Style in Fiction Symposium (SIFS)

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David L. Hoover

New York University, USA

A Conversation Among Himselves: Change and the Style of Henry James

Abstract

Stylistic studies typically focus on authors with distinctive styles, but sometimes individual texts by an author are so diverse that the style of the text rather than the style of the author becomes the appropriate focus. Here I focus on a special case of stylistic diversity: the changes in Henry James’s style from the publication of his first novel in 1871 to his death in 1916. As early as 1921, Carl Van Doren remarked on the “pellucid” clarity of the early novels and contrasted it with the obscurity of the “elaborate, maturer books,” and this judgment continues to resonate with readers to the present day. James’s extensive revisions of his early novels for the New York edition of 1907-09 have been carefully studied, and have often been discussed as an attempt bring the early novels into line with his late style. Much has also been made of the syntactic aspects of the style of the late novels, including an excellent discussion in Style in Fiction. I concentrate on a more finely grained comparison of James’s changing lexis using methods developed for authorship attribution. What emerges from this comparison is a remarkable picture of an author whose style develops incrementally and consistently, a picture that is congruent with James’s reputation as a meticulous craftsman who self-consciously transformed his style over his long career. Although stylistic change over a long career is to be expected, the novels of Charles Dickens and Willa Cather show different and much weaker patterns than those of James, suggesting that consistent chronological development cannot be safely assumed. After confirming the traditional distinction between early and late James and establishing the existence of an intermediate style, I discuss in detail some words and word families that contribute to these distinctions and conclude with some suggestions for the future study of the processes of growth and decay within an author’s vocabulary.