Abstract
My thesis is concerned with the discussion of good versus evil and how heteronormativity affects subjectivity, ultimately contributing to Henry James’s characters’ inability to perceive their good doings or their sins. The complication in this
argument lies in James’s awareness of the gray areas in human existence, illustrating that nothing, not even consciousness, is absolute in that we can never fully know others or ourselves. The only way to experience the freedom of existence is to question the structures put in place to restrain us and in this case, how heteronormativity assigns virtue to those who perform gender roles accurately. With that being said, my thesis argues that the male protagonists’ romantic perceptions become an oppressive male gaze onto their female counterparts as their impressions detail hidden desires. I would like to argue that these “desires,” stem from the male narrator’s ambition to understand their relationship with their female counterparts through the lens of conservative heteronormative romantic traditions, but being that their women counterparts each actively resist heteronormative gender expectations, they experience something akin to Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick’s “homosexual panic.” It’s essentially this that causes a disjointed understanding and perception between the two parties as the men misunderstand the women’s individuality, showing that James wants to challenge our understanding of desire by illustrating unconventional relationships between men and women that transgress heteronormativity. The fact that these women are “gazed” upon creates the misconception of their
submissiveness when each woman is actively working to subvert this gaze along with the societal implications forced upon them, and they only seemingly fail to do this due to the subjective perspective of the male narrator. In the end, the women are faced with fatality and illnesses, marking both a liberation for the women not because death, but because they have been able to accurately perceive themselves and their male counterparts before their death. What arises in James’s texts, then, is not the portrayal of good or evil people, but a critique on the way heteronormative structures can work to distort identity in that it rejects unconventional relationships, resulting in a misunderstanding from both readers and characters as they struggle to define their marginalized desires.