The Catholic side of Henry James

the long version

The Catholic Side of Henry James is the first work to reveal the profound Catholic imagery in the work of Henry James. Edwin Fussell questions conventional critical assumptions about James' secularity and shows that James' career began with narratives of Catholic conversion and ended with his masterpiece of Catholic eccentricity and alienation, The Golden Bowl. The interplay of men and women, of America and Europe - those acknowledged Jamesian themes - comes to be overlaid with the interplay between Protestant and Catholic. In the first part of the book, Fussell discusses the influence of James' Catholic friends like John La Farge; and the ambivalent attitudes toward Catholic sensibilities in writers like Cooper and Emerson and Hawthorne, James' more or less immediate predecessors on the literary scene, as well as in his contemporaries like Mark Twain and Howells. Fussell then examines the beginnings of Catholic fiction in America and the rapidly growing number of Catholics in the population and in the reading audience for fiction. He claims that the religious mix in the literary scene provided James with a commercial opportunity to explore his penchant for the Protestant-Catholic theme. The rest of the book explores the presentation of Catholics and of Catholicism in James' fiction, using criticism, letters, and notebooks to illuminate the fiction. Fussell's examination ranges from James' early reviews of religious books for the Nation and early tales like "De Grey: A Romance" through much of the canon, along the way reexamining James' overlooked play Guy Domville and climaxing with a magnificent reading of The Golden Bowl, convincingly demonstrating James' involvement with Catholic themes.