Readers of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies have long noted the absence of readily explainable motivations for some of Shakespeare’s greatest characters: why does Hamlet delay his revenge for so long? Why does King Lear choose to renounce his power? Why is Othello so vulnerable to Iago’s malice? But while many critics have chosen to overlook these omissions or explain them away, Millicent Bell demonstrates that they are essential elements of Shakespeare’s philosophy of doubt. Examining the major tragedies, Millicent Bell reveals the persistent strain of philosophical skepticism. Like his contemporary, Montaigne, Shakespeare repeatedly calls attention to the essential unknowability of our world. In a period of social, political, and religious upheaval, uncertainty hovered over matters great and small―the succession of the crown, the death of loved ones from plague, the failure of a harvest. Tumultuous social conditions raised ultimate questions for Shakespeare, Bell argues, and ultimately provoked in him a skepticism which casts shadows of existential doubt over his greatest masterpieces.

Shakespeare’s Tragic Skepticism

Literature & Fiction

BELL, MILLICENT

Dramas & Plays

Yale University Press

Marquand: An American life

Little,Brown

Henry James rebelled intuitively against the tyranny and banality of plots. Believing a life to have many potential paths and a self to hold many destinies, he hung the evocative shadow of "what might have been" over much of what he wrote. Yet James also realized that no life can be lived--and no story written--except by submission to some outcome. The limiting conventions of society and literature are, he found, almost inescapable. In a major, comprehensive new study of James's work, Millicent Bell explores this oscillation between hope and fatalism, indeterminacy and form, and uncertainty and meaning. In the process Bell provides fresh insight into how we read and interpret fiction. 
 Bell demonstrates how James's texts steadfastly, almost perversely at times, preserve a sense of alternative possibilities. James involves his characters in overlapping scenarios drawn from folklore, drama, literature, or naturalist formula. The reader engages, with the hero or heroine, in imagining many plots other than the one that finally-and often ambiguously--emerges. The story arouses expectations, proposes courses, then cancels them successively. In complicity with author and character, the reader crafts the story in an adventure of constant revision and anticipation. Literary meaning becomes an experience as well as a goal. In the end, revelations and resolutions, even if unclear or partial, assume an altered significance in light of the earlier imaginings. 
 Not surprisingly, James's deepest sympathies lay with those characters who resisted entrapment by cultural expectations--his idealistic free spirits like Isabel, his marriage renouncers like Fleda Vetch, his largely silent and detached witnesses to life like Strether and the generous Maisie. They are frequently the victims of callous manipulators who box them into oppressive roles or who literally "plot against" them. By looking closely at James's critiques of clever" categorical mind and at his loving and complex portraits of characters of unfulfilled potentiality, Bell celebrates the paradoxes of James's story-denying fiction. 
 In extended analyses of Daisy Miller," Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady; The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, "The Aspern Papers," The Spoils of Poynton, "The Turn of the Screw," What Maisie Knew, "The Beast in the Jungle," "The Jolly Corner," The Wings of the Dove, and The Ambassadors, Bell relates James's work to influential movements of the day, notably impressionism and naturalism. She examines the influence of Hawthorne, Emerson, Flaubert, Balzac, and Zola on James at various periods throughout his career. Drawing on rich traditions of criticism and on stimulating recent theories, Bell forges a critical approach both accessible and profound for this elegant reading of one of the greatest writers of this or any time. 
 It is a book that will be of high value and interest to the advanced scholar--marking out new ground in its methodology and offering innovative interpretations of James's fiction. At the same time, it will appeal equally to the general, reader, who will find his reading of James enriched by Bell's lucid and impassioned discussion.

Meaning in Henry James

History & Criticism

Harvard University Press

Henry James rebelled intuitively against the tyranny and banality of plots. Believing a life to have many potential paths and a self to hold many destinies, he hung the evocative shadow of "what might have been" over much of what he wrote. Yet James also realized that no life can be lived--and no story written--except by submission to some outcome. The limiting conventions of society and literature are, he found, almost inescapable. In a major, comprehensive new study of James's work, Millicent Bell explores this oscillation between hope and fatalism, indeterminacy and form, and uncertainty and meaning. In the process Bell provides fresh insight into how we read and interpret fiction. Bell demonstrates how James's texts steadfastly, almost perversely at times, preserve a sense of alternative possibilities. James involves his characters in overlapping scenarios drawn from folklore, drama, literature, or naturalist formula. The reader engages, with the hero or heroine, in imagining many plots other than the one that finally-and often ambiguously--emerges. The story arouses expectations, proposes courses, then cancels them successively. In complicity with author and character, the reader crafts the story in an adventure of constant revision and anticipation. Literary meaning becomes an experience as well as a goal. In the end, revelations and resolutions, even if unclear or partial, assume an altered significance in light of the earlier imaginings. Not surprisingly, James's deepest sympathies lay with those characters who resisted entrapment by cultural expectations--his idealistic free spirits like Isabel, his marriage renouncers like Fleda Vetch, his largely silent and detached witnesses to life like Strether and the generous Maisie. They are frequently the victims of callous manipulators who box them into oppressive roles or who literally "plot against" them. By looking closely at James's critiques of clever"

United States

Already the subject of articles in the International Herald Tribune and the London Times, Beloved Boy is a remarkable collection of letters tracing Henry James’s fascination with and enduring devotion to a young Norwegian-American artist. James was already fifty-six when, visiting Rome in 1899, he was introduced to the twenty-seven--year-old Hendrik Andersen. In an uncanny instance of life imitating art, Andersen bore an unmistakable resemblance to the title character of James’s 1875 novel Roderick Hudson―a figure who, like Andersen, was a young sculptor venturing into life as an expatriate in Italy. Although his initial meeting with Andersen was brief, James was deeply moved by the young man. He wrote to Andersen almost immediately after his return to his Sussex home, and remained a faithful correspondent until his own death in 1915.The two men met on only seven occasions, and never for more than a few days, so their friendship was almost entirely epistolary. The letters assembled here, nearly half of which are previously unpublished, exhibit a voice decidedly more vulnerable than that which we usually associate with James. They also shed new light on the writer’s homoerotic leanings, as he approaches Andersen with a passion, as well as a tenderness, typically reserved for a lover.Even greater than his feelings for Andersen, however, was James’s devotion to art. Despite an initially positive opinion, James was forced to reassess Andersen’s work, which became increasingly grandiose– exhibiting "megalomania," as James bluntly diagnosed it. The sculptor’s tendency toward monumentality, including plans for a utopian "World City," were at odds with James’s commitment to observing reality in all its complexity and imperfection. Despite this, James’s affection for his friend never wavered; his letters remained occasions to celebrate the youth and beauty personified for him by Andersen.

Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen, 1899–1915

Andersen, Hendrik Christian

Mamoli Zorzi, Rosella

di Majo, Elena

JAMES,HENRY

Essays & Correspondence

University of Virginia Press

"In this collection commemorating the bicentennial of Hawthorne's birth in 1804, Millicent Bell gathers essays by distinguished scholars and critics that examine the ways in which Hawthorne related himself to the "real" in his own world and expressed that relation in his writing. Radically revising the older view that he was detached from conditions of actual life in 19th-century American society, the authors undertake to show how current social conditions, current events and political movements taking place at a crucial point in American history were an evident part of Hawthorne's consciousness. The essays situate his imaginative writings in a contemporary context of common experience and rediscover a Hawthorne alert to pressing problems of his day, especially slavery, feminism, and reform in general - the very issues that motivated his contemporaries on the eve of the Civil War. Hawthorne was, with his own complicity, long described as a writer of unreal romances (as he preferred to call his novels) or "allegories of the heart" as he termed some of his short stories. The essays in this collection contribute to the turn in recent Hawthorne criticism which shows how deeply implicated in realism his writing was."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

HAWTHORNE AND THE REAL: BICENTENNIAL ESSAYS

Ohio State University Press

The Hawthorne depicted by Professor Bell in these pages will be as much of a surprise to many readers as is his appearance in the rare 1847 daguerreotype reproduced on the book-jacket. "This virtually unknown portrait," says the author, "corresponds with Samuel Goodrich's description, in 1856, of the New England writer: ...'his hair dark and bushy, his eye steel gray, his brow thick, his mouth sarcastic, his whole aspect cold, moody, distrustful....At this period...he had tried his hand in literature and considered himself to have met with a fatal rebuff from the reading world'" (pp. 92-93). His sensitiveness to the predicament of the artist in early-nineteenth-century America--when the rush for power, money, and social prestige relegated creative talent to the dustbin--filled Hawthorne's writings with penetrating statements about the artist's fate in the new scientific, industrial world, statements still applicable today.

Hawthorne's View of the Artist

Biographies & Memoirs

SUNY Press

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