The Jolly Corner | Henry James’s The Jolly Corner: The Writer’s Fable and the Deeper Matter
In the following essay, Bier shows how Nathaniel
Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe provided a
model and an ‘‘anti-model,’’ respectively, for ‘‘The
Jolly Corner.’’
We know how much James admired and identified himself with Hawthorne. He not only wrote the first extended critical study of Hawthorne but manifestly used him as a model for his own work: the general moral orientation, including Hawthorne’s concept of the Unpardonable Sin of human manipulation; the cool cerebral style and distancing technique; the careful effects of subtlety and ambiguity; and the famous disenchantment, exemplary and then strategic for James, with the impoverished and sometimes repelling American scene.
But if James’s conscious literary and psychological...
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