posted on 2019-04-08, 10:55authored byRachel Murray
In its sheer obviousness and inability to conceal itself, stupidity functions as a vital foil to the unscrupulous workings of the intellect in The Spoils of Poynton and The Golden Bowl. This essay examines the cultural and historical context of James’s appropriation of stupidity as a positive force capable of restoring ethical clarity to situations that have become mired in complexity. By tracing the pairing of stupid and intelligent characters, I argue that in contrast to the failed union of Fleda Vetch and Owen Gereth, Bob and Fanny Assingham represent the sublimation of a marriage of opposites into a dialectical union.
History
School
The Arts, English and Drama
Department
English and Drama
Published in
The Henry James Review
Volume
37
Issue
2
Pages
191 - 203
Citation
MURRAY, R., 2016. “Delightfully dense”: The art of stupidity in late James. The Henry James Review, 37 (2), pp.191-203.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publication date
2016-05-20
Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal The Henry James Review and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1353/hjr.2016.0011.