Changing the Subject: Henry James, Dred Scott, and Fictions of Identity Author(s): Sara B.

Blair Source: American Literary History, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring, 1992), pp. 28-55 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/489935 . Accessed: 17/03/2011 21:42
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Changing the Henry James,

and

Subject:
Dred
of

Fictions

Scott, Identity

Sara B. Blair

In July 1883, Henry James dedicateda memorial review in the Centurymagazine to the fiction of Anthony Trollope. Like all of James's assessments of other novelists, the essay strategicallypromotes James's literarydoctrine even as it reviews its ostensible subject. Trollope's death provided James with an occasion for revisingthe status of the novel as a social form-an occasion that came, in 1883, at a particularlyopportunemoment for James himself. Returningto Europeafter the deaths of both his parents, eager to cash out the literary capital accruingfrom his first major success two years earlier, The Portraitof a Lady, James is centrallyconcernedwith the managementof his own professionalcareer.Like other, betterknownessaysof the mid- 1880s, including"TheArt of Fiction," "Daudet,"and "IvanTurgenieff," "AnthonyTrollope"reveals James negotiatingthe "complex fate" of his social identityand his masteryof a transatlanticreadingpublic.1 At the literaland criticalcenterof the Trollopeessay,James formulatesa sweepingindictment of his predecessor's literary practicethat has profoundconsequencesfor this work of selfinvention. "It is impossible," he asserts, "to imagine what a novelist takes himself to be unless he regardhimself as an historian and his narrativeas a history. It is only as an historian that he has the smallest locus standi" ("Anthony"247). James appearshere to be making a fairly restrictedclaim about verisimilitude and the formal integrity of the work of art. The notion of the locusstandi,however,enablesJamesto inaugurate a processof criticalself-fashioning that would culminatein the to the New York Edition. By implicationand indirecprefaces tion, the Trollope essay composes James as a figurewho occupies a privileged vantage point at the margins of his own from that metaphoric community. Witnessingand representing place, the author is empowered with a moral authority-in

AmericanLiteraryHistory 29

effect, a moral omniscience-that transcendsthe practicesand the limits of the community it wholly comprehends.As the prefaceswill later do with greaterirony and self-consciousness, "Anthony Trollope" promotes a fiction of the author'slocatedness in a "greatgood place" from which authenticrepresentations (as transparent objectiveas those of "history"itself) and will ensue. The figuralwork of self-inventiondone in the "Trollope" essay becomes more obvious when we recover the continuity of its central metaphor with a body of legal thinking about personification,individualism, and the formation of political community. In the language of jurisprudence,locus standiliterally, from the Latin, "a place to stand on"-signifies the rightof the individual,basedon a legallydefensibleand tangible interestin a particularissue, to appearbefore a body of justice and make claims for its resolution.2In modem Americanjurisprudence,standinghas become a mechanism by which federal courts claim or disclaim jurisdiction over certain issues, particularly constitutional issues, brought before them and thereby manage legal and political questions on procedural grounds.3Yet even this technical function preservesthe roots of standing as a social metaphor:the court will hear only an individual entitled, literally, to stand up before the court, an individual whose political and social status guaranteesmembershipin the community and consequentlythe rightto take a stand (Winter 1387).4 If the doctrine of standing serves as a mechanism for deciding who will have a say in court, it also determines who counts, for legal purposes, as an individual, him- or herselfbeforethe law. Throughauthorizedto represent out the history of American jurisprudence,the doctrine of standinghas thus shaped and represented legal understandings of identity, the political subject, and personhood;it has effectively naturalizedindividualismas the basis for the institution of the law (Vining 2, 55).5 James'sapparentlyfortuitousinvocation of legal discourse not only mobilizesthe ideologyof individualism; puts at issue, it in his contrast between Trollope's failed authorship and the fiction of authorshipJames defends, the origins and representativenessof social texts and forms of identity. In this respect, James'smodest reviewof Trollopeintersectswith the emerging use of the standing doctrine in nineteenth-centuryAmerican law and, in particular,with a legal opinion deliveredby the US SupremeCourt 26 years earlier,in March 1857, on a case that transformedthe legal work of making up people: the case of DredScottv. JohnA. Sandford,US Howard 19. In both James's

30

Changingthe Subject

Like the increasingly prominentproponents offormalism in American legal culture, James embracesthe provisionality his of own authorityand of the texts he produces.

review and the court's controversialopinion, the concept of standing-membership within a coherent political and narrative community-is pressedinto the serviceof constructing and naturalizingpolitically chargedfictions of identity. Moreover, the structureof James's argumentto standingresemblesthat of the Taney Court in several important respects. While the latterexploits the doctrineof standingto createa form of identity, based on race, that lies outside the protectionof the law, outside "legitimate"political community, and outside constitutional discourse,James invokes locus standi to constructan author privilegedin his implied access to transcendental laws, anteriorto the limitationsof cultureand its historicallyspecific institutions.In both cases, the logic of standingpromotes political empowermentthrough regulatoryfictions of race, read as the signifierof a naturalcontinuitybetweencommunityand for the text that stands transparently it. Read against the Scott case, James's essay finally reveals the deeper ideological resources and designs of an emerging literarymastery. Like the increasinglyprominent proponents of formalism in American legal culture, James embracesthe provisionalityof his own authorityand of the texts he produces. he the mastery Paradoxically, therebyinaugurates second-order celebrated in our own postmodern moment, a mastery that legitimatesitself by delegitimation,in the advertisementof its own fictionality,its own contingency.Yet-as James's use of the standing doctrine in "Anthony Trollope" and Taney's in the text of Scott will suggest-this "higher"recognitionof textual strategiesas such selectively conceals its own complicity with the forms of authorityit challenges.In particular,it conceals its dependence on authorizingorthodoxies of race and social puritythat effectJames'srecoveryof the metaphysicsof that text, author,and representation he ostensiblyseeksto undo. To read "Anthony Trollope" against the case of Scott is thus to reconsiderthe originsand the costs of James'sliterarymastery, and of the fictions of identity and power onto which it opens out in the name of fiction'slaws. More specifically,to connect James with legal thinkingis also to force a reexaminationof his masteryin the definitively Americanculturalcontext he attemptsto suppress.Despite his wholesaleeffortsthroughoutthe 1880s to obscurehis American past, James's self-inventionevinces revealingsocial and institutional forms of connection with the culture of Dred Scott, most notably in the political content of his domestic life. Like his criticalcharity,James'sknowledgeof the genteelcultureof abolition began at home. Despite its peripatetictendencies,the

AmericanLiteraryHistory 31

James family remainedin New York continuouslyfrom 184555, a crucial decade in the development of abolition politics, which ushered in vociferous debates on states' rights, the expansion of slaveryinto the American territories,fugitive slave laws, and the legal status and viability of the Missouri Compromise.6Frequently,the architectsof these debates were visitors in the James household. Although the elder James characteristicallyobscured the institution of slavery as a spiritual condition "detached"from the realitiesof race, he was deeply engagedin intellectualexchangewith such devoutpoliticaljournalists and advocatesas CharlesA. Dana (whose cousin, Richard Dana, tried the Fugitive Slave Law cases that galvanized polite Boston society in the 1850s, as well as the treason proceedingsagainstJeffersonDavis), RufusGriswold,N. A. Willis, and George Ripley.7The elder James was particularly close to Horace Greeley duringthe latter'sexplosive years of sectional wranglingat the New YorkTribune.James himself remembers visiting Greeley there, admittingthat the Republicancrusader "droppedinto my mind the germ of certainintereststhat were
long afterwards to flower" (Autobiography 44).8 During the

months of abolitiondebatesthat culminatedin Greeley'scaning near the US Capitol in January 1856 at the hands of a future Confederategeneral,the elderJames continuedto contributea series of "Letters"to the Tribunefrom the family's temporary residencesin Europe.Meanwhile,Greeleywas alertingthe Tribune'sreadersto the impendingScottdecision and the political consequencesof "thegreat case" (AlexanderH. Stephens,qtd. in Kutler xii); immediately afterthe court deliveredits verdict, he began a series of passionate editorialsthat set the tone of the Republicanresponse,denouncingthe decision as "abominable," morally equivalentto the judgment of "those congregated in any Washington bar-room" (New York Tribune 15 Feb. 1856). Throughoutthe fracas,the elderJames's"Letters" continued to appear in the Tribunealong with Greeley's inflammatoryprose. If the intellectual pretensionsof the family patriarchexposed the younger James to abolition politics of the drawing room, so too did his own experienceof antebellumAmerican popular culture. Among his most memorable childhood excursions, James highlightsa trip in November 1853 to P. T. Barnum'sGreat American Museum, where he saw Barnum's landmark,controversial,and highly spectacularproductionof Uncle Tom's Cabin, replete with its eroticized and proslavery overtones;he latersaw the National Theatre'sextendedversion of the play on the equallymemorableoccasion of his first"the-

32

Changingthe Subject

atre party." Beyond these public performances,the text of Uncle Tom's Cabin shaped James's experienceof the middleclass institutionsand values of New York. By his own admission, he "livedand moved," duringearlychildhood,"withgreat intensity,in Mrs. Stowe'snovel." At "exactlythe seasonof [its] freshness,"and of the thickening "of the great intersectional plot," James raptlyattendedthe melodramainitiatedin Fourteenth Street by the arrivalof the Norcom family, with three sons and "two pieces of preciousproperty."The young slave, Davy, remaineda playmateof James'suntil he and his mother recognizedtheir owners'"greatKentuckyerror"and promptly fled to claim their freedom (Autobiography 92-95, 141-44). James and his readerstoo often privilegethe purely aesthetic characterof his motives virtually from the cradle, yet clearly those distinctivelyJamesianactivitiesof "watching," playgoing, and consumingfictionwerecloselyboundedby the social issues and anxieties that definedthe Scott decision. In laterlife, James superciliously recalledthe aestheticculture of middle-classNew York as a culture of "the busy, the 30). The popular tipsy, and Daniel Webster"(Autobiography imaginationof Boston, in and aroundwhich James lived from 1861-1869, was even more densely imprinted with sectional and secession politics. His activities there, aesthetic and domestic, reflectthe prominenceof currentpoliticalcontroversies in local communal life. James makes much of his presenceon New Year's Day 1863 at the Boston Music Hall, laterto be the site of his own controversial imagination of Union, where thousandsof Bostoniansgatheredfor a righteouscelebrationof Lincoln'sEmancipationProclamationthat includedEmerson's readingof the "BostonHymn." During 1862-63, Jamesboarded at the establishmentof one Miss Upham, where his fellow diners included Joe May, son of a prominentNew York abolitionist, and FrancisJ. Child, a HarvardChauceriannoted for his elegiac perorationson the state of the Union and the Har419vardianswho had died in its cause (James,Autobiography 21, 427-28, PartialPortraits27-28; Edel 195, 199). Long after armshad been laid down, the politicalcultureof the Bostonians continuedto leave its traces;two of James'sfriends(andputative rivalsfor the affectionsof Minny Temple)were OliverWendell Holmes, Jr., the future SupremeCourt "justicefor the ages," and John Chipman Gray, future Harvardlaw professorand brother of the distinguishedjurist Horace Gray, who in 1857 coauthored "A Legal Review of the Case of Dred Scott"-a decisivecritiqueof the Taneydecisionand its use of the doctrine of standing.9

AmericanLiteraryHistory 33

The very accidental nature of the threads of connection drawnbetween James and the drama of abolition politics suggests how inevitable were the issues of sectional conflict and racein the city and the academicinstitutionhe inhabitedduring the early years of the war. Beyond these accidents of location, however,James might be said to have had a much more direct connectionto the cultureof DredScott:in 1862-63, Jameswas not just in Boston or even at Harvardbut enrolledin Harvard Law School, whose institutionallife duringhis brieftenurewas rife with political debate. Before the war broke out, the law school had become a hotbed of constitutional controversies, which made for dramaticstudentand facultyconflictsso heated that they occasionally threatenedthe ordinaryfunctioning of the institution.10 Even after the departureof the law school's Southernstudentsfor Confederateregiments,legal and anthropologicalcontroversyabounded.Given the dramaticallyattenuatedpopulationof the law school duringthe waryears,James's formallegal educationwould not only have introducedhim to, but made immediate, the debatesabout states'rights,war powers, and other constitutionalissues that were ragingthroughout the legal academy. tend James'sautobiographical writingscharacteristically to obscure the ideological and political content of his Harvard experience;in particular,they transformthe agentsof his legal memorializedfourdecades educationinto literary"characters," later in the orotund vignettes of the master phase."lHowever strongJames'sputativelyliteraryinterestin theiridiosyncrasies all of characteror self-presentation, of his law professorswere in scholarlydisputeson abolition,states'rights, activelyengaged and the constitutionalissues definedby DredScott.Joel Parker, Royall Professor of Law and an increasinglyacerbic conservative voice on the law school faculty, published extensively throughout the 1860s on secession, the Scott case, and the Taney Court. TheophilusParsons,Dane Professorof Law and teacher of the first-yearlegal course on the commentariesand common law, turned his attention, when war broke out, to problemsof secessionand constitutionalfreedoms.EvenEmory Washburn,Bussey Professorof Law, shifted his focus during James's year at the law school from property law and legal historyto write on the institutionof slaveryin Englandand on states' rights and secession.'2All three "plungedinto political discussion" and "engaged in acrimonious contest," and encouraged their students to do likewise.'3 Such developments clearlyshapedthe intellectualclimate of the law school during the war years. Although James representshis year of legal ed-

34

Changingthe Subject

ucation as an essentially haphazardand inconsequentialexperience (Autobiography 438), he was in fact enrolled in the foremostinstitutionof Americanjurisprudence duringwhatone historian of the law school remembersas its "golden age," a period when its leading figureswere deeply committed, from variouspoints of view, to the political debate on constitutional rights and doctrines of nationhood, political community, and
race.14

I do not arguehere for a direct influenceof legal thinking on James, but ratherfor a telling sense of confluencethat highlights his exposure to social and legal discoursesof standing, individual rights, and race. Yet to advance even this limited argument is to risk the charge of overreading,since James's legal education, when discussed at all, has been consistently dismissedas a historicalanomaly. Here, as is so often the case, of James'srepresentation the event, and his self-representation at a distance,prevails:he offersa portraitof himselfat Harvard as an artistdetachedfromthe "practical" traininghe undertook, involved in the community only as an outsiderby fact and by inclination, an omniscient observerof its ritualsand practices 307, 411-54).15 In other words, James repre(Autobiography sents his experience of Harvard in the same constructionof authorialdistancethat the legaldiscourseof standingmay have helped him to shore up and to conceal. It is certainlytrue that legal education at HarvardduringJames's tenure had not yet been formalizedand that admissions and academic standards werefar from consistent(Quinquennial Catalogue179;Warren But it is also true that James attendedthe prescribed 23-24). lecturesfor first-year studentswith "prodigious" law regularity and "systematicfaithfulness"; that his lectureswould have included in-depth discussion of Blackstone'sand Kent's commentaries on common law (whence the doctrine of standing emerges), as well as a lecture course devoted exclusively to constitutionallaw; and that James took his legal trainingseriously enough to seek participationin a moot court case sponsored by Harvard'smost prestigiouslegal society, the Marshall Club, whose "earnest and spirited" proceedingswould have necessitateda working familiaritywith court and trial procedures (Autobiography 440-41).16 Rather than assess the influence (in the traditionalsense) of James's legal training,I wish to recoverhis relationshipto institutionallegal thinkingabout community, race, and identity. What would it mean to recover the intertextualityof James's writing, particularlyduring the 1880s, with current legal thinking about public identity and

AmericanLiteraryHistory 35

about the ontological status of its own texts as acts of naming and shapingpublic selves? One last area of connectionbetweenJames and the culture of Dred Scott dramatizesprecisely this possibility of cultural the intertextuality: accidentsof the publishingindustry.James's career began shortly after his departurefrom the law literary school, with his publicationof an unsignedreviewin the North AmericanReviewof October 1864. The journalwas then under the aegis of James Russell Lowell, who was one of the Review's editors and whose Harvardlectures on English literatureand Old French James had attended with interest. The nature of this journal, which remained an important vehicle for James throughout his career, highlights those startlinglyrevelatory connections between the launching of James's "literaryself' and the culture of Dred Scott. Apart from its literaryinterests, the Review had long been hospitable to and respectedfor its populist commentaryby legal scholarson currentissues in law and legislation,a practiceit sharedincreasinglywith such popular middle-classmagazinesas the AtlanticMonthly,the CenScribtury(in whichJames'sreviewof Trollopelaterappeared), even Thackeray's Cornhill ner's Monthly, Macmillan, and Magazine.17In 1857, the Review publisheda widely read and highly respectedessay by Timothy Farrar,a prominentBoston attorney,entitled "The Dred Scott Case," in which Farrardiscussed the merits of Taney's opinion and its apparentpolitical implications. The Review also published numerous essays by James's professorof constitutionallaw, Joel Parker,including Law and Se"The Right of Secession"(1861), "Constitutional cession" (1862), and "The Right of Secessionand the Conduct of the War" (1862). James's knowledge of these essays, although likely, is irrelevant;what counts for my purposesis the intertextualityof criticismwith currentsocial discourses his ostensibly"literary" of national unity, American identity, and race. Writingout of the cultureof Dred Scott,James replicatesthe strategiesof that them as nattext for inventingdiscursiveselves and advertising ural entities, and for creatinga form of authoritythat disguises its enabling cultural resourcesas natural truths. Taney's "peculiar" use of the standingdoctrine in Scott provides a useful analogy, if not a model, for James's self-fashioning.Denying Dred Scott legal standing, Taney simultaneouslyimagines his own interventionsin the social work of making up people as the mere manipulationof "natural"and inevitablelegal forms. He thus becomes the "historian"of James's fiction of author-

... what countsfor my purposesis the intertextuality of his ostensibly criticismwith "literary" currentsocial discourses of national unity, Americanidentity,and race.

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Changingthe Subject

ship, a figure who reconstitutesthe narrativecommunity he representsin a simultaneous concealment and display of his own authorialmotives. Ironically,James'simaginationof this form of authorshipin "Anthony Trollope"would preparethe way for such criticallyimportantnovels as The Bostoniansand ThePrincessCasamassima,both of whichreflecton the dangers posed to moral consciousnessand moral communityby equivalent acts of invention and disguise. At the moment of"Trollope,"however,Jamesis primarily concernedwith revisingthe preoccupationsof those American literaryancestorswhose influence,duringthe 1880s, he works consistentlyto suppress.Rewritingthe liminal statusof Hester Prynne, who subsists on the "verge" of a moral community orderedin the image of a covenantaljustice, and of Ishmael, who is carriedaway from the sinkingship of stateon a wayward coffin, James reinventsthe author so as to recontainthe body politic of his own audience. Just as Taney's applicationof the standingdoctrineenablesa temporaryextensionof slaveryinto so the Americanterritories, James'smetaphorof the locusstandi enables him to extend the legitimate territoryof the novel as a social genre,to createalmost single-handedly new Angloa American literaryprovince whose constituentsJames will be uniquely privilegedto represent.In its strategiesfor changing the literarysubject,the "Trollope"essay heraldsa new age in the historyof the novel and a distinctivelymoder form of selflegitimation. 2. "A separate class of persons":Dred Scott and the formationof political community Like James'sdevelopingliterarydoctrine,the case of Dred Scott raises crucial questions about social agency, representativeness, and narrativecommunity. Seekinga more literalversion of the "freedom"with which James as masteris so often identified,Scott asked the American court to adjudicatea deceptively simple legal issue: whether, on the basis of their residence on freesoil and in federalterritories, his wife, Harriet he, werelegallyfree.Similardisputes Scott, and theirtwo daughters about ownershipand slave status had been rehearsedin state judiciariesinnumerabletimes, but the Scotts' bid for freedom was uniquely tied to the phenomenon of westwardexpansion and the problem of the constitutionalstatus of slaveryin the American territories.Furthermore, conjunctionof legal isthe sues raisedin their case posed a unique challengeto the onto-

AmericanLiteraryHistory 37

logicaldistinctionson which the discoursesof slaveryand states' rightsdepended:all slaves, in the law, were consideredpersons in some respectsand propertyin others; free blacks occupied an even more ambiguousposition,intermediate betweenslavery and freedom, that called attention to the ambiguousconstruction of the American "citizen";likewise, the territoriesthemselves were entities that fell between categories,being neither coloniesnor autonomousstatesbut rathera distinctlyAmerican combinationof both (Fehrenbacher 64). In political,judicial, 7, legislative,and social terms, Scott broughtto the fore the ideological motives that attendedthe historicalact of making up people and political communities. Ironically,historianscan provideonly partialand conflictaccounts of Scott's life as a slave and of his participationin ing his own case. Born in Virginiaaroundthe turn of the century, he was sold by his original owners to Dr. John Emerson, a medical officer,in 1832 and accompaniedhis master to army posts in Missouri, in Illinois (on free soil), and in what is now Minnesota (then part of the Wisconsin Territoryregulatedby federal legislation under the Missouri Compromise).In April 1846, after Emerson's death, Scott and his wife brought suit against Irene Emerson, the officer's widow, in the St. Louis CircuitCourt.Therethe Scottsarguedthat, underthe provisions of the Missouri Compromise, their residence in Illinois and Minnesota rendered them legally free. Their suit initiated a battle of epic proportions,conducted over an 11-yearperiod, via bills, pleas, writs, and orders all the way up to the US Supreme Court. By 1853, Irene Emerson's brother John A. Sanford(whosename was consistentlymisspelledin the docket and has thus passed into constitutionalhistory)had taken up administrationof her estates and consequentlybecame Scott's legal owner. The change in ownership, perhaps an expedient effected to impede Scott's suit, had extensive implications. It allowed Scott'sattorneysto maneuverhis suit into federalcourt on the grounds of diversity of citizenship:Scott was a citizen of Missouri,Sanfordof New York, and thus their differenceof opinion as to Scott's status became a matter of federallaw. Thesegroundsfor suit would provedecisiveand, ultimately for the Scotts, disastrous.Sanford'sattorneysrespondedto the federalsuit with a maneuverdesignedto defeat Scott's plea on technical, ratherthan substantive,grounds:they claimed that since Scott and his wife were Negroes of African descent, and their ancestorshad been broughtto the US specificallywith the legal status of slaves, Scott himself was by definition legally a slave; he could not thereforeclaim US citizenshipand conse-

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Changingthe Subject

quently had no standing-no legal right-to present a suit in federalcourt.Sanford's question attorneysbeggedthe territorial altogether:by defining the African American categoricallyas "slave," they demanded that the law de jure recognizeracial categoriesas the legal basis for slaveholding.The federaljudge in questiondeniedthis plea, but nevertheless the instructed jury, on what he perceivedto be the merits of the case, in Sanford's favor; accordingly, Scott legally remained Sanford's chattel property. By the time the Scotts' appeal appearedon the docket of the SupremeCourt in February1856, the originalquestion of legal status-was Scott free by virtue of his residenceon free soil and in the territoriesregulatedby Congress,or was he an articleof propertygovernedby legal concepts of reversionand comity?-had become virtually secondaryto the question of Scott'slegalrightsand privileges: could he, or any otherAfrican himselfas a freeAmericancitAmerican,legitimatelyrepresent izen, with all the rightsand privilegesattachingto that status, in a US court of law?The question,in otherwords,had shifted fromthe specificissueof Scott'slegalstatusto the larger judicial, and political problem of making up people. Who would legal, count in the law of the land as a citizen, a political agent, an individual,a human being?Who could make legitimateclaims to legal standing,to citizenship,to moralagencybeforethe law? The controversialopinion finally offered as the Court's majority view was the handiwork of Chief Justice Roger B. Democratand states'rightsand slaverysymTaney,Jacksonian pathizer.'8It succeedednotoriouslyin changingthe subjectin question,in both sensesof the term.Not only did Taneyrelegate the original legal problem--whether residencyon free soil effectively made a slave free-to the marginsof the opinion (his remarkson this broadquestionconstituteonly a page, or about 2%, of the published opinion); he simultaneouslyundertook, and largely on his own initiative, to reify the legal identity of Americanblacks,both slave and free. Taney devoted 24 pages, about 45%, of his published opinion-by far the largest section-exclusively to the problem of black citizenship, an increasinglypressingissue as Southernanxiety about the rising populationof free blacks surgedand as sectionalcompromises concerningthe Fugitive Slave Laws unraveled(Fehrenbacher 340). In "purely"constructionist argumentsto the legitimating textsof Americanunion, Taneyundertakes provethat Scott-to as a "negroof Africandescent"whose ancestorswere "of pure Africanblood"- even iffree, could not possiblybe a citizen or legitimatelyclaim legal standing;even the freeddescendantsof

AmericanLiteraryHistory 39

such ancestors-even the childrenof free black parents-could not, he asseverated,be understoodas citizens of the states, or of the US, within the meaning of the original and originating American texts. To effect this proof, Taney persistentlyignores the dual status, in the law and in the "unequivocal"language of the Constitution,of all blacks, both free and slave. In the eyes of the law, enslaved personswere understoodas such and as autonomous moral agentswith regardto certainissues (largelyof surveillanceand punishment,to be sure, but also of legal protections and privileges).As late as 1861, an Alabama law definitivelyupheld the mixed legal identity of the slave: [S]laves are human beings, and endowed with intellect, conscience, and will.... Becausethey are rationalhuman beings, they are capable of committing crimes; and, in as references actswhich arecrimes,areregarded persons. to Because they are slaves, they are necessarily,and so long as they remain slaves, incurably,incapableof performing civil acts, and, in referenceto all such, they are things,not persons. (Cresswell'sExecutor v. Walker,Degler 29-30; emphasis added)'9 Like other laws in Tennessee, Mississippi,and throughoutthe South, this Alabama law defines slave identity historicallyand contingentlyratherthan with explicit recourseto racist ontology, and thereby openly displaysthe metaphysicalparadoxof the individualwho is understoodas "equal"partspropertyand such moralagent.Taney'sopinion,however,willfullydisregards precedents,rewritingthe narrativeof personhood so as to recontain the body politic and to extend into the American territoriesthose increasinglythreatenedsectional boundariesbeorotund tween slaveholdingland and free. In characteristically with sentimentalappeal to the intentions of the framers prose, "who formed the sovereignty"of America, Taney aggressively misreadstheir original and originatingtext; he assertsthat no of "negro[es] Africandescent,"slaveor free,have legalstanding, legitimate claims to citizenship, or-finally and drasticallylegitimate identity as persons before the law (396-97). In Taney's opinion, the matter of making up people becomes, quite literally, as simple as black and white: all middle ground, all variegationsof standing in the legal discourse of slavery, disappear,leaving in their place a rigid, governingopposition between master and slave. of The unabashedconstructionism Taney'sargumenthigh-

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Changingthe Subject

lights the peculiarinstitutionof legal identitywith two notable analogiesto James's self-inventionas literarymaster. First, it reveals-or, more accurately,remindsus-that the foundations of legal personhoodand legal self-representation, the founlike dations of James's social discourseof authorship,lie in a critScott's case is disically naturalizeddiscourse of property.20 missed,withinthe fictionsof the law, not forlackof a legitimately personalor tangible interestin the matter-the bedrockcriterion for determinationof legalstanding-but becausehe cannot be counted as a citizen, or even a legal person, in the property interestsinherentto the "commonwealth" Courthas chosen the to protect. In orderto consolidatethose interestsand bolstera AmericanUnion, Taney virtuallycreates rapidlydisintegrating the form of identity on which his opinion ostensibly turns: a "separate class of persons" uniquely composed of African Americans, extrinsicto the Union proper, broughtinto being by America'sfoundingtexts (Taney 411). Analogously,James will invoke the doctrine of locus standi to figurea naturalrelationshipbetweenthe authorand the body politic he comprehends, whose higher values and ideals-like his own literary corpus-become his propertyto protect. Both authorsremind us of the profoundimportanceof the socialnarratives identity of create:membershipindeed has its privileges. they Taney's reading of Scott suggestsa second analogy with James'sself-inventionin its virtualobsessionwith the problem of whom the foundingtexts of Americancultureauthentically represent.In Taney's political reconstruction,Scott's suit for a legal identity represents threatto that racially,culturally,linguisticallycoherentcommunitybroughtinto beingby the Constitution (in dangerof being weakenedby the entry of those of "pure African" blood), and to the sanctity of the text itself, whose "true"meaning and intention when it was framed and adopted are so clearly discernible to the initiated. If Taney promotes states' rights, he also defends the continuingpower of the Constitutionto representand speak for the American realityit "broughtinto existence"(406). His argumentdepends on, even as it defends,the statusof the Constitutionas a founding text from which legitimate political and social ordersare, by fiat, created. of In respectto this representation legaltexts, constitutional and otherwise,Scott is neither unique nor idiosyncraticin the annals of the law; rather,it reflectsa crucial shift, completed of by mid-century,in thejudicialunderstanding the foundations and authorityof legal discourse.As Morton Horwitz and MiAmerican chael Rogin have documented, nineteenth-century

AmericanLiteraryHistory 41

jurisprudenceradicallytransformedits own master narrative: the discourse,earlier initiallyadvertising law as an instrumental had insisted on the open-endednessof the legal text in jurists of determinations identity,property,and community,and pragmatically read that text to reflect and serve rights of property and citizenship understood as natural rights. By the moment of Scott, however,Americanjurists had rejectedany representation of the law as a discourse founded in such organic and governingprinciples.Instead,they invoke the logic of a newly consolidatedlegal formalism to insist that judicial thinking is bound by precedent,by federallaw--in effect, by the status of the law itself as a hermetic system of interpretation.21 the At moment of Scott,then, Taney and the newly majoritarian legal formalistshe resemblesbecome preciselythe kind of "historians" imagined by James in "Trollope":abandoningthe discourse of naturaljustice and the acknowledgment the jurist's of creativeinterventionin human affairs,they naturalizethe law as a closed, inexorable system of "logically deducible rules" whose texts have the inevitabilityand authority of a "natural language";they thereby obscure the real interestsand beneficiaries of its doctrines (Horwitz 254; Rogin 158). In both the constitutionaland common law arenas,jurists like Taney and Lemuel Shawachievethe standingof legal "historians" conby their allegianceto particularforms of power and comcealing munity, infusing them in the law with "the permanence of
nature" (Rogin 145).22

in Taney'sperformance DredScott,in the historicalcontext of its emergence,thus offersa dualanalogyto James'sformalism in "Trollope." Concealinghis authorialpowerof judicialdesign, not only representsbut rewritesthe founding texts of Taney America. Likewise,James trades on the fiction of his status as "historian"in orderto conceal his own investmentin a reconstructedromantic subjectivity,whose texts would evince their author'sprivilegedand intuitive access to transcendental laws. In James'smastertexts- and even, arguably, "AnthonyTrolin lope"-this gesturerevealsitselfas a heuristicfiction,a contract for promoting imaginative interchange between author and reader. Finally, however, that open deception, the hallmark paradox of James's mastery, may not be quite as innocent or constructiveas Jameswould advertise.As the analogywith Scott also suggests, James's creation of a legitimating locus standi ultimately depends on narrativesof identity that ensure the formation of a community of readershe can "naturally"represent, much as the Constitution, in Taney's correspondence theory, stands for a discretepolitical community. James's for-

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mation of a body of readers,like Taney'sformationof a natural constitutional "family," depends on his construction of the community whose values he will comprehend-and ultimately transume-as a racially,narratively pure body politic. In "Anand beyond, James might be said to build a thony Trollope" metaphoricHouse of Fiction on the remnantsof the Big House and of America'sHouse Divided. His limited engagementwith his own culturalresourcesconsolidatesa literarymasterywhose foundationsunderminethe structuralchallengesto American identity and ideology that it undertakes. 3. Fictionsof authorship: HenryJames and AnthonyTrollope If the occasion of "Anthony Trollope" enables James to revaluatethe American sources of literarymodernity, it does so at the safe remove of an Atlantic double cross. Having returnedto Englandfor good aftera briefvisit in America,James takes up the case of Trollope in orderto link himself with and distancehimself from particularnationaltraditions,therebyto invent an Anglo-Americanreadingpublic and the novel that will represent a vehicle for coherentmoraldiscourse,distinct it: fromthe commoditycultureit scrutinizes, embodyingthe stable values of a reified English tradition. Reading in and against Trollope, James undertakeshis own act of reconstruction,remappingthe literaryterritoryof the moder with the arena of "consciousness"-that propertyof an Anglo-Americanpropertiedclass, which providesboth the enablingresourcesand the donneesof his mastertexts-at its center.Redressing Trollope's authorialmisprisions,Jamesputsthe authorin his properplace: at the marginsof that narrativelybounded, linguisticallypure community on which his privilegedrepresentational standing will depend. The case of Anthony Trollope will enable James to defend these literaryboundaries,to "take"with the highest seriousness,as the legitimatepropertyof the novelist, the role of culturalguardianship. From the outset of the essay, James links the problem of standing with the status of the novel as a social form. His which runsto threeprintedpages,conducts openingparagraph, an extendedcritiqueof Trollope'smode of literaryproduction, which, in James's terms, compromisesa necessarydistinction between popular- and high-culturegenres-compromises, as James ironicallyputs it, "the natureof the business."Initially, James praisesTrollope'sindustrioushabits and his dedication

AmericanLiteraryHistory 43

to his craft, in an anecdote that plays fortuitouslyon the metaphoric and metaphysicalvalue of that word: It was once the fortuneof the authorof these lines to cross the Atlantic in [Trollope's]company, and he has never forgottenthe magnificentexample of plain persistencethat it was in the power of the eminent novelist to give on that occasion. The season was unpropitious,the vessel overcrowded,the voyage detestable;but Trollope shut himself up in his cabin every morningfor a purposewhich, on the writerwho was also an invulnerable partof a distinguished sailor, could only be communion with the muse. (235) One dense paragraphlater, however, James offers a "direct" representationof Trollope at work, opening the closed cabin door to expose the latter's "magnificentexample" as a form of jobbing ratherthan communion with the muse: "He sat down to his theme in a serious businesslikeway, with his elbows on the table and his eyes occasionallywanderingto the clock" (238). James figuresTrollopeas masteronly of a dogged which savors above all of New Grub Streetand "persistence," the self-servingindustryof that new breed of writers,the corporate hacks of nineteenth-centurymagazine culture. Unlike Dickens, Thackeray,and other novelists "able to wait for inspiration"(234), Trollope actively participatesin transforming the culturalwork of the author into a form of industrialmass production.In serialfictionsthat "betra[y]the dull, impersonal rumble of the mill wheel" (250), Trollope produces "for the in that caters day, for the moment," participating an "industry" to the immoderate,insatiableappetitesof an increasingly "hungry public" (259).23 James allows Trollope to speak in his Characteristically, "own"voice to defendhis complicitywith the new technologies of the popular marketplace:"I don't pretendthat each of my novels is an organic whole," he is made to say; "I have only undertakento entertainthe Britishpublic" (244). Such "gross, importunate"delightwithout instructionunderminesthe form of standing on which James's sense of the literary text, the author, and the author's signature depends. At the back of Trollope's literary populism, for James, is just his "honest, familiar,deliberateway of treatinghis readersas if he wereone of them" (236; emphasis added). In other words, Trollope locates himself withinthe narrativecommunity he addressesand represents,"delight[ing] wantonlyto violate" the necessaryfiction of the artist's standing outside the community, the body

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politic, the marketplace,as a privilegedobserverof their govto erningfictions:"He habituallyreferred the work in hand (in the course of the work)as a novel, and to himself as a novelist, and was fond of lettingthe readerknow that this novelist could directthe courseof eventsaccordingto his pleasure"(236, 247). "violations"of James names these onanistic self-interruptions literarydecorum,with all the fervorof moral outrage:they are not only "deliberatelyinartistic,"but positively "pernicious" (248, 247). To read James'scritiquein light of an anxiety of privilege is not to make claims for Trollope as a latent deconstructor of literary authority, as some recent readers have done, but to recognizethat James understandsTrollope's "perverse"form of self-representation the dangerousindulgenceof a "suicidal as satisfaction":a threat to the life of the Author. In responseto this threat,Jamesseizesthe opportunityto reinventa privileged form of standing,virtuallyin direct oppositionto the practices of his "extinct"literaryancestor.Figuringhimself in the terms of that fiction of location that informs his mastertexts, James claims that it is "only as an historianthat he has the smallest locus standi" (248). Here James might be said to practicewhat he ultimatelypreaches,for his open endorsementof pragmatic deceptionobscuresthe deeperdeceptionon which his authority depends.On James'sterms, the successof fiction-its powerto engagethe reader'smoral imagination-turns not on the fiction of the "reality"of the fictional world, as James declares,but on the ontologicalpretense,not unlike the one deployedby the legal formalists,that this world has been made in the image of that pure and transparent"history,"a form of representation discoversthe unseen ordersanimatinghuman and social realities and lays them transparently bare. James's notion of the author's standing draws on, even as it undermines,the continuing currencyof this latter myth: the "intendingnovelist" must not "th[ink] of admitting" the myth's fictionality, for without it, he "is nowhere"(248).24 If James enlists this myth in the interest of the reader's pleasure and engagement,he also capitalizes on its power to naturalizethe commodity status of the writer'ssignatureas a form of political and moral standing.That necessaryfiction of the text's verisimilitude,James argues, "permeates,animates, all the workof the most solid storytellers; need only mention we select a single instance) the magnificenthistoricaltone of (to Balzac, who would as soon have thought of admitting to the readerthat he was deceivinghim, as Garrickor John Kemble would have thought of pulling off his disguise in front of the

AmericanLiteraryHistory 45

footlights"(248). Apart from the lofty ease with which James counterexamples privilegesthe "singleinstance"and suppresses (what, for instance, of Thackeray,whom James here admits as one of the "finest" English novelists, and who also stages his literaryproductionin problematicways?),his analogycompromises its own logic. In an importantsense, figureslike Garrick and Kemble can never be disguised;rather than perfect the watcher'ssense of an alternative,verisimilitudinous world,they exhibit their own artistic capital, making the audience constantly aware of observingthe propertiesof genius-Garrick's Lear, Olivier's Hamlet, Hoffman's Shylock. Such performances do not produce autonomous realitiesso much as they confirmthe distinctlyfictive natureof the acts in question and the contingencyof the world bounded by the footlights.At the same time, however,these contractualaestheticdeceptionsnaturalize high-culturerituals of witnessing,spectating,and consuming. They thus make "real" for the audience not the dramatic events representedbut the ideological and institutional practices-including those of authorship,the signature,and the text-by which individuals come to know and name human experience.The dangerof such acts of maskingas James here endorses thus lies not in our believing what is invented to be true (as James's Puritan literaryancestorsmight have feared) but in our believingwhat is contingentto be irrevocablygiven. The moralauthorityor standingJamesseeksto reconstitute trades,at least in part, on that belief. So he upbraidsTrollope, in a last salvo, for abrogatingthe fiction of authorialprivilege: "When Trollope winks at us and reminds us that he is telling us an arbitrarything, we are startledand shocked in quite the same way as if Macaulay or Motley were to drop the historic mask and intimate that William of Orangewas a myth or the Duke of Alva an invention" (248). James's own phrasingarticulateswhat the author must not "th[ink]of admitting":that history,broadlyconstrued,is myth, is invention,but forbroadly political and ideological purposes we pretend that it is not. Refusing or failing to treat the production of literature(even briefly, narratively,hermeneutically)as an act of "historical" representation, Trollope compromisesboth the value of fiction and the privilegedstandingof the author;winkingat us in the midst of his own performance,he is guilty of far more thanjust "shocking"literarymanners.In James'sterms, he breachesthe contractbetweenwriterand readerby which both agree,in the interestof deeperheuristicpurposes,to treat the institutionsof authorship and the literary as if governed by transhistorical truths. This magnificentdeception-worthy of the saving lies

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told by James'sfictionalproxies-would preservethe very possibilityof the moral imaginationagainstthe dangersof nihilism in a worldincreasingly createdin the imageof conventionalone. form of authorshipis a threatto this social contract; Trollope's it erodes that provisional and metaphoric place of standing beyond the limits of culture, leaving both the author and his readingpublic "nowhere." James censures Trollope for violating these metaphoric boundaries, as artificial and as rigid as property stakes in a suburban neighborhood, because his failure to acknowledge them suggestsa possibilitythat James is at some pains to suppressin the interestsof his own moral standing:that the author is as "historian" not unrelatedto otherconspicuousinterpreters of modem culture,whose self-interest Jameselsewherecleverly exposes. The author James imagines in contrast to Trollope, who would offer"evidence"of felt experiencein whichwe "can believe" and thus reproducethe "real"thing, bears a notable family resemblanceto the publishingscoundrel(MatthiasParof don), the bureaucratic (the narrator "Inthe Cage,"whom spy James eerily anticipatesby linkingTrollope'sexperiencein the post office with his imagination of "modem vagrancy"),and even, in light of Dred Scott, the court reporter,who "transcribes"word for word the real testimony of actual personsin serviceof the law (248-49, 251). Likethe legalformalistsechoed by Taney in Scott, James's "historian"seeks to representhis narrativesas self-evident,marked off clearly from the "external" world he ostensiblytransumes.Embracing"the pretense of verisimilitude,"he achieves a more powerfuldeceit; he obscures his complicity as the agent of those "naturally ... just

and liberal values" of his own people in the hegemonic entertainment of the people's court (James 253; Rogin 159-60). If Trollope'smode of productionprovidesan occasion for James to reconstitutethe standingof the distinctivelyliterary enterprise,it also enablesJames to write his own act of union, bringing together British and American resources under the banner of a reconstructedrealism. Midway throughthe essay, James stages a recovery of Trollope's literaryvirtues that defends against a livelier challenge to the unified moral culture Jamesseeksto sustain,mountedby a groupof writerswho show no signs of becoming, as the Victorianshave done, "extinct": the French naturalists.Insofaras Trollope remains faithfulto a moralizedEnglishtraditionof the novel, his literarypractice provides James with the material to attack the serious threat to the fiction of standing posed by the French avant-garde. Initially figuringTrollope so as to reify the boundarybetween

American Literary History

47

him marketplaceand authoriallocus standi,Jamestransfigures in orderto buttressthe distinctionbetween a "French"realism that openly challengesits own formsof authorityand an English moral "fecundity."He therebyperformsan act of genealogical recovery, like that on which the Nietzschean slave revolt is founded, that will secure both his inheritanceof the English traditionand his power to figure,and advertise,his transumption of it. James carefully preparesfor the intrusion of the French onto the terrainhis essay maps. At the outset, he makes only a casual referenceto these "votariesof the new experimentsin fiction" who seek to produce in their readers"unwontedand bewilderingsensations"(236), drawinga contrastat Trollope's expense:the latter'sfiction, limited to feminizedobservationof the "usual," is "always safe"; it undertakes"no new experiments" at all (236). By the end of the essay, however, French canons and models serve to magnify Trollope's virtues as the practitionerof a distinctively English (i.e., Anglo-Saxon)tradition of the novel. His "happy, instinctive" perception of "character" usefullyopposesthe "so-calledscientificview"that "has lately found ingenious advocates among the countrymen and successorsof Balzac"(239). AlthoughTrollopeachieveshis knowledge of human psychology by "grace,"he nonetheless employs that knowledge in the service of "his great taste for the moral question"--which he obviously understood,James notes with approval,as "the interestof fiction" (239). As the plot of "AnthonyTrollope"thickens,Jamesgenders the terms of his comparisonwith increasingemphasis.Drawing on the ideologicalcurrencyof the separatespheres,he suggests that Trollope's domestic and feminine practicesstand for the authentic "moral interest" on which literaryculture must be founded. In the last third of the essay, he conductsan extended comparison of Trollope with the naturaliststhat solidifiesthe "essentially"moral "interest"of fiction and the standingof the author as moral "historian"of his clearly articulatedculture. "Thereis perhapslittle reasonin it," James admits, "but I find myself comparing [Trollope's]tone of allusion to many lands and many things"with "thatnarrowvision of humanitywhich accompanies the strenuous, serious work lately offered us in such abundanceby the votariesof art for art who sit so long at their desks in Parisianquatriemes."In this context, James endorses Trollope's"unsurpassed industry"and feminizedinterest in characterover and above those more artfulFrenchpractices: if "the English writer" (embodied by Trollope) is "so occasional,so accidental,so full of the echoes of voices that are

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not the voice of the muse," he neverthelesssucceedsin a kind of representational integritythat the naturalistslack. "He tells in on the whole, more about life than the 'naturalists' our us, of sisterrepublic."Like otherEnglish"providers fiction,"Trollope is admittedly "inferiorin audacity, in neatness,in acuteness, in intellectualvivacity," and in "the art of characterizing visiblethings."But the English,Jamesclaims, "havebeen more at home in the moral world; as people say today, they know theirway about the conscience."This traditionof moralthinking constitutes "the value of much of the work done by the feminine wing"-work disparaged, typically,by the Frenchon aestheticgroundsas "deplorablythin and insipid" (252-53). with the forms of censorship Given James'sdissatisfaction imposedby Anglo-Americanliterarycanonsand the statements of his support for French writers throughout the 1880s, his language initially comes off as oddly moralizing. Comparing Trollopeand Zola, he remarksthat "[florTrollopethe emotions of a nurserygovernessin Australiawould take precedenceof the adventures of a depravedfemme du monde in Paris or London" (252). (In other words, Trollope is interestedin the domesticvirtues,whereasZola is interestedin trollops.)James's fromthose of the Puritan concerns,however,differsubstantively canons of which they bear some traces.Naturalistviews-with their "gimletlike"narrownessof focus-pose a threat not because they freelyrepresentharddrinkingand loose women but because they freely representalternativeinstitutionswhose activities mirror the "depravities"- that is, the unnaturalcharacter-of normativesocial orders.Zola's interestin the abnorthose "polluting things"(238), mal, the genital,the excremental, the existence of forms of life at the marginsof norhighlights mative politicalcommunity;it also suggests waysin whichthese forms of life are suppressedin the interestof keepingthe body politic pure and whole. Throughoutthe 1880s, in such texts as The Portraitof a Lady, Daisy Miller, The Princess Casamassima, and The Bostonians, James began to representthese mechanisms of suppression;each of these fictions, in the unstable departureof its protagonist from its elaborately constructedformal integrity,signals the human costs of the narratives of identity on which particular communities, or revolutionary otherwise,are founded.In the mask of cultural critic, however, James gave precedenceto his anxieties about the ones- through preserving institutions-especiallythe literary which individualsengage in collective and moral discourse,in a moment when the continuingpossibilityof that discoursewas at stake. Effectinga recoveryof Trollope's authorialpractices

AmericanLiteraryHistory 49

allows James to lay claim to, and protect, "essentiallya moral, a social interest": fictionof the author'sstanding,which will the enable him to teach his readersabout and expose othercultural fictions of power and identity. Finally, to measure Trollope against the naturalistsis to "fix," in the phraseof a Taney advocate, one form of national characteras a usable commodity in James'sbid to reconstruct
the literary map of modernity (Van Evrie iii).25 Playing on the

strongcontrastbetween"natural"Englishvirtuesand the artful dodges of the naturalists,James reifies an essentializedracial differencebetweenthe novelistictraditionsthat will enablehim to contain, and lay claim to, the body politic of Anglo-America. Thus he characterizesthe new French writers as superior in they "audacity,""neatness,""acuteness,"and "arrangement"; exhibit all the dubious virtues of Gallic "art" and cunning. Speaking as the protesting "historian,"James twice refers to the naturalistsas "votaries," thereby invoking the charge of papist sensuousnessso dear to the Protestantimagination.By his contrast, Trollope eschews all artistic "perversions"; is a genius, as the Frenchthemselveswould say, of the "honnete," an unself-conscious,healthy openness to the world. Trollope "writes,he feels, he judges like a man," but a man who "has kept the purityof his imagination,"and so embodies the "natural decorum of the Englishspirit"(238). His embodiment of to this essentialcharacter,his transparency the constituencyhe represents,guaranteesTrollope's"morejust and liberal"form of perception;because his "naturalrightnessand purity" are "so real,""the good thingshe projectsmust be real"(253, 260). of Unlike the narrator TheAmericanScene, who discoverswith is dismay that his state of desirefor representativeness radically undercutby the racialpolyphonyof the states,James'sTrollope can be imagined to stand for the unified culturehe surveys,to embody a fantasy of authorial"possession"and containment. In orderto preservethis American dream of the narrative community whose ongoing history can be, from the authorial locus standi, comprehendedwhole, James must revert to the same tactic as Taney, invokingand "fixing"the "natural"category of race. He thus ends his long good-bye to Trollopewith a proclamationof inheritancethat shores up the racialboundaries of, and his own proprietaryrightsto, his newly acquired constituency:"A race is fortunatewhen it has a good deal of the sort of imagination- of imaginativefeeling- that had fallen to the share of Anthony Trollope; and in this possession our Englishrace is not poor" (260). The final epithet of inclusion"our Englishrace"-suggests that James standsfor a greatEn-

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glish tradition sanctifiedby virtue of its historical continuity and its metaphysicalessentialism.Yet his high-mindedpraise of Trollope, as a credit to their mutual race, constitutes an inspiredact of genealogicalrevolt. Like the good ascetic priest of Nietzsche's genealogy, James effectively invents the racial characterhe draws on as a natural resource and claims as a naturalinheritance: Englandis a social constituencyhe has only and not wholly acquired,and whose essential "charrecently acter"and values he will selectivelyendorse in the developing interestsof his self-representation.26 the moment of "TrolAt lope," James is busy reinventinghimself as heir apparentto "the old Englishtradition";invoking the fiction of a transhistorical racial character,James imagines a new form of literary productionin which the savingvirtuesof a highercivilizationand of its literaryforms-will themselvesbe savedfrom "virtual extinction." James's invocation of race suggeststhe complexity of the kind of "historical"gesture he imagines within the essay; it ensuresboth the preservation the novel as a vehicle for moral of discourseand James'sproprietary rightsto the genre.The play the of his homophonesat the end of "Trollope" (between "poor" and the "pure") reveals that his concern with the aesthetic povertyof America implicatesa concernwith the social purity on which his own standing and the claims of his texts to the status of moral discoursedepend. In the logic of James'sart of fiction, the authoritative reinvention of Anglo-America demands a recontainmentof the polis that will guaranteeboth the externality-the moral disinterestedness-of the observer and the transparencyof his fictions to the culture for which they stand:one moral community, with "morejust and liberal perceptions"of all. His "historical"invocation of an ontologically bounded racial identity serves the continuingpossibility of moral discourse and unified moral community; it enables James to reinventthe author as an individualwith privileged access to naturaltruthsso "real"that "the good thingshe projects must be real."Againstthe nihilism that threatensthe borders of the literary,James reimaginesracialidentityin orderto effect a recovery of some essential human capacity for selfrealizationand moral agency. James'sstrategicmaneuver,however,obviouslybelies the dialecticalprocess of his own self-invention(of which it forms a part)and of social identity as he so complexly imaginesit in his fiction.By the end of the essay,he has thus assumeda deeply ironic resemblanceto the historical figure of Dred Scott: the latterstands,in legaldiscourse,beyondthe law andthusremains

AmericanLiteraryHistory 51

a slave, while James actively seeks such a culturallocus standi in order to become a master. As the model of Scott suggests, his reinventionof moral agencyis effectedat the expenseof the moral or hermeneuticattention it intends to develop, insofar as it trades on an unexamined identificationwith the cultural orthodoxies and institutions it purportsto transform.In this respect,James'sliterarytributeexhibitsan unintendedbut historically appropriateself-reference,characteristicof the modernism he inauguratedand of the problemit bequeathsus, the problem not of repudiating,but of laying authenticclaim to a collective history. Notes
in This projectwas undertaken partat the OregonHumanitiesCenter,whose I gratefullyacknowledge. support 1. "Anthony Trollope" appearedin the Centurymagazinein July 1883; "The Art of Fiction" in Longman's Magazine in September 1884; "Alphonse Daudet" in the Centuryin August 1883; and "Ivan Turgenieff' in the AtlanticMonthly in January 1884, shortly after Turgenev'sdeath. 2. Black'sLaw Dictionaryidentifiesthe essenceof the doctrineof standing as the rule that no person is entitled to challengethe constitutionalityof an ordinanceor statute except insofar as he or she is adversely affectedby it. Formally, determinationsof standing are made with respect both to constitutional and nonconstitutionalcriteria;for a brief discussion, see Encyclopedia of the American Constitution4:1722. Fletcher discusses current mechanisms for determiningstandingin Americancourts. 3. Accordingto severalhistoriansof Americanlaw, the doctrineof standing has only recently-that is, during the twentieth century-come to be used to make proceduralratherthan substantivejudgments on the merits of a case. Recent discussions of shifts in the uses of the standingdoctrine and in its determinationof legalidentityincludeVining;Winter;and Nichol. 4. Cogantracesthe roots of the modem doctrineof locusstandito Roman jurisprudenceand common law, where both locus and stare criteriarefer, he argues,to position or rank. He furtherarguesthat Americanlawyersof the 1780s would have been well aware of the historical use of standingto referto and name in the law those persons deemed less than full members of the community (including, for example, women, perjurers,excommunicates, enemies of the state, and slaves). 5. Black'sdefinesthe legal "person"specificallyin terms of categoriesand criteria for standing:a person is "a human being (i.e., a naturalperson), though by statute the term may include a firm, labor organization,parttrustees,trustees nerships,associations,corporations,legal representatives, in bankruptcy,or receiver" (1028). A more extensive historical overview

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of the making up of persons in the law, with respectto faculties of apprehension, rationality,moral sense, personality,rank, place, reputation,and property,is given in Wordsand Phrases 287-314. 6. Fehrenbacher,11-151, discusses these debates as backgroundto the emergenceof Scott in great detail. 7. The elder James, at the invitation of the citizens of Newport, did give an IndependenceDay "oration"in 1861 entitled "The Social Significance of Our Institutions,"in which he discussedthe moral consequencesof slavery. 8. Fehrenbacher,289 et passim, details Greeley's intensive political engagementin the Scott case and the politics of secession. 9. Edel, 228-34, details James's friendshipswith Gray and Holmes, including their trip to the White Mountains in August 1865. Fehrenbacher, 422-23, judges the "Legal Review" to be among the best critiquesof the Taney decision; he concludes, however, that its argumentessentially replicates the logic of Greeley'seditorials. 10. Warrendiscussesin detail the political conditions shapingintellectual activity in the law school duringthe "excitingtwelve yearspriorto the Civil War"; his remarks on the war period, 262-301, suggest the continuing importanceof political activism to the institutionallife of the law school. 11. See in particularthe Autobiography 442-44. By analogy, the motive of erasure also prevailed in legal culture itself, at a moment when legal education in America sought both to professionalizeits own activities and to advertise the work done by the law as "scientific"ratherthan instrumental. For a broad discussion of this shift and its political motives and implications, see Horwitz 1-30, 253-66. 12. Warren, 74-75, discusses the importance of recent Supreme Court decisions to the moot court trials within the law school. A complete list of the publicationsof James'slaw professorsis given in CentennialHistoryof the HarvardLaw School 1817-1917 372-74, 336-37. 13. On one occasion, Parsons,who served as a liaison for the Union War Department,even organizedand armed a group of law studentsto protect local Union munitions against suspected Confederateattack. See Warren 269-72. 14. See Warren 20-21, and especially 262-64, on the involvement of Harvardscholarswith Fugitive Slave Law cases and on their discussionsin popularperiodicalsof such cases and of Dred Scott. 15. James representshis motives for attendingHarvardas follows:"What I 'wanted to want' to be was, all intimately,just literary,"to achieve "the real disclosure,the largerrevelation"of characterthroughthe study of the "young types" at the law school "underthe rich cover of obscurity"(Autobiography413-14, 425-26). He calls himself "the queerest of forensic recruits"(417) and "a singularlyalien member" of the community (307).

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In fact,attendanceat the law school duringthe waryearsdeclineddrastically; the significantlyreduced size of the community would presumablyhave made it difficultfor Jamesto remainas "alien"and "obscure"as he suggests. 16. James recalls as a "black little memory" his participationin moot court: "I liken it all to a mercifulfall of the curtainon some actor stricken and stammering,"adding that, "in truth, save for one or two minor and merely comparativemiscarriagesof the sacrificialact before my false gods, my connection with the temple was to remain as consistentlysuperficialas could be possible"(Autobiography 438). Warren,74-75, discussesthe social influenceof and qualificationsfor membershipin the MarshallClub;he also notes that most of the moot court cases "tried"in 1862 were based on such ongoingconstitutionalissues as Confederatepiracy,remarkingthat "in the midst of the Civil War,the law club was keepingabreastof the times" (323). 17. For a comprehensivelist of journals publishingpopulararticles and commentarieson legal matters in America and Britain see Jones xi-xiii. 18. Taney was politically an interestinganomaly: a former Whig turned Jacksoniandemocrat,he hailed from the borderstate of Maryland.He was marriedto Francis Scott Key's sister; accordingto the Whigs, he "reeked of partisanship"and slaveholding sympathies;Greeley's Tribunehad no hesitation in labeling him a "political hack." For extended discussion of 227; and Kutler,introduction. Taney's political interests,see Fehrenbacher 19. In the chapter entitled "Who Protects the Slave's Humanity?"(2639), Degler discusses a number of such legal formulations,as well as the legal protections extended to slaves in their mixed status as persons and movable property. 20. Taney's decision was handed down at a moment when the American judiciary moved decisively away from the legitimatingdiscourseof natural rightsin property,towarda positivist and formalistconstructionof property rights. Finally, as Horwitz argues,this shift ensued preciselyas a means of protectingthe corporateand capitalist forms of power consolidated under the originalmodel: by abandoningthe priorityof "natural"rights for that of legal precedent, the American common law judiciary effectively naturalizedcorporatepropertyand the statusof the law as an interpretive,rather than creative, instrument.See Horwitz 27-30 and 256-66. 21. Rogin charts this shift in the foundationsof American legal thinking in the judicial career of Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of the Massachusetts SupremeCourt and author of critical decisions in both the instrumentalist and formalist modes; see 31-44, 107-18, 142-59. Horwitz, 253-66, gives a more generalaccount of the rise of legal formalism as an institution for both consolidatingand naturalizingthe powers of corporateAmerica. 22. Rogin's analysis of Shaw helps to substantiatethe analogy between James and the legal formalists. Rogin argues that Shaw was transformed, in the endorsement of formalism, from a jurist who freed himself from positive law and practiceda "propertiedlegalism"(44, 142) into one who consolidated the organic identity of the state precisely by naturalizingits powers.

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Changingthe Subject

23. James thus obscures his own financialdependence, throughoutthe 1880s, on the publicationof potboiler fiction in magazinescateringto this and very appetite.See James'scomplaintsabout the "disfigure[ment]" "deformities"wreakedon his "careful Americanmagazines,in Letters prose"by 2: 388 and in Edel's introductionto Letters3: xv. 24. Rowe reads this passageand the problem of fictionalityquite differently. He considers James's suppression of Trollope's influence in some detail; his reading, however, serves ultimately to contrastJames's deeper tip[s] his hand to the reader" mastery,that of the writerwho "perpetually and thus "expos[es]the fictive foundationsfor his 'illusion' of the real,"to the practicesof Trollope as James representshim, a writerwho "presumes to have full controlof his art." In Rowe's reading,it is Trollope,ratherthan a James, who attempts a misguidedmastery,preciselyin his arbitrariness, that he has "succumbedto a certain 'suicidal satisfaction'in his own sign independenceand artistic self-sufficiency" (71-72). racismarediscussedin Frederickson 25. Van Evrie'sfiguresof celebratory and in Fehrenbacher 428-29. 26. See, for example,James'sessay on "Du Maurierand LondonSociety," publishedin the Century just two months before "AnthonyTrollope,"and reprintedin Partial Portraits.In this essay, James representshimself in a very different relation to English canons and traditions:denouncing the English as not by nature "an aesthetic people," James complains of their failure to sustain "a spontaneous artistic life; their taste is a matter of conscience, reflection,duty, and the writer who in our time has appealed to them most eloquently on behalf of art has rested his plea on moral standards-has talkedexclusivelyof rightand wrong."Here,Jamesinvokes the fact that Du Maurier"has Frenchblood in his veins" to accountfor the "richer"realism of his art; James's differentialpronouns stronglyidentify him with that "racial"attribute,as againstthe stolidity of "those" British.

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