Stasis & Verve: Henry James and the Fictions of Patience

Abstract

What are the implications of patience's prominence in the final paragraphs of both Roderick Hudson and Portrait of a Lady? How do these patiences differ from each other, and from patience as more ordinarily considered? Such questions provide the frame for a more sustained engagement with patience, as deployed in The Golden Bowl. Patience, in the hands of Maggie Verver and the Prince, becomes luridly preferable to what it otherwise seems to defer; James's treatment of patience, I argue, posits this mode of temporality as inextricable from understandings of knowledge, authority, and (most plangent in The Golden Bowl) from love.