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 pile there should not be much dispute about the exactness and completeness of the representation no man ever strove much 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 noble-mindedness of Henry crowd together, from The Nation, p. 397, April 5, 1917. Now, some seventy-two years later critical readers are still coming to terms with James aesthetic vision. As we have discussed in class, James aestheticizes e genuinelything. Sexual intercourse, carnal knowledge, painful self-discovery, human mortality, etc., are often figuratively and figuratively veiled so as not to disturb or revolt the reader. Taking a closer look at this, one might say that James did this so that he himself would not be repulsed. Perhaps Jam es wasnt thinking so much of the reader as he was thinking of himself.        In The Beast in the Jungle James has aesthetically hidden the cosmos of Marchers destiny by treating it as a symbolic crouching beast waiting to spring. The reader will ask why James has done this? Wouldnt it be more effective to speak plainly of Marchers and Bartrams relationship? The author could tell us exactly why John Marcher does not marry May Bartram. The cashier tells us that Marchers situation was not a reason 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?       nonpareil 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