"Horrible Impossible": Henry James's Awkward Stage

Abstract

This article reads the formal peculiarity of The Awkward Age (written almost entirely in dialogue) as a document of James's ambivalence about the psychological novel of which he was shortly to become the acknowledged master. Approximating the form and texture of an impossible or unperformed play, The Awkward Age explores the depsychologizing possibilities of drama and shows James resisting precisely the interiorizing narrative techniques he bequeathed to the twentieth-century novel. In the process, the paper argues, James also hypothesized a community of erotic dissidence and evaded the preoccupation with sexual secrecy that dominates his later career.

Bringing Nanda forward, or acting your age in The Awkward Age

“…In a brilliant reading of the novel, David Kurnick, too, sees it as turned toward the future. Arguing that the theatrical scene‐setting of the book addresses an audience yet to come, Kurnick connects the book's insistent proleptic verbal structures to its ‘ambition to imagine a world that would sustain the radical values described in the novel’ . For Kurnick, The Awkward Age 's proleptic style and its consistent use of foggy, under‐descriptions of characters and settings looks towards a future which cannot be staged within the social boundaries of the novel's world.…”