references to the possibility of the hero's looking like a woman
instead of a man after he returns with his wounds- is of considerable
interest as indicating the presence of certain feminine elements in his
personality to which his self-doubt and the anticipated injury may
bear some relationship.
Certain details of the story might with further knowledge of
James's own life lend themselves to a fuller interpretation. Thus, for
instance, the possessive character of the mother in relation to the son;
the heroine's being a ward of the mother-a "cousin" of the hero;
aud the personality of the successful rival Bruce-all raise interesting
problems regarding possible intimates in James's environment.
Perhaps even more significant is the absence of a father-the widowed
state of Mrs. Ford.
If
Henry James's own father is here in question,
the filial relationship may have been sensed as "too sacred" for ex–
posure. The depth of identification between father and son in terms
of their common infirmity, already discussed, agrees with such a view.
