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Stephen P. Ryder
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 2797
Registered: 10-1997
| | Posted on Wednesday, August 06, 2003 - 9:23 am: |       |
Henry James, Jack the Ripper, and the Cosmopolitan Jew Staging Authorship in The Tragic Muse
Blair, Sara
From: English Literary History (ELH) 63.2 (1996) 489-512
Summary:
"James, I argue, engages the Anglo-Saxonist idiom heightened by the Ripper murders in the service of challenging narrower notions of the 'Anglo-Saxon' imagination, risking gestures of filiation with ambiguously "cosmopolitan" figures. Against more defensive notions of type, his internationalist performances concern and themselves depend upon an 'Anglo-Saxon' character whose currency is 'convertible' rather than fixed. What James posits for his own culture-building is the crucial role of defending against the 'object density and puerility' of a degraded discourse of culture, whose 'lo[w] level of Philistine twaddle' circulates throughout the Anglo-American press, compromises authentic communication, and 'writes the intellect of our race too low.'"
Ahhh... how I miss the empty jargon of academia.... 
Stephen P. Ryder, Editor
Casebook: Jack the Ripper |
Christopher T George
Inspector
Username: Chrisg
Post Number: 270
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, August 06, 2003 - 11:32 am: | |
Hi, Stephen:
Good pick up. I recently found this same material as a chapter in a book by Sara Blair, which came out around the same time as the publication of her academic paper in English Literary History that you have cited.
See Chapter 4, "James, Jack the Ripper, and the cosmopolitan Jew: Staging Authorship in The Tragic Muse," in Sara Blair, Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1996; x, 259 p., ill.; 24 cm.
I have not read The Tragic Muse in detail but have skimmed it. The book is available on-line as an e-text beginning at The Tragic Muse, Chapter I.
As you might suspect if you know James's oeuvre, the plot centers around upper middle class society people and, in this case, how a family of Jews, the Rooths, function (or don't fit) in that genteel society.
Spry, I have a similar intellectual blurb to share about Blair's theory of Jewishness. One critic, Sheila Teahan, has written,
'[Blair's] reading of The Tragic Muse focuses on the cultural work performed by the figure of the Jew. Miriam Rooth's insistently invoked "blankness" tropes her power of self-invention and ultimately an ideal "freedom from determinate cultural identity." But the Jew figures a "danger to unified culture" as well as this cultural mobility, and Miriam functions as a pharmakon whose cosmopolitanism signifies both disease and cure for the community in which she circulates. Figuratively "purged" of her Jewishness by the novel's end, she is rehabilitated as the embodiment of a "revitalized national culture."'
It seems that Sara Blair is using the idea of a Jewish Jack the Ripper suspect as a symbol of the darkness and alienness that she assumes being Jewish may mean to James and western society of the day, i.e., that the Jews were perceived as a threat to Anglo-Saxon western society. We might we see that these types of ideas, seen to be current around 1880-1910 or so among people like Henry James and others of his strata of society in England (James though American-born became a British subject) led to the Fascist leanings of some of the British upper classes in the 1930's.
All the best
Chris |
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