The Portrait of a Lady - Chapters 22-28

[Lily]

@47Jeremy wrote: "...I thought we were only dealing with James's dense style, but maybe the language serves another purpose as well...."

Hmm... was pursuing some information about Allen Bloom today and came to this in the Wiki entry for Leo Strauss. Is it perhaps too presumptuous to relate this to James?

"...In 1952 he published Persecution and the Art of Writing, arguing that serious writers write esoterically, that is, with multiple or layered meanings, often disguised within irony or paradox, obscure references, even deliberate self-contradiction. Esoteric writing serves several purposes: protecting the philosopher from the retribution of the regime, and protecting the regime from the corrosion of philosophy; it attracts the right kind of reader and repels the wrong kind; and ferreting out the interior message is in itself an exercise of philosophic reasoning.[13][14] Taking his bearings from his study of Maimonides and Al Farabi, and pointing further back to Plato's discussion of writing as contained in the Phaedrus, Strauss proposed that the classical and medieval art of exoteric writing is the proper medium for philosophic learning: rather than displaying philosophers' thoughts superficially, classical and medieval philosophical texts guide their readers in thinking and learning independently of imparted knowledge. Thus, Strauss agrees with the Socrates of the Phaedrus, where the Greek indicates that, insofar as writing does not respond when questioned, good writing provokes questions in the reader—questions that orient the reader towards an understanding of problems the author thought about with utmost seriousness...."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss

[Goodreads links added.]

Do we think there are problems that James "thought about with utmost seriousness" when writing PoaL?

-------------------------

@44Madge wrote: "...There is homoeroticism in James' portrayal of Ralph ..."

Is there any more homoeroticism in James's portrayal of Ralph than his portrayals of Warburton or Osmund?

[Madge UK]

I think there are problems for those of his readers not accustomed to dealing with serious philosophic thoughts within a novel, within fiction, or not wanting to deal with them there.

James tries to deal with the problem of writing about sexual feelings but I think he was too mixed up about his own sexuality to do this well.

[Lily]

Madge wrote: "...James tries to deal with the problem of writing about sexual feelings but I think he was too mixed up about his own sexuality to do this well...."

I've not read enough biographical information about James to accurately assess, but in reading his novels, I feel as if the writing is as constrained by the mores and laws of its time as by the narrator's own self-knowledge.

[Madge UK]

The general biographical consensus seems to be that James was a closet homosexual and the mores of his time were far more constrained about homosexuality than about heterosexuality.

I do find Ralph to be an aesthetic, consumptive, homoerotic figure, portrayed rather as Wilde portrayed Dorian Gray. and in keeping with characters from Beardsley's Yellow Book (to which James contributed). More so than either Warburton or Goodwood.