Changing the Subject: Henry James, Dred Scott, and Fictions of Identity

Author(s): Sara B. Blair

Source: American Literary History, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring, 1992), pp. 28-55
Published by: Oxford University Press
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Changing the Subject:
Henry James, Dred Scott,
and Fictions of Identity
Sara B. Blair

In July 1883, Henry James dedicateda memorial review

in the Centurymagazine to the fiction of Anthony Trollope.
Like all of James's assessments of other novelists, the essay
strategicallypromotes James's literarydoctrine even as it re-
views its ostensible subject. Trollope's death provided James
with an occasion for revisingthe status of the novel as a social
form-an occasion that came, in 1883, at a particularlyop-
portunemoment for James himself. Returningto Europeafter
the deaths of both his parents, eager to cash out the literary
capital accruingfrom his first major success two years earlier,
The Portraitof a Lady, James is centrallyconcernedwith the
managementof his own professionalcareer.Like other, better-
knownessaysof the mid- 1880s, including"TheArt of Fiction,"
"Daudet,"and "IvanTurgenieff,""AnthonyTrollope"reveals
James negotiatingthe "complex fate" of his social identityand
his masteryof a transatlanticreadingpublic.1
At the literaland criticalcenterof the Trollopeessay,James
formulatesa sweepingindictment of his predecessor'sliterary
practicethat has profoundconsequencesfor this work of self-
invention. "It is impossible," he asserts, "to imagine what a
novelist takes himself to be unless he regardhimself as an his-
torian and his narrativeas a history. It is only as an historian
that he has the smallest locus standi" ("Anthony"247). James
appearshere to be making a fairly restrictedclaim about ver-
isimilitude and the formal integrity of the work of art. The
notion of the locusstandi,however,enablesJamesto inaugurate
a processof criticalself-fashioningthat would culminatein the
prefacesto the New York Edition. By implicationand indirec-
tion, the Trollope essay composes James as a figurewho oc-
cupies a privileged vantage point at the margins of his own
community. Witnessingand representingfrom that metaphoric
place, the author is empowered with a moral authority-in
 AmericanLiteraryHistory 29

effect, a moral omniscience-that transcendsthe practicesand

the limits of the community it wholly comprehends.As the
prefaceswill later do with greaterirony and self-consciousness,
"Anthony Trollope" promotes a fiction of the author'slocat-
edness in a "greatgood place" from which authenticrepresen-
tations (as transparentand objectiveas those of "history"itself)
will ensue.
The figuralwork of self-inventiondone in the "Trollope"
essay becomes more obvious when we recover the continuity
of its central metaphor with a body of legal thinking about
personification,individualism, and the formation of political
community. In the language of jurisprudence,locus standi-
literally, from the Latin, "a place to stand on"-signifies the
rightof the individual,basedon a legallydefensibleand tangible
interestin a particularissue, to appearbefore a body of justice
and make claims for its resolution.2In modem Americanju-
risprudence,standinghas become a mechanism by which fed-
eral courts claim or disclaim jurisdiction over certain issues,
particularly constitutional issues, brought before them and
thereby manage legal and political questions on procedural
grounds.3Yet even this technical function preservesthe roots
of standing as a social metaphor:the court will hear only an
individual entitled, literally, to stand up before the court, an
individual whose political and social status guaranteesmem-
bershipin the community and consequentlythe rightto take a
stand (Winter 1387).4 If the doctrine of standing serves as a
mechanism for deciding who will have a say in court, it also
determines who counts, for legal purposes, as an individual,
authorizedto representhim- or herselfbeforethe law. Through-
out the history of American jurisprudence,the doctrine of
standinghas thus shaped and representedlegal understandings
of identity, the political subject, and personhood;it has effec-
tively naturalizedindividualismas the basis for the institution
of the law (Vining 2, 55).5
James'sapparentlyfortuitousinvocation of legal discourse
not only mobilizesthe ideologyof individualism;it puts at issue,
in his contrast between Trollope's failed authorship and the
fiction of authorshipJames defends, the origins and represen-
tativenessof social texts and forms of identity. In this respect,
James'smodest reviewof Trollopeintersectswith the emerging
use of the standing doctrine in nineteenth-centuryAmerican
law and, in particular,with a legal opinion deliveredby the US
SupremeCourt 26 years earlier,in March 1857, on a case that
transformedthe legal work of making up people: the case of
DredScottv. JohnA. Sandford,US Howard 19. In both James's
 30 Changingthe Subject

review and the court's controversialopinion, the concept of

standing-membership within a coherent political and narra-
tive community-is pressedinto the serviceof constructingand
naturalizingpolitically chargedfictions of identity. Moreover,
the structureof James's argumentto standingresemblesthat
of the Taney Court in several important respects. While the
latterexploits the doctrineof standingto createa form of iden-
tity, based on race, that lies outside the protectionof the law,
outside "legitimate"political community, and outside consti-
tutional discourse,James invokes locus standi to constructan
author privilegedin his implied access to transcendentallaws,
anteriorto the limitationsof cultureand its historicallyspecific
institutions.In both cases, the logic of standingpromotes po-
litical empowermentthrough regulatoryfictions of race, read
as the signifierof a naturalcontinuitybetweencommunityand
the text that stands transparentlyfor it.
Read against the Scott case, James's essay finally reveals
the deeper ideological resources and designs of an emerging
Like the increasingly literarymastery. Like the increasinglyprominent proponents
prominentproponents of formalism in American legal culture, James embracesthe
offormalism in Ameri- provisionalityof his own authorityand of the texts he produces.
can legal culture,
James embracesthe Paradoxically,he therebyinauguratesthe second-ordermastery
provisionalityof his celebrated in our own postmodern moment, a mastery that
own authorityand of legitimatesitself by delegitimation,in the advertisementof its
the texts he produces. own fictionality,its own contingency.Yet-as James's use of
the standing doctrine in "Anthony Trollope" and Taney's in
the text of Scott will suggest-this "higher"recognitionof tex-
tual strategiesas such selectively conceals its own complicity
with the forms of authorityit challenges.In particular,it con-
ceals its dependence on authorizingorthodoxies of race and
social puritythat effectJames'srecoveryof the metaphysicsof
text, author,and representationthat he ostensiblyseeksto undo.
To read "Anthony Trollope" against the case of Scott is thus
to reconsiderthe originsand the costs of James'sliterarymas-
tery, and of the fictions of identity and power onto which it
opens out in the name of fiction'slaws.
More specifically,to connect James with legal thinkingis
also to force a reexaminationof his masteryin the definitively
Americanculturalcontext he attemptsto suppress.Despite his
wholesaleeffortsthroughoutthe 1880s to obscurehis American
past, James's self-inventionevinces revealingsocial and insti-
tutional forms of connection with the culture of Dred Scott,
most notably in the political content of his domestic life. Like
his criticalcharity,James'sknowledgeof the genteelcultureof
abolition began at home. Despite its peripatetictendencies,the
 AmericanLiteraryHistory 31

James family remainedin New York continuouslyfrom 1845-

55, a crucial decade in the development of abolition politics,
which ushered in vociferous debates on states' rights, the ex-
pansion of slaveryinto the American territories,fugitive slave
laws, and the legal status and viability of the Missouri Com-
promise.6Frequently,the architectsof these debates were vis-
itors in the James household. Although the elder James char-
acteristicallyobscured the institution of slavery as a spiritual
condition "detached"from the realitiesof race, he was deeply
engagedin intellectualexchangewith such devoutpoliticaljour-
nalists and advocatesas CharlesA. Dana (whose cousin, Rich-
ard Dana, tried the Fugitive Slave Law cases that galvanized
polite Boston society in the 1850s, as well as the treason pro-
ceedingsagainstJeffersonDavis), RufusGriswold,N. A. Willis,
and George Ripley.7The elder James was particularlyclose to
Horace Greeley duringthe latter'sexplosive years of sectional
wranglingat the New YorkTribune.James himself remembers
visiting Greeley there, admittingthat the Republicancrusader
"droppedinto my mind the germ of certainintereststhat were
long afterwards to flower" (Autobiography 44).8 During the
months of abolitiondebatesthat culminatedin Greeley'scaning
near the US Capitol in January 1856 at the hands of a future
Confederategeneral,the elderJames continuedto contributea
series of "Letters"to the Tribunefrom the family's temporary
residencesin Europe.Meanwhile,Greeleywas alertingthe Tri-
bune'sreadersto the impendingScottdecision and the political
consequencesof "thegreat case" (AlexanderH. Stephens,qtd.
in Kutler xii); immediately afterthe court deliveredits verdict,
he began a series of passionate editorialsthat set the tone of
the Republicanresponse,denouncingthe decision as "abomi-
nable," morally equivalentto the judgment of "those congre-
gated in any Washington bar-room" (New York Tribune 15
Feb. 1856). Throughoutthe fracas,the elderJames's"Letters"
continued to appear in the Tribunealong with Greeley's in-
flammatoryprose.
If the intellectual pretensionsof the family patriarchex-
posed the younger James to abolition politics of the drawing
room, so too did his own experienceof antebellumAmerican
popular culture. Among his most memorable childhood ex-
cursions, James highlightsa trip in November 1853 to P. T.
Barnum'sGreat American Museum, where he saw Barnum's
landmark,controversial,and highly spectacularproductionof
Uncle Tom's Cabin, replete with its eroticized and proslavery
overtones;he latersaw the National Theatre'sextendedversion
of the play on the equallymemorableoccasion of his first"the-
32 Changingthe Subject

atre party." Beyond these public performances,the text of

Uncle Tom's Cabin shaped James's experienceof the middle-
class institutionsand values of New York. By his own admis-
sion, he "livedand moved," duringearlychildhood,"withgreat
intensity,in Mrs. Stowe'snovel." At "exactlythe seasonof [its]
freshness,"and of the thickening "of the great intersectional
plot," James raptlyattendedthe melodramainitiatedin Four-
teenth Street by the arrivalof the Norcom family, with three
sons and "two pieces of preciousproperty."The young slave,
Davy, remaineda playmateof James'suntil he and his mother
recognizedtheir owners'"greatKentuckyerror"and promptly
fled to claim their freedom (Autobiography92-95, 141-44).
James and his readerstoo often privilegethe purely aesthetic
characterof his motives virtually from the cradle, yet clearly
those distinctivelyJamesianactivitiesof "watching,"playgoing,
and consumingfictionwerecloselyboundedby the social issues
and anxieties that definedthe Scott decision.
In laterlife, James superciliouslyrecalledthe aestheticcul-
ture of middle-classNew York as a culture of "the busy, the
tipsy, and Daniel Webster"(Autobiography30). The popular
imaginationof Boston, in and aroundwhich James lived from
1861-1869, was even more densely imprinted with sectional
and secession politics. His activities there, aesthetic and do-
mestic, reflectthe prominenceof currentpoliticalcontroversies
in local communal life. James makes much of his presenceon
New Year's Day 1863 at the Boston Music Hall, laterto be the
site of his own controversial imagination of Union, where
thousandsof Bostoniansgatheredfor a righteouscelebrationof
Lincoln'sEmancipationProclamationthat includedEmerson's
readingof the "BostonHymn." During 1862-63, Jamesboard-
ed at the establishmentof one Miss Upham, where his fellow
diners included Joe May, son of a prominentNew York abo-
litionist, and FrancisJ. Child, a HarvardChauceriannoted for
his elegiac perorationson the state of the Union and the Har-
vardianswho had died in its cause (James,Autobiography419-
21, 427-28, PartialPortraits27-28; Edel 195, 199). Long after
armshad been laid down, the politicalcultureof the Bostonians
continuedto leave its traces;two of James'sfriends(andputative
rivalsfor the affectionsof Minny Temple)were OliverWendell
Holmes, Jr., the future SupremeCourt "justicefor the ages,"
and John Chipman Gray, future Harvardlaw professorand
brother of the distinguishedjurist Horace Gray, who in 1857
coauthored "A Legal Review of the Case of Dred Scott"-a
decisivecritiqueof the Taneydecisionand its use of the doctrine
of standing.9
 AmericanLiteraryHistory 33

The very accidental nature of the threads of connection

drawnbetween James and the drama of abolition politics sug-
gests how inevitable were the issues of sectional conflict and
racein the city and the academicinstitutionhe inhabitedduring
the early years of the war. Beyond these accidents of location,
however,James might be said to have had a much more direct
connectionto the cultureof DredScott:in 1862-63, Jameswas
not just in Boston or even at Harvardbut enrolledin Harvard
Law School, whose institutionallife duringhis brieftenurewas
rife with political debate. Before the war broke out, the law
school had become a hotbed of constitutional controversies,
which made for dramaticstudentand facultyconflictsso heated
that they occasionally threatenedthe ordinaryfunctioning of
the institution.10Even after the departureof the law school's
Southernstudentsfor Confederateregiments,legal and anthro-
pologicalcontroversyabounded.Given the dramaticallyatten-
uatedpopulationof the law school duringthe waryears,James's
formallegal educationwould not only have introducedhim to,
but made immediate, the debatesabout states'rights,war pow-
ers, and other constitutionalissues that were ragingthroughout
the legal academy.
James'sautobiographicalwritingscharacteristicallytend to
obscure the ideological and political content of his Harvard
experience;in particular,they transformthe agentsof his legal
educationinto literary"characters,"memorializedfourdecades
later in the orotund vignettes of the master phase."lHowever
strongJames'sputativelyliteraryinterestin theiridiosyncrasies
of characteror self-presentation,all of his law professorswere
activelyengagedin scholarlydisputeson abolition,states'rights,
and the constitutionalissues definedby DredScott.Joel Parker,
Royall Professor of Law and an increasinglyacerbic conser-
vative voice on the law school faculty, published extensively
throughout the 1860s on secession, the Scott case, and the
Taney Court. TheophilusParsons,Dane Professorof Law and
teacher of the first-yearlegal course on the commentariesand
common law, turned his attention, when war broke out, to
problemsof secessionand constitutionalfreedoms.EvenEmory
Washburn,Bussey Professorof Law, shifted his focus during
James's year at the law school from property law and legal
historyto write on the institutionof slaveryin Englandand on
states' rights and secession.'2All three "plungedinto political
discussion" and "engaged in acrimonious contest," and en-
couraged their students to do likewise.'3 Such developments
clearlyshapedthe intellectualclimate of the law school during
the war years. Although James representshis year of legal ed-
34 Changingthe Subject

ucation as an essentially haphazardand inconsequentialex-

perience (Autobiography438), he was in fact enrolled in the
foremostinstitutionof Americanjurisprudenceduringwhatone
historian of the law school remembersas its "golden age," a
period when its leading figureswere deeply committed, from
variouspoints of view, to the political debate on constitutional
rights and doctrines of nationhood, political community, and
race.14
I do not arguehere for a direct influenceof legal thinking
on James, but ratherfor a telling sense of confluencethat high-
lights his exposure to social and legal discoursesof standing,
individual rights, and race. Yet to advance even this limited
argument is to risk the charge of overreading,since James's
legal education, when discussed at all, has been consistently
dismissedas a historicalanomaly. Here, as is so often the case,
James'srepresentationof the event, and his self-representation
at a distance,prevails:he offersa portraitof himselfat Harvard
as an artistdetachedfromthe "practical"traininghe undertook,
involved in the community only as an outsiderby fact and by
inclination, an omniscient observerof its ritualsand practices
(Autobiography307, 411-54).15 In other words, James repre-
sents his experience of Harvard in the same constructionof
authorialdistancethat the legaldiscourseof standingmay have
helped him to shore up and to conceal. It is certainlytrue that
legal education at HarvardduringJames's tenure had not yet
been formalizedand that admissions and academic standards
werefar from consistent(QuinquennialCatalogue179;Warren
23-24). But it is also true that James attendedthe prescribed
lecturesfor first-yearlaw studentswith "prodigious"regularity
and "systematicfaithfulness";that his lectureswould have in-
cluded in-depth discussion of Blackstone'sand Kent's com-
mentaries on common law (whence the doctrine of standing
emerges), as well as a lecture course devoted exclusively to
constitutionallaw; and that James took his legal trainingseri-
ously enough to seek participationin a moot court case spon-
sored by Harvard'smost prestigiouslegal society, the Marshall
Club, whose "earnest and spirited" proceedingswould have
necessitateda working familiaritywith court and trial proce-
dures (Autobiography440-41).16 Rather than assess the influ-
ence (in the traditionalsense) of James's legal training,I wish
to recoverhis relationshipto institutionallegal thinkingabout
community, race, and identity. What would it mean to recover
the intertextualityof James's writing, particularlyduring the
1880s, with current legal thinking about public identity and
 AmericanLiteraryHistory 35

about the ontological status of its own texts as acts of naming

and shapingpublic selves?
One last area of connectionbetweenJames and the culture
of Dred Scott dramatizesprecisely this possibility of cultural
intertextuality:the accidentsof the publishingindustry.James's
literarycareer began shortly after his departurefrom the law
school, with his publicationof an unsignedreviewin the North
AmericanReviewof October 1864. The journalwas then under
the aegis of James Russell Lowell, who was one of the Review's
editors and whose Harvardlectures on English literatureand
Old French James had attended with interest. The nature of
this journal, which remained an important vehicle for James
throughout his career, highlights those startlinglyrevelatory
connections between the launching of James's "literaryself'
and the culture of Dred Scott. Apart from its literaryinterests,
the Review had long been hospitable to and respectedfor its
populist commentaryby legal scholarson currentissues in law
and legislation,a practiceit sharedincreasinglywith such pop-
ular middle-classmagazinesas the AtlanticMonthly,the Cen-
tury(in whichJames'sreviewof Trollopelaterappeared),Scrib-
ner's Monthly, Macmillan, and even Thackeray's Cornhill
Magazine.17In 1857, the Review publisheda widely read and
highly respectedessay by Timothy Farrar,a prominentBoston
attorney,entitled "The Dred Scott Case," in which Farrardis-
cussed the merits of Taney's opinion and its apparentpolitical
implications. The Review also published numerous essays by
James's professorof constitutionallaw, Joel Parker,including
"The Right of Secession"(1861), "ConstitutionalLaw and Se-
cession" (1862), and "The Right of Secessionand the Conduct
of the War" (1862).
James's knowledge of these essays, although likely, is ir-
relevant;what counts for my purposesis the intertextualityof ... what countsfor my
his ostensibly"literary"criticismwith currentsocial discourses purposesis the intertex-
of national unity, American identity, and race. Writingout of tuality of his ostensibly
"literary"criticismwith
the cultureof Dred Scott,James replicatesthe strategiesof that currentsocial discours-
text for inventingdiscursiveselves and advertisingthem as nat- es of national unity,
ural entities, and for creatinga form of authoritythat disguises Americanidentity,and
its enabling cultural resourcesas natural truths. Taney's "pe- race.
culiar" use of the standingdoctrine in Scott provides a useful
analogy, if not a model, for James's self-fashioning.Denying
Dred Scott legal standing, Taney simultaneouslyimagines his
own interventionsin the social work of making up people as
the mere manipulationof "natural"and inevitablelegal forms.
He thus becomes the "historian"of James's fiction of author-
36 Changingthe Subject

ship, a figure who reconstitutesthe narrativecommunity he

representsin a simultaneous concealment and display of his
own authorialmotives. Ironically,James'simaginationof this
form of authorshipin "Anthony Trollope"would preparethe
way for such criticallyimportantnovels as The Bostoniansand
ThePrincessCasamassima,both of whichreflecton the dangers
posed to moral consciousnessand moral communityby equiv-
alent acts of invention and disguise.
At the moment of"Trollope,"however,Jamesis primarily
concernedwith revisingthe preoccupationsof those American
literaryancestorswhose influence,duringthe 1880s, he works
consistentlyto suppress.Rewritingthe liminal statusof Hester
Prynne, who subsists on the "verge" of a moral community
orderedin the image of a covenantaljustice, and of Ishmael,
who is carriedaway from the sinkingship of stateon a wayward
coffin, James reinventsthe author so as to recontainthe body
politic of his own audience. Just as Taney's applicationof the
standingdoctrineenablesa temporaryextensionof slaveryinto
the Americanterritories,so James'smetaphorof the locusstan-
di enables him to extend the legitimate territoryof the novel
as a social genre,to createalmost single-handedlya new Anglo-
American literaryprovince whose constituentsJames will be
uniquely privilegedto represent.In its strategiesfor changing
the literarysubject,the "Trollope"essay heraldsa new age in
the historyof the novel and a distinctivelymoder form of self-
legitimation.

2. "A separate class of persons":Dred Scott and the for-

mationof political community

Like James'sdevelopingliterarydoctrine,the case of Dred

Scott raises crucial questions about social agency, representa-
tiveness, and narrativecommunity. Seekinga more literalver-
sion of the "freedom"with which James as masteris so often
identified,Scott asked the American court to adjudicatea de-
ceptively simple legal issue: whether, on the basis of their res-
idence on freesoil and in federalterritories,he, his wife, Harriet
Scott, and theirtwo daughterswerelegallyfree.Similardisputes
about ownershipand slave status had been rehearsedin state
judiciariesinnumerabletimes, but the Scotts' bid for freedom
was uniquely tied to the phenomenon of westwardexpansion
and the problem of the constitutionalstatus of slaveryin the
American territories.Furthermore,the conjunctionof legal is-
sues raisedin their case posed a unique challengeto the onto-
 AmericanLiteraryHistory 37

logicaldistinctionson which the discoursesof slaveryand states'

rightsdepended:all slaves, in the law, were consideredpersons
in some respectsand propertyin others; free blacks occupied
an even more ambiguousposition,intermediatebetweenslavery
and freedom, that called attention to the ambiguousconstruc-
tion of the American "citizen";likewise, the territoriesthem-
selves were entities that fell between categories,being neither
coloniesnor autonomousstatesbut rathera distinctlyAmerican
combinationof both (Fehrenbacher7, 64). In political,judicial,
legislative,and social terms, Scott broughtto the fore the ide-
ological motives that attendedthe historicalact of making up
people and political communities.
Ironically,historianscan provideonly partialand conflict-
ing accounts of Scott's life as a slave and of his participationin
his own case. Born in Virginiaaroundthe turn of the century,
he was sold by his original owners to Dr. John Emerson, a
medical officer,in 1832 and accompaniedhis master to army
posts in Missouri, in Illinois (on free soil), and in what is now
Minnesota (then part of the Wisconsin Territoryregulatedby
federal legislation under the Missouri Compromise).In April
1846, after Emerson's death, Scott and his wife brought suit
against Irene Emerson, the officer's widow, in the St. Louis
CircuitCourt.Therethe Scottsarguedthat, underthe provisions
of the Missouri Compromise, their residence in Illinois and
Minnesota rendered them legally free. Their suit initiated a
battle of epic proportions,conducted over an 11-yearperiod,
via bills, pleas, writs, and orders all the way up to the US
Supreme Court. By 1853, Irene Emerson's brother John A.
Sanford(whosename was consistentlymisspelledin the docket
and has thus passed into constitutionalhistory)had taken up
administrationof her estates and consequentlybecame Scott's
legal owner. The change in ownership, perhaps an expedient
effected to impede Scott's suit, had extensive implications. It
allowed Scott'sattorneysto maneuverhis suit into federalcourt
on the grounds of diversity of citizenship:Scott was a citizen
of Missouri,Sanfordof New York, and thus their differenceof
opinion as to Scott's status became a matter of federallaw.
Thesegroundsfor suit would provedecisiveand, ultimately
for the Scotts, disastrous.Sanford'sattorneysrespondedto the
federalsuit with a maneuverdesignedto defeat Scott's plea on
technical, ratherthan substantive,grounds:they claimed that
since Scott and his wife were Negroes of African descent, and
their ancestorshad been broughtto the US specificallywith the
legal status of slaves, Scott himself was by definition legally a
slave; he could not thereforeclaim US citizenshipand conse-
38 Changingthe Subject

quently had no standing-no legal right-to present a suit in

federalcourt.Sanford'sattorneysbeggedthe territorialquestion
altogether:by defining the African American categoricallyas
"slave," they demanded that the law de jure recognizeracial
categoriesas the legal basis for slaveholding.The federaljudge
in questiondeniedthis plea, but neverthelessinstructedthejury,
on what he perceivedto be the merits of the case, in Sanford's
favor; accordingly, Scott legally remained Sanford's chattel
property.
By the time the Scotts' appeal appearedon the docket of
the SupremeCourt in February1856, the originalquestion of
legal status-was Scott free by virtue of his residenceon free
soil and in the territoriesregulatedby Congress,or was he an
articleof propertygovernedby legal concepts of reversionand
comity?-had become virtually secondaryto the question of
Scott'slegalrightsand privileges:could he, or any otherAfrican
American,legitimatelyrepresenthimselfas a freeAmericancit-
izen, with all the rightsand privilegesattachingto that status,
in a US court of law?The question,in otherwords,had shifted
fromthe specificissueof Scott'slegalstatusto the largerjudicial,
legal, and political problem of making up people. Who would
count in the law of the land as a citizen, a political agent, an
individual,a human being?Who could make legitimateclaims
to legal standing,to citizenship,to moralagencybeforethe law?
The controversialopinion finally offered as the Court's
majority view was the handiwork of Chief Justice Roger B.
Taney,JacksonianDemocratand states'rightsand slaverysym-
pathizer.'8It succeedednotoriouslyin changingthe subjectin
question,in both sensesof the term.Not only did Taneyrelegate
the original legal problem--whether residencyon free soil ef-
fectively made a slave free-to the marginsof the opinion (his
remarkson this broadquestionconstituteonly a page, or about
2%, of the published opinion); he simultaneouslyundertook,
and largely on his own initiative, to reify the legal identity of
Americanblacks,both slave and free. Taney devoted 24 pages,
about 45%, of his published opinion-by far the largest sec-
tion-exclusively to the problem of black citizenship, an in-
creasinglypressingissue as Southernanxiety about the rising
populationof free blacks surgedand as sectionalcompromises
concerningthe Fugitive Slave Laws unraveled(Fehrenbacher
340). In "purely"constructionistargumentsto the legitimating
textsof Americanunion, Taneyundertakesto provethat Scott--
as a "negroof Africandescent"whose ancestorswere "of pure
Africanblood"- even iffree, could not possiblybe a citizen or
legitimatelyclaim legal standing;even the freeddescendantsof
 AmericanLiteraryHistory 39

such ancestors-even the childrenof free black parents-could

not, he asseverated,be understoodas citizens of the states, or
of the US, within the meaning of the original and originating
American texts.
To effect this proof, Taney persistentlyignores the dual
status, in the law and in the "unequivocal"language of the
Constitution,of all blacks, both free and slave. In the eyes of
the law, enslaved personswere understoodas such and as au-
tonomous moral agentswith regardto certainissues (largelyof
surveillanceand punishment,to be sure, but also of legal pro-
tections and privileges).As late as 1861, an Alabama law de-
finitivelyupheld the mixed legal identity of the slave:

[S]laves are human beings, and endowed with intellect,

conscience, and will.... Becausethey are rationalhuman
beings, they are capable of committing crimes; and, in
referencesto actswhich arecrimes,areregardedas persons.
Because they are slaves, they are necessarily,and so long
as they remain slaves, incurably,incapableof performing
civil acts, and, in referenceto all such, they are things,not
persons. (Cresswell'sExecutor v. Walker,Degler 29-30;
emphasis added)'9

Like other laws in Tennessee, Mississippi,and throughoutthe

South, this Alabama law defines slave identity historicallyand
contingentlyratherthan with explicit recourseto racist ontol-
ogy, and thereby openly displaysthe metaphysicalparadoxof
the individualwho is understoodas "equal"partspropertyand
moralagent.Taney'sopinion,however,willfullydisregardssuch
precedents,rewritingthe narrativeof personhood so as to re-
contain the body politic and to extend into the American ter-
ritoriesthose increasinglythreatenedsectional boundariesbe-
tween slaveholdingland and free. In characteristicallyorotund
prose, with sentimentalappeal to the intentions of the framers
"who formed the sovereignty"of America, Taney aggressively
misreadstheir original and originatingtext; he assertsthat no
"negro[es]of Africandescent,"slaveor free,have legalstanding,
legitimate claims to citizenship, or-finally and drastically-
legitimate identity as persons before the law (396-97). In Ta-
ney's opinion, the matter of making up people becomes, quite
literally, as simple as black and white: all middle ground, all
variegationsof standing in the legal discourse of slavery, dis-
appear,leaving in their place a rigid, governingopposition be-
tween master and slave.
The unabashedconstructionismof Taney'sargumenthigh-
40 Changingthe Subject

lights the peculiarinstitutionof legal identitywith two notable

analogiesto James's self-inventionas literarymaster. First, it
reveals-or, more accurately,remindsus-that the foundations
of legal personhoodand legal self-representation,like the foun-
dations of James's social discourseof authorship,lie in a crit-
ically naturalizeddiscourse of property.20Scott's case is dis-
missed,withinthe fictionsof the law, not forlackof a legitimately
personalor tangible interestin the matter-the bedrockcrite-
rion for determinationof legalstanding-but becausehe cannot
be counted as a citizen, or even a legal person, in the property
interestsinherentto the "commonwealth"the Courthas chosen
to protect. In orderto consolidatethose interestsand bolstera
rapidlydisintegratingAmericanUnion, Taney virtuallycreates
the form of identity on which his opinion ostensibly turns: a
"separate class of persons" uniquely composed of African
Americans, extrinsicto the Union proper, broughtinto being
by America'sfoundingtexts (Taney 411). Analogously,James
will invoke the doctrine of locus standi to figurea naturalre-
lationshipbetweenthe authorand the body politic he compre-
hends, whose higher values and ideals-like his own literary
corpus-become his propertyto protect. Both authorsremind
us of the profoundimportanceof the socialnarrativesof identity
they create:membershipindeed has its privileges.
Taney's reading of Scott suggestsa second analogy with
James'sself-inventionin its virtualobsessionwith the problem
of whom the foundingtexts of Americancultureauthentically
represent.In Taney's political reconstruction,Scott's suit for
legal identity representsa threatto that racially,culturally,lin-
guisticallycoherentcommunitybroughtinto beingby the Con-
stitution (in dangerof being weakenedby the entry of those of
"pure African" blood), and to the sanctity of the text itself,
whose "true"meaning and intention when it was framed and
adopted are so clearly discernible to the initiated. If Taney
promotes states' rights, he also defends the continuingpower
of the Constitutionto representand speak for the American
realityit "broughtinto existence"(406). His argumentdepends
on, even as it defends,the statusof the Constitutionas a found-
ing text from which legitimate political and social ordersare,
by fiat, created.
In respectto this representationof legaltexts, constitutional
and otherwise,Scott is neither unique nor idiosyncraticin the
annals of the law; rather,it reflectsa crucial shift, completed
by mid-century,in thejudicialunderstandingof the foundations
and authorityof legal discourse.As Morton Horwitz and Mi-
chael Rogin have documented, nineteenth-centuryAmerican
 AmericanLiteraryHistory 41

jurisprudenceradicallytransformedits own master narrative:

initiallyadvertisingthe law as an instrumentaldiscourse,earlier
jurists had insisted on the open-endednessof the legal text in
determinationsof identity,property,and community,and prag-
matically read that text to reflect and serve rights of property
and citizenship understood as natural rights. By the moment
of Scott, however,Americanjurists had rejectedany represen-
tation of the law as a discourse founded in such organic and
governingprinciples.Instead,they invoke the logic of a newly
consolidatedlegal formalism to insist that judicial thinking is
bound by precedent,by federallaw--in effect, by the status of
the law itself as a hermetic system of interpretation.21 At the
moment of Scott,then, Taney and the newly majoritarianlegal
formalistshe resemblesbecome preciselythe kind of "histori-
ans" imagined by James in "Trollope":abandoningthe dis-
course of naturaljustice and the acknowledgmentof the jurist's
creativeinterventionin human affairs,they naturalizethe law
as a closed, inexorable system of "logically deducible rules"
whose texts have the inevitabilityand authority of a "natural
language";they thereby obscure the real interestsand benefi-
ciaries of its doctrines (Horwitz 254; Rogin 158). In both the
constitutionaland common law arenas,jurists like Taney and
Lemuel Shawachievethe standingof legal "historians"by con-
cealing their allegianceto particularforms of power and com-
munity, infusing them in the law with "the permanence of
nature" (Rogin 145).22
Taney'sperformancein DredScott,in the historicalcontext
of its emergence,thus offersa dualanalogyto James'sformalism
in "Trollope."Concealinghis authorialpowerof judicialdesign,
Taney not only representsbut rewritesthe founding texts of
America. Likewise,James trades on the fiction of his status as
"historian"in orderto conceal his own investmentin a recon-
structedromantic subjectivity,whose texts would evince their
author'sprivilegedand intuitive access to transcendentallaws.
In James'smastertexts- and even, arguably,in "AnthonyTrol-
lope"-this gesturerevealsitselfas a heuristicfiction,a contract
for promoting imaginative interchange between author and
reader. Finally, however, that open deception, the hallmark
paradox of James's mastery, may not be quite as innocent or
constructiveas Jameswould advertise.As the analogywith Scott
also suggests, James's creation of a legitimating locus standi
ultimately depends on narrativesof identity that ensure the
formation of a community of readershe can "naturally"rep-
resent, much as the Constitution, in Taney's correspondence
theory, stands for a discretepolitical community. James's for-
42 Changingthe Subject

mation of a body of readers,like Taney'sformationof a natural

constitutional "family," depends on his construction of the
community whose values he will comprehend-and ultimately
transume-as a racially,narrativelypure body politic. In "An-
thony Trollope" and beyond, James might be said to build a
metaphoricHouse of Fiction on the remnantsof the Big House
and of America'sHouse Divided. His limited engagementwith
his own culturalresourcesconsolidatesa literarymasterywhose
foundationsunderminethe structuralchallengesto American
identity and ideology that it undertakes.

3. Fictionsof authorship:HenryJames and AnthonyTrol-

lope
If the occasion of "Anthony Trollope" enables James to
revaluatethe American sources of literarymodernity, it does
so at the safe remove of an Atlantic double cross. Having re-
turnedto Englandfor good aftera briefvisit in America,James
takes up the case of Trollope in orderto link himself with and
distancehimself from particularnationaltraditions,therebyto
invent an Anglo-Americanreadingpublic and the novel that
will representit: a vehicle for coherentmoraldiscourse,distinct
fromthe commoditycultureit scrutinizes,embodyingthe stable
values of a reified English tradition. Reading in and against
Trollope, James undertakeshis own act of reconstruction,re-
mappingthe literaryterritoryof the moder with the arena of
"consciousness"-that propertyof an Anglo-Americanprop-
ertiedclass, which providesboth the enablingresourcesand the
donneesof his mastertexts-at its center.RedressingTrollope's
authorialmisprisions,Jamesputsthe authorin his properplace:
at the marginsof that narrativelybounded, linguisticallypure
community on which his privilegedrepresentationalstanding
will depend. The case of Anthony Trollope will enable James
to defend these literaryboundaries,to "take"with the highest
seriousness,as the legitimatepropertyof the novelist, the role
of culturalguardianship.
From the outset of the essay, James links the problem of
standing with the status of the novel as a social form. His
openingparagraph,which runsto threeprintedpages,conducts
an extendedcritiqueof Trollope'smode of literaryproduction,
which, in James's terms, compromisesa necessarydistinction
between popular- and high-culturegenres-compromises, as
James ironicallyputs it, "the natureof the business."Initially,
James praisesTrollope'sindustrioushabits and his dedication
 AmericanLiteraryHistory 43

to his craft, in an anecdote that plays fortuitouslyon the met-

aphoric and metaphysicalvalue of that word:

It was once the fortuneof the authorof these lines to cross

the Atlantic in [Trollope's]company, and he has never
forgottenthe magnificentexample of plain persistencethat
it was in the power of the eminent novelist to give on that
occasion. The season was unpropitious,the vessel over-
crowded,the voyage detestable;but Trollope shut himself
up in his cabin every morningfor a purposewhich, on the
partof a distinguishedwriterwho was also an invulnerable
sailor, could only be communion with the muse. (235)

One dense paragraphlater, however, James offers a "di-

rect" representationof Trollope at work, opening the closed
cabin door to expose the latter's "magnificentexample" as a
form of jobbing ratherthan communion with the muse: "He
sat down to his theme in a serious businesslikeway, with his
elbows on the table and his eyes occasionallywanderingto the
clock" (238). James figuresTrollopeas masteronly of a dogged
"persistence,"which savors above all of New Grub Streetand
the self-servingindustryof that new breed of writers,the cor-
porate hacks of nineteenth-centurymagazine culture. Unlike
Dickens, Thackeray,and other novelists "able to wait for in-
spiration"(234), Trollope actively participatesin transforming
the culturalwork of the author into a form of industrialmass
production.In serialfictionsthat "betra[y]the dull, impersonal
rumble of the mill wheel" (250), Trollope produces "for the
day, for the moment," participatingin an "industry"that caters
to the immoderate,insatiableappetitesof an increasingly"hun-
gry public" (259).23
Characteristically,James allows Trollope to speak in his
"own"voice to defendhis complicitywith the new technologies
of the popular marketplace:"I don't pretendthat each of my
novels is an organic whole," he is made to say; "I have only
undertakento entertainthe Britishpublic" (244). Such "gross,
importunate"delightwithout instructionunderminesthe form
of standing on which James's sense of the literary text, the
author, and the author's signature depends. At the back of
Trollope's literary populism, for James, is just his "honest,
familiar,deliberateway of treatinghis readersas if he wereone
of them" (236; emphasis added). In other words, Trollope lo-
cates himself withinthe narrativecommunity he addressesand
represents,"delight[ing]wantonlyto violate" the necessaryfic-
tion of the artist's standing outside the community, the body
44 Changingthe Subject

politic, the marketplace,as a privilegedobserverof their gov-

erningfictions:"He habituallyreferredto the work in hand (in
the course of the work)as a novel, and to himself as a novelist,
and was fond of lettingthe readerknow that this novelist could
directthe courseof eventsaccordingto his pleasure"(236, 247).
James names these onanistic self-interruptions"violations"of
literarydecorum,with all the fervorof moral outrage:they are
not only "deliberatelyinartistic,"but positively "pernicious"
(248, 247).
To read James'scritiquein light of an anxiety of privilege
is not to make claims for Trollope as a latent deconstructorof
literary authority, as some recent readers have done, but to
recognizethat James understandsTrollope's "perverse"form
of self-representationas the dangerousindulgenceof a "suicidal
satisfaction":a threat to the life of the Author. In responseto
this threat,Jamesseizesthe opportunityto reinventa privileged
form of standing,virtuallyin direct oppositionto the practices
of his "extinct"literaryancestor.Figuringhimself in the terms
of that fiction of location that informs his mastertexts, James
claims that it is "only as an historianthat he has the smallest
locus standi" (248). Here James might be said to practicewhat
he ultimatelypreaches,for his open endorsementof pragmatic
deceptionobscuresthe deeperdeceptionon which his authority
depends.On James'sterms, the successof fiction-its powerto
engagethe reader'smoral imagination-turns not on the fiction
of the "reality"of the fictional world, as James declares,but
on the ontologicalpretense,not unlike the one deployedby the
legal formalists,that this world has been made in the image of
pure and transparent"history,"a form of representationthat
discoversthe unseen ordersanimatinghuman and social real-
ities and lays them transparentlybare. James's notion of the
author's standing draws on, even as it undermines,the con-
tinuing currencyof this latter myth: the "intendingnovelist"
must not "th[ink] of admitting" the myth's fictionality, for
without it, he "is nowhere"(248).24
If James enlists this myth in the interest of the reader's
pleasure and engagement,he also capitalizes on its power to
naturalizethe commodity status of the writer'ssignatureas a
form of political and moral standing.That necessaryfiction of
the text's verisimilitude,James argues, "permeates,animates,
all the workof the most solid storytellers;we need only mention
(to select a single instance) the magnificenthistoricaltone of
Balzac, who would as soon have thought of admitting to the
readerthat he was deceivinghim, as Garrickor John Kemble
would have thought of pulling off his disguise in front of the
 AmericanLiteraryHistory 45

footlights"(248). Apart from the lofty ease with which James

privilegesthe "singleinstance"and suppressescounterexamples
(what, for instance, of Thackeray,whom James here admits as
one of the "finest" English novelists, and who also stages his
literaryproductionin problematicways?),his analogycompro-
mises its own logic. In an importantsense, figureslike Garrick
and Kemble can never be disguised;rather than perfect the
watcher'ssense of an alternative,verisimilitudinousworld,they
exhibit their own artistic capital, making the audience con-
stantly aware of observingthe propertiesof genius-Garrick's
Lear, Olivier's Hamlet, Hoffman's Shylock. Such perfor-
mances do not produce autonomous realitiesso much as they
confirmthe distinctlyfictive natureof the acts in question and
the contingencyof the world bounded by the footlights.At the
same time, however,these contractualaestheticdeceptionsnat-
uralize high-culturerituals of witnessing,spectating,and con-
suming. They thus make "real" for the audience not the dra-
matic events representedbut the ideological and institutional
practices-including those of authorship,the signature,and the
text-by which individuals come to know and name human
experience.The dangerof such acts of maskingas James here
endorses thus lies not in our believing what is invented to be
true (as James's Puritan literaryancestorsmight have feared)
but in our believingwhat is contingentto be irrevocablygiven.
The moralauthorityor standingJamesseeksto reconstitute
trades,at least in part, on that belief. So he upbraidsTrollope,
in a last salvo, for abrogatingthe fiction of authorialprivilege:
"When Trollope winks at us and reminds us that he is telling
us an arbitrarything, we are startledand shocked in quite the
same way as if Macaulay or Motley were to drop the historic
mask and intimate that William of Orangewas a myth or the
Duke of Alva an invention" (248). James's own phrasingar-
ticulateswhat the author must not "th[ink]of admitting":that
history,broadlyconstrued,is myth, is invention,but forbroadly
political and ideological purposes we pretend that it is not.
Refusing or failing to treat the production of literature(even
briefly, narratively,hermeneutically)as an act of "historical"
representation,Trollope compromisesboth the value of fiction
and the privilegedstandingof the author;winkingat us in the
midst of his own performance,he is guilty of far more thanjust
"shocking"literarymanners.In James'sterms, he breachesthe
contractbetweenwriterand readerby which both agree,in the
interestof deeperheuristicpurposes,to treat the institutionsof
authorship and the literary as if governed by transhistorical
truths. This magnificentdeception-worthy of the saving lies
46 Changingthe Subject

told by James'sfictionalproxies-would preservethe very pos-

sibilityof the moral imaginationagainstthe dangersof nihilism
in a worldincreasinglycreatedin the imageof conventionalone.
Trollope'sform of authorshipis a threatto this social contract;
it erodes that provisional and metaphoric place of standing
beyond the limits of culture, leaving both the author and his
readingpublic "nowhere."
James censures Trollope for violating these metaphoric
boundaries, as artificial and as rigid as property stakes in a
suburban neighborhood, because his failure to acknowledge
them suggestsa possibilitythat James is at some pains to sup-
pressin the interestsof his own moral standing:that the author
as "historian"is not unrelatedto otherconspicuousinterpreters
of modem culture,whose self-interestJameselsewherecleverly
exposes. The author James imagines in contrast to Trollope,
who would offer"evidence"of felt experiencein whichwe "can
believe" and thus reproducethe "real"thing, bears a notable
family resemblanceto the publishingscoundrel(MatthiasPar-
don), the bureaucraticspy (the narratorof "Inthe Cage,"whom
James eerily anticipatesby linkingTrollope'sexperiencein the
post office with his imagination of "modem vagrancy"),and
even, in light of Dred Scott, the court reporter,who "tran-
scribes"word for word the real testimony of actual personsin
serviceof the law (248-49, 251). Likethe legalformalistsechoed
by Taney in Scott, James's "historian"seeks to representhis
narrativesas self-evident,marked off clearly from the "exter-
nal" world he ostensiblytransumes.Embracing"the pretense
of verisimilitude,"he achieves a more powerfuldeceit; he ob-
scures his complicity as the agent of those "naturally ... just
and liberal values" of his own people in the hegemonic enter-
tainment of the people's court (James 253; Rogin 159-60).
If Trollope'smode of productionprovidesan occasion for
James to reconstitutethe standingof the distinctivelyliterary
enterprise,it also enablesJames to write his own act of union,
bringing together British and American resources under the
banner of a reconstructedrealism. Midway throughthe essay,
James stages a recovery of Trollope's literaryvirtues that de-
fends against a livelier challenge to the unified moral culture
Jamesseeksto sustain,mountedby a groupof writerswho show
no signs of becoming, as the Victorianshave done, "extinct":
the French naturalists.Insofaras Trollope remains faithfulto
a moralizedEnglishtraditionof the novel, his literarypractice
provides James with the material to attack the serious threat
to the fiction of standing posed by the French avant-garde.
Initially figuringTrollope so as to reify the boundarybetween
 American Literary History 47

marketplaceand authoriallocus standi,Jamestransfigureshim

in orderto buttressthe distinctionbetween a "French"realism
that openly challengesits own formsof authorityand an English
moral "fecundity."He therebyperformsan act of genealogical
recovery, like that on which the Nietzschean slave revolt is
founded, that will secure both his inheritanceof the English
traditionand his power to figure,and advertise,his transump-
tion of it.
James carefully preparesfor the intrusion of the French
onto the terrainhis essay maps. At the outset, he makes only
a casual referenceto these "votariesof the new experimentsin
fiction" who seek to produce in their readers"unwontedand
bewilderingsensations"(236), drawinga contrastat Trollope's
expense:the latter'sfiction, limited to feminizedobservationof
the "usual," is "always safe"; it undertakes"no new experi-
ments" at all (236). By the end of the essay, however, French
canons and models serve to magnify Trollope's virtues as the
practitionerof a distinctively English (i.e., Anglo-Saxon)tra-
dition of the novel. His "happy, instinctive" perception of
"character"usefullyopposesthe "so-calledscientificview"that
"has lately found ingenious advocates among the countrymen
and successorsof Balzac"(239). AlthoughTrollopeachieveshis
knowledge of human psychology by "grace,"he nonetheless
employs that knowledge in the service of "his great taste for
the moral question"--which he obviously understood,James
notes with approval,as "the interestof fiction" (239).
As the plot of "AnthonyTrollope"thickens,Jamesgenders
the terms of his comparisonwith increasingemphasis.Drawing
on the ideologicalcurrencyof the separatespheres,he suggests
that Trollope's domestic and feminine practicesstand for the
authentic "moral interest" on which literaryculture must be
founded. In the last third of the essay, he conductsan extended
comparison of Trollope with the naturaliststhat solidifiesthe
"essentially"moral "interest"of fiction and the standingof the
author as moral "historian"of his clearly articulatedculture.
"Thereis perhapslittle reasonin it," James admits, "but I find
myself comparing [Trollope's]tone of allusion to many lands
and many things"with "thatnarrowvision of humanitywhich
accompanies the strenuous, serious work lately offered us in
such abundanceby the votariesof art for art who sit so long at
their desks in Parisianquatriemes."In this context, James en-
dorses Trollope's"unsurpassedindustry"and feminizedinter-
est in characterover and above those more artfulFrenchprac-
tices: if "the English writer" (embodied by Trollope) is "so
occasional,so accidental,so full of the echoes of voices that are
48 Changingthe Subject

not the voice of the muse," he neverthelesssucceedsin a kind

of representationalintegritythat the naturalistslack. "He tells
us, on the whole, more about life than the 'naturalists'in our
sisterrepublic."Like otherEnglish"providersof fiction,"Trol-
lope is admittedly "inferiorin audacity, in neatness,in acute-
ness, in intellectualvivacity," and in "the art of characterizing
visiblethings."But the English,Jamesclaims, "havebeen more
at home in the moral world; as people say today, they know
theirway about the conscience."This traditionof moralthink-
ing constitutes "the value of much of the work done by the
feminine wing"-work disparaged,typically,by the Frenchon
aestheticgroundsas "deplorablythin and insipid" (252-53).
Given James'sdissatisfactionwith the forms of censorship
imposedby Anglo-Americanliterarycanonsand the statements
of his support for French writers throughout the 1880s, his
language initially comes off as oddly moralizing. Comparing
Trollopeand Zola, he remarksthat "[florTrollopethe emotions
of a nurserygovernessin Australiawould take precedenceof
the adventures of a depravedfemme du monde in Paris or
London" (252). (In other words, Trollope is interestedin the
domesticvirtues,whereasZola is interestedin trollops.)James's
concerns,however,differsubstantivelyfromthose of the Puritan
canons of which they bear some traces.Naturalistviews-with
their "gimletlike"narrownessof focus-pose a threat not be-
cause they freelyrepresentharddrinkingand loose women but
because they freely representalternativeinstitutionswhose ac-
tivities mirror the "depravities"- that is, the unnaturalchar-
acter-of normativesocial orders.Zola's interestin the abnor-
mal, the genital,the excremental,those "pollutingthings"(238),
highlightsthe existence of forms of life at the marginsof nor-
mative politicalcommunity;it also suggestswaysin whichthese
forms of life are suppressedin the interestof keepingthe body
politic pure and whole. Throughoutthe 1880s, in such texts as
The Portraitof a Lady, Daisy Miller, The Princess Casamas-
sima, and The Bostonians, James began to representthese
mechanisms of suppression;each of these fictions, in the un-
stable departureof its protagonist from its elaborately con-
structedformal integrity,signals the human costs of the nar-
ratives of identity on which particular communities,
revolutionaryor otherwise,are founded.In the mask of cultural
critic, however, James gave precedenceto his anxieties about
preservingthe institutions-especiallythe literaryones- through
which individualsengage in collective and moral discourse,in
a moment when the continuingpossibilityof that discoursewas
at stake. Effectinga recoveryof Trollope's authorialpractices
 AmericanLiteraryHistory 49

allows James to lay claim to, and protect, "essentiallya moral,

a social interest":the fictionof the author'sstanding,which will
enable him to teach his readersabout and expose othercultural
fictions of power and identity.
Finally, to measure Trollope against the naturalistsis to
"fix," in the phraseof a Taney advocate, one form of national
characteras a usable commodity in James'sbid to reconstruct
the literary map of modernity (Van Evrie iii).25 Playing on the
strongcontrastbetween"natural"Englishvirtuesand the artful
dodges of the naturalists,James reifies an essentializedracial
differencebetweenthe novelistictraditionsthat will enablehim
to contain, and lay claim to, the body politic of Anglo-America.
Thus he characterizesthe new French writers as superior in
"audacity,""neatness,""acuteness,"and "arrangement";they
exhibit all the dubious virtues of Gallic "art" and cunning.
Speaking as the protesting "historian,"James twice refers to
the naturalistsas "votaries," thereby invoking the charge of
papist sensuousnessso dear to the Protestantimagination.By
contrast, Trollope eschews all artistic "perversions";his is a
genius, as the Frenchthemselveswould say, of the "honnete,"
an unself-conscious,healthy openness to the world. Trollope
"writes,he feels, he judges like a man," but a man who "has
kept the purityof his imagination,"and so embodies the "nat-
ural decorum of the Englishspirit"(238). His embodiment of
this essentialcharacter,his transparencyto the constituencyhe
represents,guaranteesTrollope's"morejust and liberal"form
of perception;because his "naturalrightnessand purity" are
"so real,""the good thingshe projectsmust be real"(253, 260).
Unlike the narratorof TheAmericanScene, who discoverswith
dismay that his state of desirefor representativenessis radically
undercutby the racialpolyphonyof the states,James'sTrollope
can be imagined to stand for the unified culturehe surveys,to
embody a fantasy of authorial"possession"and containment.
In orderto preservethis American dream of the narrative
community whose ongoing history can be, from the authorial
locus standi, comprehendedwhole, James must revert to the
same tactic as Taney, invokingand "fixing"the "natural"cat-
egory of race. He thus ends his long good-bye to Trollopewith
a proclamationof inheritancethat shores up the racialbound-
aries of, and his own proprietaryrightsto, his newly acquired
constituency:"A race is fortunatewhen it has a good deal of
the sort of imagination- of imaginativefeeling- that had fallen
to the share of Anthony Trollope; and in this possession our
Englishrace is not poor" (260). The final epithet of inclusion-
"our Englishrace"-suggests that James standsfor a greatEn-
50 Changingthe Subject

glish tradition sanctifiedby virtue of its historical continuity

and its metaphysicalessentialism.Yet his high-mindedpraise
of Trollope, as a credit to their mutual race, constitutes an
inspiredact of genealogicalrevolt. Like the good ascetic priest
of Nietzsche's genealogy, James effectively invents the racial
characterhe draws on as a natural resource and claims as a
naturalinheritance:Englandis a social constituencyhe has only
recently and not wholly acquired,and whose essential "char-
acter"and values he will selectivelyendorse in the developing
interestsof his self-representation.26At the moment of "Trol-
lope," James is busy reinventinghimself as heir apparentto
"the old Englishtradition";invoking the fiction of a transhis-
torical racial character,James imagines a new form of literary
productionin which the savingvirtuesof a highercivilization-
and of its literaryforms-will themselvesbe savedfrom "virtual
extinction."
James's invocation of race suggeststhe complexity of the
kind of "historical"gesture he imagines within the essay; it
ensuresboth the preservationof the novel as a vehicle for moral
discourseand James'sproprietaryrightsto the genre.The play
of his homophonesat the end of "Trollope"(betweenthe "poor"
and the "pure") reveals that his concern with the aesthetic
povertyof America implicatesa concernwith the social purity
on which his own standing and the claims of his texts to the
status of moral discoursedepend. In the logic of James'sart of
fiction, the authoritative reinvention of Anglo-America de-
mands a recontainmentof the polis that will guaranteeboth
the externality-the moral disinterestedness-of the observer
and the transparencyof his fictions to the culture for which
they stand:one moral community, with "morejust and liberal
perceptions"of all. His "historical"invocation of an ontolog-
ically bounded racial identity serves the continuingpossibility
of moral discourse and unified moral community; it enables
James to reinventthe author as an individualwith privileged
access to naturaltruthsso "real"that "the good thingshe pro-
jects must be real."Againstthe nihilism that threatensthe bor-
ders of the literary,James reimaginesracialidentityin orderto
effect a recovery of some essential human capacity for self-
realizationand moral agency.
James'sstrategicmaneuver,however,obviouslybelies the
dialecticalprocess of his own self-invention(of which it forms
a part)and of social identity as he so complexly imaginesit in
his fiction.By the end of the essay,he has thus assumeda deeply
ironic resemblanceto the historical figure of Dred Scott: the
latterstands,in legaldiscourse,beyondthe law andthusremains
 AmericanLiteraryHistory 51

a slave, while James actively seeks such a culturallocus standi

in order to become a master. As the model of Scott suggests,
his reinventionof moral agencyis effectedat the expenseof the
moral or hermeneuticattention it intends to develop, insofar
as it trades on an unexamined identificationwith the cultural
orthodoxies and institutions it purportsto transform.In this
respect,James'sliterarytributeexhibitsan unintendedbut his-
torically appropriateself-reference,characteristicof the mod-
ernism he inauguratedand of the problemit bequeathsus, the
problem not of repudiating,but of laying authenticclaim to a
collective history.

Notes
This projectwas undertakenin partat the OregonHumanitiesCenter,whose
supportI gratefullyacknowledge.

1. "Anthony Trollope" appearedin the Centurymagazinein July 1883;

"The Art of Fiction" in Longman's Magazine in September 1884; "Al-
phonse Daudet" in the Centuryin August 1883; and "Ivan Turgenieff' in
the AtlanticMonthly in January 1884, shortly after Turgenev'sdeath.

2. Black'sLaw Dictionaryidentifiesthe essenceof the doctrineof standing

as the rule that no person is entitled to challengethe constitutionalityof an
ordinanceor statute except insofar as he or she is adversely affectedby it.
Formally, determinationsof standing are made with respect both to con-
stitutional and nonconstitutionalcriteria;for a brief discussion, see Ency-
clopedia of the American Constitution4:1722. Fletcher discusses current
mechanisms for determiningstandingin Americancourts.

3. Accordingto severalhistoriansof Americanlaw, the doctrineof stand-

ing has only recently-that is, during the twentieth century-come to be
used to make proceduralratherthan substantivejudgments on the merits
of a case. Recent discussions of shifts in the uses of the standingdoctrine
and in its determinationof legalidentityincludeVining;Winter;and Nichol.

4. Cogantracesthe roots of the modem doctrineof locusstandito Roman

jurisprudenceand common law, where both locus and stare criteriarefer,
he argues,to position or rank. He furtherarguesthat Americanlawyersof
the 1780s would have been well aware of the historical use of standingto
referto and name in the law those persons deemed less than full members
of the community (including, for example, women, perjurers,excommu-
nicates, enemies of the state, and slaves).

5. Black'sdefinesthe legal "person"specificallyin terms of categoriesand

criteria for standing:a person is "a human being (i.e., a naturalperson),
though by statute the term may include a firm, labor organization,part-
nerships,associations,corporations,legal representatives,trustees,trustees
in bankruptcy,or receiver" (1028). A more extensive historical overview
52 Changingthe Subject

of the making up of persons in the law, with respectto faculties of appre-

hension, rationality,moral sense, personality,rank, place, reputation,and
property,is given in Wordsand Phrases 287-314.

6. Fehrenbacher,11-151, discusses these debates as backgroundto the

emergenceof Scott in great detail.

7. The elder James, at the invitation of the citizens of Newport, did give
an IndependenceDay "oration"in 1861 entitled "The Social Significance
of Our Institutions,"in which he discussedthe moral consequencesof slav-
ery.

8. Fehrenbacher,289 et passim, details Greeley's intensive political en-

gagementin the Scott case and the politics of secession.

9. Edel, 228-34, details James's friendshipswith Gray and Holmes, in-

cluding their trip to the White Mountains in August 1865. Fehrenbacher,
422-23, judges the "Legal Review" to be among the best critiquesof the
Taney decision; he concludes, however, that its argumentessentially rep-
licates the logic of Greeley'seditorials.

10. Warrendiscussesin detail the political conditions shapingintellectual

activity in the law school duringthe "excitingtwelve yearspriorto the Civil
War"; his remarks on the war period, 262-301, suggest the continuing
importanceof political activism to the institutionallife of the law school.

11. See in particularthe Autobiography442-44. By analogy, the motive

of erasure also prevailed in legal culture itself, at a moment when legal
education in America sought both to professionalizeits own activities and
to advertise the work done by the law as "scientific"ratherthan instru-
mental. For a broad discussion of this shift and its political motives and
implications, see Horwitz 1-30, 253-66.

12. Warren, 74-75, discusses the importance of recent Supreme Court

decisions to the moot court trials within the law school. A complete list of
the publicationsof James'slaw professorsis given in CentennialHistoryof
the HarvardLaw School 1817-1917 372-74, 336-37.

13. On one occasion, Parsons,who served as a liaison for the Union War
Department,even organizedand armed a group of law studentsto protect
local Union munitions against suspected Confederateattack. See Warren
269-72.

14. See Warren 20-21, and especially 262-64, on the involvement of

Harvardscholarswith Fugitive Slave Law cases and on their discussionsin
popularperiodicalsof such cases and of Dred Scott.

15. James representshis motives for attendingHarvardas follows:"What

I 'wanted to want' to be was, all intimately,just literary,"to achieve "the
real disclosure,the largerrevelation"of characterthroughthe study of the
"young types" at the law school "underthe rich cover of obscurity"(Au-
tobiography413-14, 425-26). He calls himself "the queerest of forensic
recruits"(417) and "a singularlyalien member" of the community (307).
 AmericanLiteraryHistory 53

In fact,attendanceat the law school duringthe waryearsdeclineddrastically;

the significantlyreduced size of the community would presumablyhave
made it difficultfor Jamesto remainas "alien"and "obscure"as he suggests.

16. James recalls as a "black little memory" his participationin moot

court: "I liken it all to a mercifulfall of the curtainon some actor stricken
and stammering,"adding that, "in truth, save for one or two minor and
merely comparativemiscarriagesof the sacrificialact before my false gods,
my connection with the temple was to remain as consistentlysuperficialas
could be possible"(Autobiography438). Warren,74-75, discussesthe social
influenceof and qualificationsfor membershipin the MarshallClub;he also
notes that most of the moot court cases "tried"in 1862 were based on such
ongoingconstitutionalissues as Confederatepiracy,remarkingthat "in the
midst of the Civil War,the law club was keepingabreastof the times" (323).

17. For a comprehensivelist of journals publishingpopulararticles and

commentarieson legal matters in America and Britain see Jones xi-xiii.

18. Taney was politically an interestinganomaly: a former Whig turned

Jacksoniandemocrat,he hailed from the borderstate of Maryland.He was
marriedto Francis Scott Key's sister; accordingto the Whigs, he "reeked
of partisanship"and slaveholding sympathies;Greeley's Tribunehad no
hesitation in labeling him a "political hack." For extended discussion of
Taney's political interests,see Fehrenbacher227; and Kutler,introduction.

19. In the chapter entitled "Who Protects the Slave's Humanity?"(26-

39), Degler discusses a number of such legal formulations,as well as the
legal protections extended to slaves in their mixed status as persons and
movable property.

20. Taney's decision was handed down at a moment when the American
judiciary moved decisively away from the legitimatingdiscourseof natural
rightsin property,towarda positivist and formalistconstructionof property
rights. Finally, as Horwitz argues,this shift ensued preciselyas a means of
protectingthe corporateand capitalist forms of power consolidated under
the originalmodel: by abandoningthe priorityof "natural"rights for that
of legal precedent, the American common law judiciary effectively natu-
ralizedcorporatepropertyand the statusof the law as an interpretive,rather
than creative, instrument.See Horwitz 27-30 and 256-66.

21. Rogin charts this shift in the foundationsof American legal thinking
in the judicial career of Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of the Massachusetts
SupremeCourt and author of critical decisions in both the instrumentalist
and formalist modes; see 31-44, 107-18, 142-59. Horwitz, 253-66, gives
a more generalaccount of the rise of legal formalism as an institution for
both consolidatingand naturalizingthe powers of corporateAmerica.

22. Rogin's analysis of Shaw helps to substantiatethe analogy between

James and the legal formalists. Rogin argues that Shaw was transformed,
in the endorsement of formalism, from a jurist who freed himself from
positive law and practiceda "propertiedlegalism"(44, 142) into one who
consolidated the organic identity of the state precisely by naturalizingits
powers.
54 Changingthe Subject

23. James thus obscures his own financialdependence, throughoutthe

1880s, on the publicationof potboiler fiction in magazinescateringto this
very appetite.See James'scomplaintsabout the "disfigure[ment]" and "de-
formities"wreakedon his "carefulprose"by Americanmagazines,in Letters
2: 388 and in Edel's introductionto Letters3: xv.

24. Rowe reads this passageand the problem of fictionalityquite differ-

ently. He considers James's suppression of Trollope's influence in some
detail; his reading, however, serves ultimately to contrastJames's deeper
mastery,that of the writerwho "perpetuallytip[s] his hand to the reader"
and thus "expos[es]the fictive foundationsfor his 'illusion' of the real,"to
the practicesof Trollope as James representshim, a writerwho "presumes
to have full controlof his art." In Rowe's reading,it is Trollope,ratherthan
James, who attempts a misguidedmastery,preciselyin his arbitrariness,a
sign that he has "succumbedto a certain 'suicidal satisfaction'in his own
independenceand artistic self-sufficiency"(71-72).

25. Van Evrie'sfiguresof celebratoryracismarediscussedin Frederickson

and in Fehrenbacher428-29.

26. See, for example,James'sessay on "Du Maurierand LondonSociety,"

publishedin the Centuryjust two months before "AnthonyTrollope,"and
reprintedin Partial Portraits.In this essay, James representshimself in a
very different relation to English canons and traditions:denouncing the
English as not by nature "an aesthetic people," James complains of their
failure to sustain "a spontaneous artistic life; their taste is a matter of
conscience, reflection,duty, and the writer who in our time has appealed
to them most eloquently on behalf of art has rested his plea on moral
standards-has talkedexclusivelyof rightand wrong."Here,Jamesinvokes
the fact that Du Maurier"has Frenchblood in his veins" to accountfor the
"richer"realism of his art; James's differentialpronouns stronglyidentify
him with that "racial"attribute,as againstthe stolidity of "those" British.

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