The Jolly Croner Flashcards
Henry James
is caught in between the old century and the new century, the 19th century and the 20th century, a period between the realism and new forms and experimentation, is caught in between the Victorian novel and modernist. Many modernists, many writers of the 20th century identified James as the master, as a genius of the passage between 19th century and 20th century and he is regarded as a key figure of American literature. His works were increasingly experimental, he wrote a huge number of novels and short stories, some remained incomplete at death, he wrote many essays especially about travels, the cultures of the places he visited and lived. He wrote reviews, speeches about culture, language, life, on both sides of the Atlantic, comments on World War One (because he lived also experience World War One). He wrote for the theatre and at the beginning of the 20th century he wrote the prefaces to the New York edition of this works.
Life:
He was born in 1843 and died in 1916, he was born in the United States, in a wealthy family of intellectuals, for example his family knew very well Emerson. His father was Harry James Senior, he was a philosopher, a theologist and who belong to the generation of the transcendentalists. Henry James was very wealthy, and for this reason his father decided that his sons and one daughter study at home, which meant that Henry James received an education by his father and his transcendentalist friends, who were authoritarian and experimental as teachers and this can be seen in his personality as a writer, he was very rigorous but at the same time experimental. Henry, his brothers, and his sister studied many languages and travelled a lot through the world, they relocated to Europe as young, and they often changed schools/environments because their father thought that they had to acquire a certain mental flexibility. His education was meant to expose they to many influences, primarily scientific and philosophical. Henry junior was one of four boys, and his elder brother was William James (he was a philosopher, and he is considered the father of American pragmatists, a type of philosophy, that is very characteristic of the United States. He was a sort of a constant point of reference and always in competition with Henry and they competed the place as the most “intellectual” in the family).
In the fall of 1861 Henry received an injury, probably to his back while fighting in a fire, and here he wrote an obscure heart. This obscure heart was interpreted by the critics in many ways, especially because this injury made him unfit for military service and those were the years of the American Civil War. Harry James was a bachelor, he never married and so this obscure heart that saved him from the war, it was also interpreted as a gay identity. The fact that he was gay he never explicitly said in many of these writing. He seems though that in his biography, he didn’t like the idea that the writer that is big and important of American literature was gay and so eliminate all the ambiguous letters that he might have written to perhaps a partner. In fact, James was also closed to the German estheticism, he hates was Oscar Wild, and he was often in conflict with him. In 1862 he attended Harvard Law School, he went to school to become a lawyer, for the career in politics, but he realized that he was not interested in studying law, so he pursued his interest in literature and associated with many important authors and critics of the time. The cultural and literary scene in America was rather poor, he was still dealing with the frontier, with the effects of the civil war, so culturally speaking was backwards compared to Europe. Henry James moved to Europe and here he built himself as an intellectual, he made a career out of his writings and one that he could not pursue in the context of possible war America, where the general idea among rich people was that men had to conform to the idea of the self- made man, so mostly had to be businessman.
In Europe, first Paris and then London, they became huge cultural centers where Henry James felt at home, he also spent a long period in Italy where he visited especially the north. In London he found a certain homogeneity of language, he settled in England becoming a British citizen in 1915, one year before his death.
He was born American and died as an English subject.
In England he produced many novels and was able to live off the profit in made with his literary works. Basically, the figure of Henry James is that of an intellectual, of someone who never worked for a living someone who lacked the experiences of school’s army, all those places that form the common bonds of masculine society and this is clearly mirrored in the character of Spencer Brydon of Jolly Corner. He was immediately occupied himself in the task to give literature legitimacy, to rehabilitate the idea of literature as art, he considers the novel as art and not merely as a vehicle for ideas or behaviors. The romanticism works overall expressed his position as an expatriate and in many ways also as an outsider living in Europe. He came from middle class, he was considered provincial in the United States, compared to the high Society of Europe. He worked to very hard to gain access to all levels of society. The settings of this fiction range from working class to middle class, often aristocratic class describes the efforts of middle class American to make their way in European capitals. One of the fundamental, literally, deems pursued by James was the international game (it’s a sort of self-representation of America describe through a comparison with Europe. In many of his stories we find American characters who travel to Europe and interact with European societies, sometimes we also have the opposite that a European goes to America but that’s very rare. American are seen as poor, wealthy, while European as rich, snob, aristocratic). James is one of the major figures of the transatlantic literature, his works frequently just oppose characters from Europe to world, characters that embody a feudal civilization and characters from the new world, the United States, where people are often open and assertive, they embody the virtues of the United States, of the new American Society, freedom and sometimes even a more highly evolved moral sense. He is very critic of both societies but in a way, values are more present and more respectful in the United States. James explores this clash of personalities and cultures in stories, and there are stories full of personal relationships but all of them power relations are always foregrounded.
Woman in James
James’s protagonists are young American women, in which very often defeats oppression and some sort of abuse. Sometimes there are men protagonists but, in those cases, there are “different men” and by different, I mean that they have not the usually expected qualities, characteristics.
Individual and society in James
Paris, especially in London, as places of cultural ideas and estheticism while easily represented a more exotic, beautiful, picturesque framework, they never considered a real culture of tentative. But in this works speaks of contemporary society always foregrounding the difficulties of communication and misunderstandings, those are all present in this story. He, basically, exposes the power gains and dynamics of the Society, of the bourgeoisie or the upper bourgeoisie, in which rich and well-educated characters showing problems of self-definition in a psychological and social way. The relation between the individual and society in his works is expressed through the contemporary lenses of gender and power, so those things are fundamental to understand Henry James’s power, dynamics, gender, and nationality.
American critics about James
The comparison between different nations that also means that James was considered a master for the generation of modernists but American literary critics of the 1930s did not appreciate James not only because he’s difficult to understand his mental but also because his characters are rich and show all signs to be happy, they have all the potential to be happy. But, our characters subjected to many constrictions, to many difficulties in economic terms, difficulties of gender of communication, of social status and in a way, they found those difficulties not appropriate for those rich characters, because those difficulties had only been used to describe subordinate individuals inside the society lower. In James there aren’t happy endings
James as a writer in English and American
At the beginning of the 20th century, James had already written many novels and short stories, so that he was one stablished as a writer in both the English and American literary scenes. He became the center of many cycles of writers, he had been attending literary circles all his life, he was used to go to the best literary parlors of both estheticism and realism. In fact, he knew Zola, Balzac, and Stephenson, all generation of the biggest names of European or international literary scene. Many of these writers did consider him their master and agreed with him shared his idea of art as pure art, an idea that reevaluated the novel and produced a commercial form of art.
In favour of art as freedom
1884 James wrote an essay called “the art of fiction” which is a classic essay, a sort of manifest of his ideas against the conceptualization of the novel as either morally edifying genre or a conventional art and he speaks in favor of art as Freedom, as a moment of high experimentation.
The link of James with Virginia Woolf and James Joyce
The Jolly Corner
The role of the Narrator in the Jolly corner
As in many of James’s fictional tales the narrator’s role is key. By the time James wrote “The Jolly Corner” in 1908 he had been writing short stories since 1868. During those 40 years James had perfected his craft and, in particular, the theme of human consciousness that was prevalent in most of his fiction. The narrator conveys this theme with thoroughness, drama, and detail as well as subtlety. “The Jolly Corner” is an effectively frightening ghost story, as highlighted when the narrator tells the reader, “Horror, with the sight, had leaped into Brydon’s throat, gasping there in a sound he couldn’t utter; for the bared identity was too hideous as HIS, and his glare was the passion of his protest. The face, THAT face, Spencer Brydon’s?” The narrator takes the reader to this point, the story’s climax, having built on Brydon’s ruminations since the beginning. The reader knows the characters through the narrator’s descriptions. By contrast, the reader knows nothing of the narrator—the narrator could be a mouthpiece for Henry James or could play some other role that James controls. Whatever the case, the narrator reveals the inner workings of the characters’ consciousness. The narrator controls everything the reader knows about the characters. Early on the narrator describes the complicated relationship between Brydon and Alice. Through the narrator the reader learns how insecure Brydon is and how deeply Alice cares for him despite his insecurity. Brydon recognizes how much Alice understands and accepts him. Alice says to him, “Oh you don’t care either—but very differently: you don’t care for anything but yourself,” and the narrator adds that “Spencer Brydon recognized it— it was in fact what he had absolutely professed.” Alice does not make this remark to be judgmental but rather to show Brydon that she understands him, and Brydon does not feel criticized. Instead, he feels understood because he knows that this is the truth about himself. The reader already knows by this time that Alice loves Brydon. The reader can wonder if she has loved Brydon for the decades that he has been in Europe. The narrator does not answer all the questions the reader might have about the characters, but the reader can appreciate what the narrator tells using detail, drama, and subtlety.
The plot of the Jolly Corner
Spencer Brydon returns to New York City from Europe, having left it when he was 23. He is now 56 and has been living in Europe for 33 years. He hasn’t seen the city since he left at twenty-three to live in Europe. There was no need for him to earn a living there because he supported himself on rent from two properties that he owns in New York. The jolly corner that he has inherited after the death of his brothers and the house within the street was already in course of reconstruction as a tall mass of flats. He is a self-professed wanderer, having lived a “selfish, frivolous, scandalous life” in Europe. He returns to New York to check up on the two properties he has rented all these years and because He is also curious to see how his hometown has changed over the years. He finds New York much changed, grossly urbanized, chaotic, and ugly, especially in comparison with the European environment he left behind. Brydon becomes reacquainted with one of his few old friends still alive in New York, Alice Staverton that he sees as lovely flowerlike woman. He immediately reconnects with her and is drawn to spend as much time and to shares memories with her as he can.
The alter ego of James
They enter the house on the jolly corner that Spencer has decided to keep, having already hired Mrs. Muldoon, a housekeeper, who is pleased with the arrangements if she need not enter the premises after dark. They tour room after room and Alice notes it is a shame that such a place isn’t furnished and lived in and from his perspective, the very walls are infused with the presence of the past. The reader finds himself in an empty, disturbing family museum, which the housekeeper would never go to clean in the evening. It’s here that Alice suggests to Brydon that if he had stayed in New York, he could have become someone, such as a Master of Architectural Design. She implies he could have had a successful real estate business, suggesting, “If he had but stayed at home, he would have anticipated the inventor of the skyscraper.” It is also Alice who first mentions the idea of ghosts in “jolly corner.” Spencer replies, “Oh ghosts—of course, the place must swarm with them! I should be ashamed of it if it didn’t.” Although Brydon frivolously replies to Alice, the image of ghosts does not leave his mind. In fact, he becomes obsessed with who he would have become had he remained in New York. Alice tells him that she has dreamed about this person—the person he would have been. Spencer wants to see him and becomes obsessed with the idea of meeting his ALTER EGO and seeing for himself what he would have been.
The figure of the double
How do we situate the house on the corner in these dynamics? How do we interpret?
The title is important in old stories, so why this story is called the jolly corner? Why does James give such prominence to the house?
Because it’s his house where he grew up, with his family and traditions. And symbolize the domestic. We don’t know the relationship between his family, we only know that they are death, and that Spencer was in conflict with his father – while Henry James was in conflict with his brother –
Does it also symbolize the commercial?
He gets a lot of offers about. It’s an intersection of the domestic and the commercial. The commercial language pervades the text, especially the first paragraph, the first pages are full of transactional language, we read: property,
