The Jolly Corner Theme

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Henry James’s tale “The Jolly Corner” is singularly evocative and worthwhile for the insight it offers into the American artistic personality. With the wisdom of hindsight, James shows the consequences of a fundamental and early divergence in American aesthetic sensibility. “The Jolly Corner” reflects, in its most general sense, awareness. It is essentially a work of art about art itself, and, more particularly, about the teasingly ambivalent relationship between art and life. Just as the notions of life and death are existential polarities, the dichotomy between life and art is a central one in the history of aesthetic reflection. Art may be a representation of life, but it is emphatically not life itself. The variance is one of form. However, art can be seen as an intensified and finer kind of life in that its beauty of form transcends time and thus bestows on life its own immortality. By freezing the living moment into the formal timelessness of art, the artist disrupts the very purposes of life by leaving its processes exasperated. In this sense, art can be seen as a way of death in life. “The Jolly Corner” epitomizes this paradox. The structure of the tale is a perfect vehicle for its theme of the double agency of both art and life. Rarely have form and content been so inseparably fused. Furthermore, just as parables persuade us through the recognizable authenticity of the situations they describe, it would not be a contradiction to interpret James’s tale as a parable, not only of the artist as an international man of letters, but also as a parable of the artist as an unmistakable American. James extends duality further into the two personas of Spencer Brydon. Aside from the question of legitimacy, both the European and Amer... ... middle of paper ... ...e means by which defective vision is corrected. Spencer Brydon sports a “charming monocle,” but the alter ego needs a double eyeglass, a “great convex pince-nez” (101). The European aesthetic perception of life, James implies, may be a more finely trained and acute one, but in the comparatively narrowed scope of its vision, it is as surely damaged as the American perspective which has taken in more of life. The advancement, and also the injury, to each perspective and also the irrevocable divorce between them finally emerges from Alice’s last words to Spencer Brydon: “And he isn’t—no, he isn’t—you! (101). Spencer actualizes a cognizance of visual beauty and of himself, as one complete person, via his dueling identities as both an American and a European. The alter ego may not truly be Spencer Brydon, but he has been raised by Brydon in the house on the jolly corner.

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