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6 - Literary Archaeology and The Portrait of a Lady

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2010

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Summary

In the remaining two chapters the imaginative models of John Winthrop and the American jeremiad will prove much less central to an examination of the creative enterprises of Henry James and Emily Dickinson than they were to those of Melville and Whitman. In each instance more traditionally literary precursors are at work: Hawthorne and Shakespeare, in James's first major novel; Milton, in a surprising number of Dickinson's most challenging poems. But the assumptions to which “A Modell of Christian Charity” gives expression remain critical to the performance of each writer. Both Dickinson and James in some measure appear to fall outside of the struggle of what Quentin Anderson has called “associated life.” In distinct ways each writer seems an example of the American “imperial self,” working “by incorporation” to absorb the world into consciousness and its aesthetic products. But each is equally committed to the war with the self that Winthrop proclaimed and to the establishment of charity in the human community. In James that commitment is experienced in stages through a complex imaginative inheritance. In Dickinson the process is more sudden, accomplished in a striking series of dialogues with her most influential male forebear. An act of creative recovery is involved in each case, a recovery that James in particular associates both with the formal disciplines devoted to recovering and preserving culture and with Shakespeare's great romance, The Tempest. Daniel Mark Fogel has treated the influence that key images from Shakespeare's late romance exert upon the moral transformations of Milly Theale and Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove.

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A House Undivided
Domesticity and Community in American Literature
, pp. 148 - 166
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1990

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