Watch and Ward: James's fantasy of Omnipotence - Henry James

In James's first novel, Watch and Ward (1871), the protagonist Roger Lawrence, whose recent marriage proposal to Miss Morton has just been rejected, meets and adopts an orphan, Nora Lambert, and raises her with the hopes of making her his ideal wife. James seems unaware of the sexual displacement he sets up in his plot. While Leon Edel, in his introduction to the 1959 Grove Press edition, notes James's apparent obliviousness to the text's eroticism, he views both the obliviousness and the eroticism as "harmless": "Watch and Ward contains a peculiar sexuality of its own. I refer to the book's persistent erotic imagery and innocent erotic statement which seems to have been set down with bland unconsciousness on the author's part" (6). Because Roger Lawrence never physically acts on his desire for Nora Lambert as she is growing up under his care, Edel concludes that Roger's desire for the girl as revealed in the text's imagery is unconscious and "innocent" because it is "Freudian" - natural, in other words. Of course fathers desire their daughters - if only unconsciously - just as daughters, in turn, cannot help but desire their fathers. Thus, Roger's desire is "understandable" - certainly not harmful to the child, at any rate. In fact, Edel does not even refer to the child's experience. Edel sees Roger's, and by implication the narrator's and James's, obliviousness to the relationship's inherent sexuality as endearing: "Watch and Ward is naive from beginning to end. . . . It is the utter innocence of this story which, in a way, endears it to us" (7). It is reassuring to note that most recent critics find this story to be anything but "utterly innocent," for if the plot of Watch and Ward is a narcissist's dream-come-true, it is also replete with all the destructiveness that such a dream entails.(1) But what is more, the novel shows that patriarchy is an especially fertile ground for pathological narcissism.

Current theory describes healthy narcissism as the playful indulgence of illusions (about life, ourselves, and others), combined with the understanding that they are illusions and that one might have to let go of them.(2) The healthy subject indulges illusions, recognizing their potential and that without them the subject cannot create, grow, or change, that as one illusion dies, another is born in its place. The pathological narcissist does not understand the tentative, precarious nature of illusions, and maintains illusions at the expense of reality, often addictively. Denial or despair becomes more and more a part of psychic life.

Whether or not a person will be a healthy or a pathological narcissist depends largely on one's early relationship with one's parents. The ideal parent can enjoy and play with the child's illusions - the child's overvaluations of self and others and feelings of merger with the parent - and with her or his own illusions. She or he can play with and let go of any or all of those illusions when circumstances call for a more realistic vision (Mitchell, Relational Concepts 196). A parent who must delude him or herself, whose own sense of security or specialness is shaky or grandiose, forces the child to maintain similar delusions. Because physical and emotional survival at this stage of development depends upon relatedness with the parent, the child will comply with the parent and the parent's delusions. It is too painful for the child to hold onto its own wishes and needs in this kind of environment with this kind of parent. The child will abandon its authentic true self - hide or repress it - and construct in its place a false self to meet the caretaker's needs and agenda. "Here illusions are no longer the spontaneously generated, transitory, playful creation of an active mind. Illusions are insisted upon with utmost seriousness by significant others, and they become the necessary price for contact and relation" (Mitchell, Relational Concepts 197). The child learns how it must be if it is going. to be with the parent at all, and in future relations it will try to be with others in the same way.

Jessica Benjamin's recent work on domination and submission offers insight into the dynamics of a narcissist's dream. Benjamin takes Winnicott's theory of the infant's need to be met and recognized by the mother and says that the process also entails the infant's need to meet and recognize the mother as an independent subject (23). According to Benjamin, relations of domination "result from a breakdown of the necessary tension between self-assertion and mutual recognition that allows self and other to meet as sovereign equals" (12). Of course, this parent-child relationship is unequal; the parent can exist without the child, can abandon the child's true self and survive, but the child cannot afford to abandon the parent in retaliation. So the child complies, repressing feelings of abandonment, endangerment, fear and rage; and to defend itself constructs a self that will hold the parent in place as a functioning, life-giving adult.

The parent-child relationships in Watch and Ward illustrate the dynamics of an unhealthy enmeshment - the parent's motives, the child's defenses. The earliest fact that we know about Nora Lambert is that her mother has abandoned her by dying, and has left her to a father who is "in great want of money" (41). This father (Lambert) isolates Nora and reduces her to complete dependency upon him: "she had no other kindred nor friends. Her father may have had friends, but she never saw them. She could indicate no source of possible assistance or sympathy" (32). Her father, somewhat crudely, does not hesitate to tell her that she has "not a friend in the world nor a person that cares" (33). In addition to being mirrored and affirmed, the child, in order to form a cohesive self, needs a strong and calm parent with whom to merge (Kohut and Wolf 419-20). Lambert's lack of "calmness," to say nothing of his insensitivity to Nora's needs and anxieties, is illustrated even prior to his suicide: "The father had come in early in the evening, in great trouble and excitement, and had made her go to bed. He had kissed her and cried over her and, of course, made her cry." His selfish intrusions into her bedroom continue: "Late at night she was aroused by feeling him again at her bedside, kissing her, fondling her, raving over her. He bade her good-night and passed into the adjoining room, where she heard him fiercely knocking about. She was very much frightened; she fancied he was out of his mind" (31). Yet Lambert's lack of strength and calmness seems trivial compared to his more serious misuse of his daughter. Through the events James describes and the language he uses, James strongly suggests emotional or covert incest. Certainly, insofar as Nora's father expects her to cope with very adult problems and responsibilities, he clearly oversteps generational boundaries.(3) But more than that, Nora's appearance suggests there has been emotional incest. There is something about her that is unnaturally adult, almost freakish. Roger describes it as "something undeniably vulgar" that makes her look "as if she belonged to a circus troupe" (32). Yet at the same time he notes something "too young" about her:

The common relations of things seemed quite reversed in her brief experience, and immaturity and precocity shared her young mind in the freest fellowship. She was ignorant of the plainest truths and credulous of the quaintest falsities; unversed in the commonest learning and instructed in the rarest. . . . Evidently she had sprung from a horribly vulgar soil; she was a brand snatched from a burning. (41-42)

Incest victims often manifest this duality: ignorance and immaturity arising from an arrested development, on the one hand, and, on the other, knowledge beyond one's years obviously resulting from the child's need to mirror the parent's illusions.

But the most damning evidence of Lambert's emotional, if not sexual, abuse of his daughter comes when he attempts to put an end to her life once he decides to end his own. "Suddenly he called her. She asked what he wanted, and he bade her get out of bed and come to him. She trembled, but she obeyed." He shoots, just misses her cheek, and then shoots himself. The landlady's subsequent remark to Roger reveals her own, Roger's, and probably society's blindness to the abuse of the child and its idealization of the father's actions by implying that they are somehow noble: "'He meant to kill her, of course,' said the landlady, 'that she mightn't be left alone in the world. It's a wonderful mixture of cruelty and kindness!'" (31). The remark also implies that without the father, the child is nothing, and so illustrates the very real dependency of the child on the parent.

Nora's next "parent" is Roger Lawrence, a man with many qualities considered by nineteenth-century Victorian society to be more "feminine" than "masculine." Theorists agree that gender identity is more of a problem for men than women because most child-rearing is done by women.(4) In the child, there is a preoedipal sense of identification with the mother - with femaleness and all that it seems to entail - that the male must renounce if he is to become a "man." Women do not need to renounce that original identification with femaleness. Thus, men have an investment in difference that women do not have; they must deny aspects of themselves that culture perceives as "feminine" - especially feelings of dependency and need for relation, but also emotions in general. Women do not have a similar problem determining they are female - their problem, given the culture's arrangement of power between the sexes, is that "female" is not a particularly good thing to be. A woman learns that being female entitles her to less, particularly in terms of autonomy, and that she is not allowed to protest that smaller entitlement. She thus learns to repress aspects of herself, particularly her aggressions, that would help her to become more like an agent. Aggression, a biological response to endangerment, can, if integrated, powerfully energize and transform. If it is disowned and hidden, it constricts and sometimes destroys (Mitchell, Hope and Dread 157-72).

Roger, when we meet him, is in a precarious position in terms of his masculine identity. He is described by the narrator as "fastidiously neat in his person, extremely precise and methodical in his habits, which were of the sort supposed to mark a man for bachelorhood" (20). He is "oldmaidish," in other words, devoted to detail, to small, measured, "precise" movements, as opposed to more spontaneous, bold, and decisive moves. Rather than being independent, self-sufficient, detached, distant, he yearns emotionally and even sentimentally for relationship. He is not openly aggressive, nor do we learn that he is particularly competent at his job (we never even learn what his job is - only that he gives it up when he takes over the guardianship of young Nora). Most important, he is having trouble competing for a mate. We understand why the narrator describes him as an "undervalued man" (20). He dreams that his hidden qualities will someday become visible, betraying underlying feelings of inferiority and causing us to further suspect that he feels less than manly. His offers of marriage are repeatedly rejected by Miss Morton, yet she tells him that she "esteems him more than any man she has known" (25). She implies that her rejection is on monetary grounds, but we learn later in the text that Roger is well-off financially, so her implication can only be a consolatory move to salve a wounded ego, for to "esteem" someone of the opposite sex insinuates a lack of passion.

The last time that we see Roger rejected by Miss Morton, he reacts against his feelings of dependency on the symbolic mother-figure in two ways: first, he resolves to do without her; then, he discovers a way to dominate her.(5) He substitutes for her a younger, more helpless version. Leaving Miss Morton that night, Roger tells himself emphatically that he will never love again: "He had made a woman a goddess, and she had made him a fool. He would henceforth care neither for woman nor man, but simply for comfort, and, if need should be, for pleasure" (29). His resolve, however, is short-lived. Significantly, he finally resigns himself to failure with Miss Morton on the night in which she introduces him to her ten-year-old niece. Seeing the young girl with the adult Miss Morton, Roger dreams of marriage and gives the child a significant role in his fantasy: "There glimmered mistily in the young man's brain a vision of a home-scene in the future, - a lamp-lit parlour on a winter night, a placid wife and mother wreathed in household smiles, a golden-haired child, and in the midst, his sentient self, drunk with possession and gratitude" (27). Although Roger never sees this niece again, it may be that the sight of her - the symbolic promise of a similar relationship all his own - is what enables him finally to accept that indeed Miss Morton is not going to marry him. Certainly when, later that night in his hotel room, he hears pistol shots, runs to the room where Lambert has just shot himself, and sees Little Nora "in her nightdress, her long hair on her shoulders, shrieking and wringing her hands" (29), he knows he has found someone young, powerless, and needy enough to give him what Miss Morton did not. What he has not done is accept that he needs Miss Morton and that she is outside his control. He is unable to, withstand the tension caused by holding on to these two notions simultaneously.

When Nora, standing over Lambert's body, sobs, "O father, father, father," Roger steps into that role and "opens his arms" to her for two reasons: first, to gain Nora's loyalty and idealization and affection, which he needs but cannot get through a more reciprocal relationship with a mature woman; and, second, to satisfy another repressed need of his own: in rescuing Nora, to rescue himself. Nora mirrors his own loneliness, rejection, and isolation. He feels "a certain indefeasible fellowship in the sorrow of the little girl" (30) and equates Lambert's betrayal of Nora with Miss Morton's rejection of him: "He leaned back in his chair and looked at the child, - the little forlorn, precocious, potential woman. His own sense of recent bereavement rose powerful in his heart and seemed to respond to hers" (33). More important, by rescuing her, he can ignore those qualities of vulnerability, weakness, and helplessness that he has in himself, qualities abhorred in men, but encouraged and "natural" in Nora. In fact, because Nora's vulnerability allows Roger to assume the role of rescuer, it satisfies, even arouses him. The morning after Lambert's suicide, Roger asks Nora "'Do you remember my taking you last night in my arms?' It was his fancy that for an answer, she faintly blushed" (34; my emphasis).

Most important in terms of narcissistic injury to Nora is that Roger's desire to help her is, from the beginning, tinged with the desire that she reciprocate:

Lawrence felt the tears rising to his eyes; he felt in his heart the tumult of a new emotion. Was it the inexpugnable instinct of paternity? Was it the restless ghost of his buried hope? He thought of his angry vow the night before to live only for himself and turn the key on his heart. . . . Before twenty-four hours had elapsed a child's fingers were fumbling with the key. He felt deliciously contradicted; he was after all but a lame egotist. Was he to believe, then, that he could not live without love, and that he must take it where he found it? . . . What was the child before him but a tragic embodiment of the misery of isolation, a warning from his own blank future? "God forbid!" he cried. And as he did so, he drew her towards him and kissed her. (35)

Among other reasons, Roger uses Nora to insure against a lonely old-age. But most obviously his hidden agenda lies in his hope for returned love from her: "His philosophy in this as in all things was extremely simple, - to make her happy that she might be good. Meanwhile as he cunningly devised her happiness, his own seemed securely established" (40). Underlying it all is that she be "good" - compliant, submissive.

Roger also seriously abuses Nora by disavowing her past self and making her his "selfobject." Under the aegis of kindness, he tries to erase from her mind and his own her life before she came to him:

It lay close to his heart . . . to drive away the dusky fears and sordid memories of Nora's anterior life. He strove to conceal the past from her childish sense by a great pictured screen of present joys and comforts. He wished her life to date from the moment he had taken her home. He had taken her for better, for worse; but he longed to quench all baser chances in the daylight of actual security. (40)

The parent's narcissistic abuse of the child becomes paradigmatic of the culture's patriarchal abuse of women. When Nora first ran into Roger's arms on the night of her father's suicide, Roger referred to their relationship as being "indefeasible," one denotation of which is "unannullable." Now he notes taking her "for better or for worse." Clearly he has already married her in his mind, and any reference to her life before he came on the scene fills him with visions of other men and puts her in the category of damaged goods. By denigrating Nora, Roger defends his own weak and threatened ego: "His ignorance of the past distressed and vexed him, jealous as he was of admitting even to himself that she had ever lived till now. He trod on tiptoe in the region of her early memories, in the dread of reviving some dormant claim, some ugly ghost" (41). A figure of memory from Nora's past that Roger fears reviving would be "ugly" - not part of the image of himself he wants mirrored - and would lay "claim" - challenge his ownership. In short, Roger makes Nora a selfobject. Since a selfobject, in Kohut's terms, cannot have an existence - a life - prior to the appropriator's, the selfobject must be a part of the appropriator. As in Roger's transformation of Nora, a selfobject can live only insofar as it remains that part.

Rather than examining and expressing her own emotions, Nora learns the necessity of concentrating on the emotions and reactions of others. Like most children, she perceptively picks up on Roger's need to disavow part of herself: "Nora seemed by instinct to have perceived the fitness of not speaking of her own affairs, and indeed displayed in the matter a precocious good taste" (41). What to the narrator seems "good taste" we regard as proof that Nora has already learned how to parent her new parent. Deferring to Roger's "discomfort" about her past, Nora never has a chance to express her feelings about what must have been traumatic events. Nora learns that to speak would "pain" her already "overburdened" new parent (to use Kohut's terminology), and Nora of course cannot afford to do that.

Moreover, by implication, Roger's "pained" expression in reference to Nora's past probably leads in her mind to the conclusion that it - and she - are shameful. She believes, as every child will, what Roger believes - that is, that the aspect of herself that is her past life is bad and that his invalidation of that part of her is for her own good. When, on one Christmas Eve after having been with Roger for a few years, she insists on talking about her biological father and her past, she says, "I want for an hour to be myself and feel how little that is, to be my miserable father's daughter" (65). Without Roger, Nora accepts that she is nothing. And presumably, by bringing up her past on this one occasion and speaking of it, she can exorcise it from herself, so that from this point on she is free to live only to make Roger happy and to be for him what he needs her to be: "She disinterred her early memories with a kind of rapture of relief." From Nora's point of view in this last sentence we abruptly shift to Roger's point of view in the next sentence: "Her evident joy in this frolic of confidence gave Roger a pitying sense of what her long silence must have cost her. But evidently she bore him no grudge, and his present tolerance of her rambling gossip seemed to her but another proof of his charity" (66). Despite James's explanation here, we question Nora's motives for so "disinterring her memories." She does so to mollify Roger, not to cure her drama. The child can mirror her parent only by rejecting in herself what is rejected by the parent; thus Nora's sense of worth depends upon her role as Roger's object.

This sudden shifting between Nora's and Roger's points of view, as if Nora needed Roger to complete her thoughts, as if Roger felt compelled to finish Nora's sentences, occurs elsewhere in the text. It not only embodies the relationship that is growing between Roger and Nora, but it also suggests a flaw in James's text. Roger gives to Nora with the express expectation that he will eventually receive back from her, and his peace of mind depends on her growing sense of obligation and gratitude. Roger needs her to mirror him, and he lets her know that her worth depends on how much she can reflect back to him the image of himself he wants reflected:

A passion of gratitude was silently gathering in the young girl's heart: that heart could be trusted to keep its engagements. A deep conciliatory purpose seemed now to pervade her life, of infinite delight to Roger as little by little it stole upon his mind like the fragrance of a deepening spring. He had his idea; he suspected that she had hers. They were but opposite faces of the same deep need. (62)

It is impossible to tell whether this "passion of gratitude" and "deep conciliatory purpose" accurately describes what Nora is feeling or what Roger thinks (or hopes) Nora is feeling. There exists a definite confusion here between the two points of view (and thus between Nora and Roger), and James seems to be complicit in it. James certainly seems to approve of the way that Nora and Roger "mirror" each other, of their showing but "opposite faces of the same deep need." In these passages, the omniscient narrator sees through his own, Roger's, and Nora's eyes, and the reader often cannot be sure whose sight prevails. Thus, it is impossible to know which of these lines, if any, are meant to be ironic. It is a flaw in the narrative that is emblematic of the flaw in the relationship.

Thus, we suspect that Roger adds to Lambert's narcissistic injury of Nora and that James suspects also. When Roger comes to her the day after her father kills himself, he uses nearly the same insensitive words that Nora's father spoke to her the night before: "'Nora,' he said, 'you know you are quite alone. You have no home.'" These words must frighten and disturb Nora, and the narrator's description of her reaction indicates some anxiety on her part, but the description also seems to indicate a strange attraction for Nora to the speaker of the words: "Her lips trembled, but her eyes were fixed and fascinated." This "fascination" that the narrator claims appears in Nora's eyes betrays Roger's wishful thinking - his projection onto Nora of his own desire that she "love" him in more than a familial way. Roger then asks her: "'Do you think you could love me?' She flushed to the tender roots of her tumbled hair. 'Will you come and try?' Her range of expression of course was limited; she could only answer by another burst of tears" (36). Roger and the narrator note Nora's pain in her tears, but they also note her flushing face and tumbling hair. It probably escapes their attention, but not the reader's, that Roger's offer of help is not without strings. It seems likely that Nora recognizes that Roger's love will be as conditional as her father's, that Roger too will exact a price for his devotion.

But Roger does not exact that price immediately, of course. From the beginning he has maintained that, in spite of his feelings for Nora, he is raising her for the purpose of "setting her free": "It is an odd sort of position, you know. I have brought her up with the view of making her my wife, but I have never breathed a word of it to her. She must choose for herself. My hope is that she will choose for me" (136). And he encourages and supports her trip to Europe with Miss Morton (who at this point in the novel has married, been widowed, and is now Mrs. Keith). Yet when Nora returns from Europe and starts to fall in love with Roger's brother, the clergyman Hubert Lawrence, Roger is suddenly stricken with typhus fever, thus drawing Nora back to his bedside. At one point during Roger's illness, when Hubert tries to coax Nora away from Roger's grasp, Nora's rejoinder to Hubert reveals the nature of Roger's hold on her:

"Talk of my future if you like, but not of my past! No one can speak of it, no one knows it! Such as you see me here, bedecked and bedizened, I am a penniless, homeless, friendless creature! But for Roger, I might be in the streets! Do you think I have forgotten it, that I ever can forget it? There are things that colour one's life, memories that last for ever. I have my share! What am I to settle, between whom am I to choose? My love for Roger is no choice, it is part and parcel of my being!" (170)

In relegating her past to the inexplicable and unconscious, Nora has become alienated from much of herself. She has substituted in its place "Roger's love." The one thing that she does remember is that she owes everything to Roger; he has fused with her, become "part and parcel of [her] being." Her love is "no choice" - she has no agency in the matter and it is contingent upon her absolute lack of worth in her own right.

Although we can be sure that Roger really has typhus fever and is not simply manufacturing the disease to regain Nora's attention, we wonder if James does not rather unabashedly use his power to keep Nora attached. When Hubert proclaims his love for Nora and she begins to feel joy at hearing the proclamation, James conveniently sends in the servant with the warning that Roger is "sinking." And then, magically, Nora's presence at Roger's deathbed saves Roger's life. As the doctor explains to Hubert: "The young lady knows a few remedies not taught in the schools He has recognized her. He is good for tonight, at least. Half an hour ago he had no pulse at all, but this has started it" (172). Paradoxically, using illness to insure emotional and physical obligation sends the message to Nora that she has enormous power. Apparently Nora has the power to kill or save her parent. But this is a negative power; since acting for herself will deprive and hurt others, she must act for others. Thus, Roger's falling ill calls on Nora to do that which culture most expects her to do as a woman - serve and care for someone else's needs.

This burden of imagined power and responsibility is transferred to children generationally. In the final lines of the letter Roger wrote, years before, to Miss Morton, telling her of his original intentions in adopting Nora, we find evidence that he too was similarly burdened:

"You know that, two years ago, I adopted a homeless little girl. One of these days she will be a lovely woman. I mean to do what I can to make her one. Perhaps, six years hence, she will be grateful enough not to refuse me as you did. Pray for me more than ever. I have begun at the beginning; it will be my own fault if I have not a perfect wife." (53; my emphasis)

To begin with, Roger's notion that it will be his "own fault" if Nora does not turn out to be a "perfect wife" embodies the obligatory loyalty that narcissistic parents exact from their children. But it also embodies the curious reversal of the parent-child relationship that marks narcissistic injury. When the parent rejects the child - leaving it disappointed, abused, abandoned, or in any other way not met empathically as it needs to be met for the formation of self - the child can only conclude that the fault lies within him- or herself. Something has to be wrong with the child, or so reasons the child. Himself in the place of the child, Roger tries to rewrite the script of his own childhood drama and of his adult rejection by Miss Morton. He has "begun at the beginning" with a dependent, malleable Nora. If, after devoting himself exclusively to her and to winning her approval, she rejects him, the fault will be his, not hers. Thus, he will reaffirm what he has suspected all along - that it is he who is unworthy, unlovable.

When Nora first reads this letter and finally discovers that Roger had ulterior motives in taking her on as a ward, she is shocked, bewildered, confused, and frightened (189). Her reaction in many ways resembles that moment in therapy when the patient sees through her illusory idealization of the parent to the real, disappointing, and sometimes abusive human being, and discovers that the narcissistic needs of her childhood were never met, but had instead to be sacrificed to the parent's needs. Ideally, the patient would then come to acknowledge the parent's betrayal, to express that betrayal and her feelings of rage and grief about it, and then learn how to get those needs met by others or how to meet them herself. Meeting them herself would depend upon her ability to internalize those affirming parts of her analyst (surrogate parent, in this respect) that did not exist in her parents during her early years of life. Nora begins this process of enlightenment:

[The letter's] disclosure took time to swell to its full magnitude; for an hour she sat, half stunned, seeming to see it climb heaven-high and glare upon her like some monstrous blighting sun. Then at last she broke into a cry and wept. Her immense pain gushed and filtered through her heart, and passed out in shuddering sobs. The whole face of things was hideously altered; a sudden horror had sprung up in her innocent past, and it seemed to fling forward a shadow which made the future a blank darkness. She felt cruelly deluded and injured. (190)

The last line shows uncanny, almost clinical insight on James's part, but surely it is unintentional and coincidental. For as soon as Nora starts to see through the obligatory idealization to how she has been hurt, the voice of authority - the fourth commandment - insinuates itself: "the sense of suffered wrong absorbed for the time the thought of wrong inflicted" (190). Although she feels - "senses" - that she has been wronged, the more serious wrong, she finds, is that which she has inflicted upon Roger, apparently by rejecting him. She subordinates emotion (sense) to reason (thought), the interesting detail of the sentence being that the quality associated with the "feminine" loses out to that of the "masculine." Obviously, Nora makes her feelings, needs, wishes, secondary to Roger's. A child, she is still parenting the parent and judges her wrong against him as far more serious than his against her. In fact, she believes that the most intolerable part of her discovery is that Roger has robbed her of the chance to be really selfless in her devotion:

That Roger, whom all these years she had fancied as simple as charity, should have been as double as interest, should have played a part and laid a trail, that she had been living in darkness, on illusion and lies, all this was an intolerable thing. And the worst was that she had been cheated of the chance to be really loyal. Why had he never told her that she wore a chain! Why, when he took her, had he not drawn up his terms and made his bargain? She would have kept the bargain to the letter; she would have taught herself to be his wife.

(191)

It is possible for Nora to be critical of Roger, but not beyond a certain level. Self-accusation prevails. Even as Nora discovers how Roger has betrayed her, she reprimands herself for feeling pain because of that betrayal. Reaffirming his rights, she renounces her own. What is notable about her bitterness is that, turning it in on herself, she continues to deny the parent's culpability. She does this so quickly and surely that we hardly glimpse her justified anger and what could be her self-assertion (anger and assertion are so closely linked it is sometimes hard to differentiate them; certainly it is in this case). Nora's immediate assertion of blind loyalty and unquestioned obligation silences any other kind of assertion. But Nora's response, by reminding one of Jean Baker Miller's suggestion that "remaining in a powerless position can be a refuge from one's fearsome anger" (12), suggests that Nora's anger is real.

The final scenes of this text reenact the preservation of the idealization of the deluded parent. They also represent a feigned separation and individuation that actually masks the final step into a deeper, irretrievable enmeshment. After reading the letter revealing Roger's "plan," Nora runs to her cousin George Fenton:

A day's freedom had come at last; a lifetime's freedom confronted her. For, as you will have guessed, immediate retrocession and departure had imperiously prescribed themselves. Until this had taken place, there could be nothing but deeper trouble. On the old terms there could be no clearing up; she could speak to Roger again only in perfect independence. She must throw off those suffocating bounties which had been meant to bribe her to the service in which she had so miserably failed. (193)

Maddeningly ambivalent, this passage expresses relief at a day's freedom come at last, but also dread at a lifetime's freedom, as practical alternatives for women in her situation are slim at best. Nora senses that Roger has betrayed her, but in Nora's conscious mind she has no rights - no true self - so she can only see that the self she constructed to please Roger has failed. Her conscious mind will not allow her to see Roger's limitations as a parent: "It was strange how, as the night elapsed and her heart-beats seemed to keep time to the crashing swing of the train, her pity for Roger increased. It would have been an immense relief to be able to hate him." It indeed would have been a relief to hate him. From the self-vitalization that her aggression might have given her, she could have reopened the original narcissistic wounds of the past as well as the possibility of healing them. This knowledge is why her "affection" for him rankles so tormentingly: "Her undiminished affection, forced back upon her heart, swelled and rankled there tormentingly. But if she was unable to hate Roger, she could at least abuse herself" (194). Her affection covers and holds down the hatred that could activate a transforming aggression. And society encourages her to be affectionate rather than strong. Moreover, to hate Roger, she thinks, would destroy him, would break connection, and above all she has been encouraged to maintain connection. So Nora's inability to hate Roger is her abuse of herself as she has dutifully learned it.

The situation in which Nora finds herself now with Roger brings back other aspects of her childhood. Children need to be enabled to explore their environment. The extent to which a child's parent provides her with a secure base and encourages her to explore from it has much to do with whether the child will have a coherent picture of the environment later in life. Her ability to perceive and trust her perceptions depends largely upon this secure base.(6) Since Nora's base has never been secure, her environment is even more forbidding now than it was during her previous attempts to venture out into it: "As she stood at the street-corner, beneath an unextinguished lamp, listening to the nascent hum of the town, she felt a most unreasoned sinking of the heart. . . . What a hideous, sordid world! She was afraid to do anything but walk and walk" (195). Still, she does not see that more than she, her parent has ruined her world for her. When Nora tells Fenton why she has had to leave Roger, she implies not that Roger has betrayed her, but that she no longer deserves him.

Most important at this juncture in her development, to be able to separate from Roger she needs to see Roger stripped of his idealized image. James instead strips the rest of the world of its "glitter" before her eyes, thus "teaching" her that she has been deluded about the world rather than Roger. Fenton turns out to be thoroughly disreputable, and Hubert, the object of genuine desire on her part, turns out to be disloyal as well as cowardly. Therefore, the maxim - that the rest of the world cannot be trusted, that the parents are and must remain the authority - holds firm. These developments with the two other men in her life also confirm her object status. Her physical, sexual impulses and interests exist by and for others. She is not supposed to have her own needs in these areas, and discovering that George and Hubert are dangerous confirms that she was misguided, perhaps evil, to experience stirrings of her own sexual desire.

James would have us believe that Nora, seeing through to the "sordid" George Fenton and Hubert Lawrence, thereby grows up and becomes free:

She stood there on the pavement, strangely, almost absurdly, free and light of spirit. She knew neither whither she should turn nor what she should do, yet the fears which had haunted her for a whole day and night had vanished. The sky was blazing blue overhead; the opposite side of the street was all in sun; she hailed the joyous brightness of the day with a kind of answering joy. She seemed to be in the secret of the universe. (236)

After her "revelation," Nora discovers a world of beauty and goodness. She has supposedly struggled out of darkness and into light, progressed from childhood to maturity. She seems so grown up, in fact, that she is ready to be a wife and mother: "A nursery-maid came along, pushing a baby in a perambulator. [Nora] stopped and greeted the child, and talked pretty nonsense to it with a fervour which left the young woman staring" (236). Yet the quality of motherhood that Nora is ready for may not be "good enough," as Winnicott would define it, because Nora's liberation is suspect. James says that the "fears which had haunted her" have vanished, but if those fears were, as I have argued, Nora's memories and dawning awareness of her father's and then Roger's narcissistic use of her, then their "vanishing" is hardly a good thing. Repressing those memories - not consciously acknowledging them and what they would tell her about the real Mr. Lambert and the real Roger Lawrence - keeps Nora very firmly in her Platonic cave of misperception.

Evidence that Nora is maintaining an ideal at the expense of the real is that she suddenly "realizes" that the secret of the universe is that "Roger is the only man in it who has a heart" (237). This belief simplifies her world and her life immensely, and very well might be the belief that is necessary for her to perform properly and obediently the duties of wife and mother in nineteenth-century Victorian society, but the belief alienates her from much of herself. At the close of the novel, Nora feels that her promptings and attempts to separate from Roger - her desire for another man, her feelings of betrayal by Roger when she reads the letter and learns of his original plan for her, and most important her anger at Roger - were not only misguided but sinful. This knowledge of her own "sin" obscures any knowledge of Roger's sin. She expresses her feelings of guilt to Roger in the final paragraphs: "'If I am wiser now, I have learnt wisdom at my cost. I am not the girl you proposed to on Sunday. I feel - I feel dishonoured!' she said, uttering the word with a vehemence that stirred his soul to its depths." The message that Nora has "learnt wisdom at [her own] cost" reveals that, rather than face the truth of her parent, she has instead taken his "sins" onto herself and thus perpetuated the abuse. She has learned his wisdom. Her realization and taking on of this sin "stirs" Roger's "soul to its depths" because it makes his greatest dream come true. It offers absolution. But James also implies that Nora needs to be rescued from herself by Roger, and that Roger, god-like, has the power to redeem her sin by loving her:

"My own poor child!" he murmured, staring.

"There is a young girl in that house," Nora went on, "who will tell you that I am shameless!"

. . . Roger gave a glance at the house behind them, as if to fling defiance and oblivion upon all that it suggested and contained. (237-38)

The novel's virtually final words, however, carry ominous meaning. After Nora's marriage to Roger, she and Mrs. Keith (nee Miss Morton) become "very good friends." Mrs. Keith, "on being complimented on possessing the confidence of so charming a woman," says that "the fact is, Nora is under a very peculiar obligation to me" (238). One obvious implication is that if Roger's old love had not rejected him, Nora would not have been so "fortunate" as to marry Roger. Another implication is that Mrs. Keith conspired with Roger in his plan to use and misuse Nora, and that she is, therefore, complicit. But it must be clear by now that narcissistic parenting is not caused by isolated, inadequate individuals; it is rather the result of a culture that values one gender over another and that asks members of each gender to repress certain aspects of themselves. Roger's dream-come-true, then, can also be seen as his dream to recover the repressed, female, "mother" part of himself, and to possess and control it.

Notes

1 J. A. Ward notes a "deeper psychology" at work here (62). Lee Ann Johnson writes. of the "potential harmfulness" of the character Roger Lawrence (170). Alfred Habegger argues that the novel "masks dependency as love" (257). Lynda Boren declaims "Nora's victimization" (32). And Fred Caplan describes the subject matter of the novel as "substantial, serious, and autobiographically revealing"(128).

2 See Stephen Mitchell, Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis (194-98). He integrates the leading object-relations and self-psychology theorists and moves even further away than they do from Freud's drive theory.

3 Boren also notes incestuous overtones in this scene: "James's description of Mr. Lambert's agony at the bedside of his daughter prior to his suicide, his gestures and frenzy, suggests an underlying incestuous impulse. In many ways, the scene is a foreshadowing of both Nora's dilemma and Roger's ambiguous relation to her" (30).

4 See Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur, and Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love.

5 See Benjamin, who says that defense against such feelings usually takes either one form or the other (174).

6 See John Bowlby, A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development (11-12).

Works Cited

Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon, 1988.

Boren, Lynda. Eurydice Reclaimed: Language, Gender, and Voice in Henry James. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1989.

Bowlby, John. A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. New York: Basic, 1988.

Caplan, Fred. Henry James: The Imagination of Genius. New York: Morrow, 1992.

Chodorow, Nancy J. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.

-----. Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989.

Dinnerstein, Dorothy. The Mermaid and the Minotaur. New York: Harper, 1976.

Edel, Leon. "Introduction." Watch and Ward. By Henry James. New York: Grove, 1959. 5-18.

Habegger, Alfred. "Precocious Incest: First Novels by Louisa May Alcott and Henry James." Massachusetts Review 26 (Summer-Autumn 1986): 233-62.

James, Henry. Watch and Ward. 1871. New York: Grove, 1959.

Johnson, Lee Ann. "'A Dog in the Manger': James's Depiction of Roger Lawrence in Watch and Ward." Arizona Quarterly 29 (Summer 1973): 169-76.

Kohut, Heinz, and Ernest S. Wolf. "The Disorders of the Self and Their Treatment: An Outline." International Journal of Psychoanalysis 59 (1978): 413.

Mitchell, Stephen A. Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.

-----. Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic, 1993.

Ward, J. A. The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James's Fiction. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1967.

Winnicott, D. W. Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis. New York: Basic, 1958.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Northern Illinois University
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group