The Warning in The Beast in the Jungle :: Beast in the Jungle Essays

The Warning in The Beast in the Jungle          In the case of Henry James there should not be much dispute about the exactness and completeness of the representation no man ever strove more studiously or on the whole more successfully to reproduce the shape and color and movement of his     &230sthetic experience. These are the remarks of Stuart P. Sherman from his article entitled The Aesthetic Idealism of Henry James, from The Nation, p. 397, April 5, 1917. Now, some seventy-two years later minute readers are still coming to terms with James aesthetic vision. As we have discussed in class, James aestheticizes everything. Sexual intercourse, carnal knowledge, painful self-discovery, human mortality, etc., are frequently figuratively and metaphorically veiled so as not to disturb or repulse the reader. Taking a closer look at this, cardinal might say that James did this so that he himself would not be repulsed. Perhaps James wasnt thinki ng so much of the reader as he was thinking of himself.        In The Beast in the Jungle James has aesthetically hidden the reality of Marchers destiny by treating it as a symbolic crouching wolf waiting to spring. The reader allow for ask why James has done this? Wouldnt it be more effective to speak plainly of Marchers and Bartrams relationship? The author could specialize us exactly why John Marcher does not marry May Bartram. The narrator tells us that Marchers situation was not a condition he could invite a woman to share and that a man of feeling didnt  cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger hunt (p. 417). This is nonsense. Marcher wont marry May because he doesnt want to inconvenience her with his condition or endanger her life on a tiger hunt? First of all, he inconveniences her right up to the day of her death with his condition, and as for the metaphorical tiger hunt, what exactly does that refer to? What is it here that James will not speak of in plain language? Simply what is the meaning of this what is the authors intent?      One might speculate that this story is somewhat autobiographical in that James himself never married and often carried on close personal relationships with a very select few. The various biographers of his life