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- Title
"Who Could say now with What Passion?": Reimagining Henry James and "The Beast in the Jungle".
- Authors
Stuart, Christopher
- Abstract
James's closest queer friends and those whom Anesko calls "satellite figures" (men James knew as acquaintances or as the friends of friends) "enjoyed" a relative "exemption" from persecution "largely because of the prerogatives of class privilege."[6] Anesko goes on to document a "surprisingly open network of queer filiation in which James occupied a central place." Although James was nearly three decades older than Andersen, and May is five years younger than Marcher, one of the story's curiosities is how May seems practically from the outset to parallel James in his avuncular relation to Andersen. James registered his resulting heartache in his letters, which Edel summarizes as "pleading and pathetic", a record mainly of "[James's] anguish: the pain of separation, the feeling that Andersen, who is always in Rome, is too aloof as he lived his own life in the imperial city."[19] With his beloved seeming not to value, or even to recognize, the love that he so yearned to give, James fell back on the time-tested consolation of fiction. Quoting Lubbock who quotes James, Anesko offers us a rare glimpse into how direct James could be when expressing his homoerotic desires to a sympathetic and like-minded friend: As for me, alone and unhampered in a great foreign capital, [James] makes great round eyes of envy and delight at the thought.
- Subjects
JAMES, Henry, 1843-1916; HOMOSEXUALITY; JUNGLES; ENVY; BIOGRAPHICAL fiction; LGBTQ+ identity; ARABS; SEXUAL minority men
- Publication
ELH, 2023, Vol 90, Issue 3, p827
- ISSN
0013-8304
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/elh.2023.a907210