ヘンリ-・ジェイムズ 1895年-1901年-1-

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From 1890 on Henry James disastrously tried to be a playwright for five years, and suffered a great deal when all his efforts and much cared Guy Domville proved to be a failure. After that he returned to write novels, and between 1895 and 1901 wrote The Other House, The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age, "The Turn of the Screw", The Sacred Fount, and some twenty stones. With one or two exceptions they are not so charming or great as his earlier or later works. Why did he write such books? Was the author's inner life reflected in them? In his ambitious biography Henry James, Leon Edel says that the works Henry James wrote at that time suggest that he continued to live in a struggling nightmare caused by the failure of Guy Domville, and that he returned to the sensitive hurts of his early life. The fire of Poynton at the end of the novel corresponds to the destruction of Guy Domville; Maisie's bewilderment is James's bewilderment facing the moral corruption of later Victorian society; little Miles is James at his age; the girl in the cage of the post-office is James confined at Lamb House m Rye. My interpretations of the author and his works at this period are quite different. The plot and the character of the heroine of The Spoils of Poynton are consistent. Fleda Vetch is Jamesian heroine with her imagination, taste, sensitivity, and above all her strict moral sense. The theme is Jamesian; Fleda insists on excercising moral sense, and lose natural happiness which depends on the compromises she refuses to make. The fire of Poynton is necessary to make the ending of the novel forceful. In this novel I don't recognize the author's experience in theater which Edel says makes the novel inconsistent and un-Jamesian. What Maisie Knew is a social satire written from the viewpoint of a little girl. Though the world of the child's consciousness is vague and phantasmagoric, the author knows clearly what is happening in the novel. He is not bewildered by the moral corruption of the society; he rather exaggerates it. The Spoils of Poynton and What Maisie Knew are two pieces of art which Henry James made from small gossips of the society through his proffesional curiosity, imagination, technical experiments and skill. Henry James's life at Lamb House, which he began in the summer of 1898, was quiet and peaceful. It was a kind of 'domestic life' he enjoyed for the first time in his life. He planted flowers and trees in the garden and waited hopefully for the protrusion of bulbs in early spring. It was a new experience to him. He accepted his solitary life and began to root himself to the earth. He was finding inner as well as outer peace by living at Lamb House and devoting himself to the art of the novel.

ヘンリ-・ジェイムズ 1895年-1901年-1-

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