The Jolly Corner (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

“The Jolly Corner” has generated much critical commentary. On one level, Spencer Brydon’s experience is quite familiar and represents a painful but inevitable aspect of the human condition. Critics explore the implications of his self-doubt and insecurity as well as the meaning of the story’s conclusion. Is the final scene a moment of redemption for Spencer; or, is Spencer incapable of really coming to terms with his past?

Some commentators view the story as autobiographical. Like Spencer, James left the United States (in 1875), lived in Europe for a long period of time, and returned to find America much changed. Spencer’s conflict between Europe and America is subject of much of James’s fiction, literary criticism and diary entries. Moreover, Alice Staverton’s name echoes James’s beloved younger sister.

Spencer’s alter ego represents a personal and philosophical crisis that James’s father often spoke about — the “vastation.” Henry James, Sr. was influenced by the moral philosopher Emmanuel Swedenborg, whose ideas explored the unmanageable energies of nature and the extremes of human consciousness. The “vastation” was a visitation by one’s evil self that forced one to confront their most sensitive weakness.

One well-established view is that by facing the “black stranger,” Spencer confronts Henry James’s alter ego. Leon Edel, James’s most meticulous and authoritative biographer, considered Spencer’s conflict emblematic of whether James regarded the United States or England as the source of his fiction. In Henry James, The Master: 1901-1916 (1972), Edel responds to early criticism of James’s career, most notably that of Van Wyck Brook. In The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925) Brook charged James with turning his back on the United States in an ineffective attempt to associate with the more highly esteemed, genteel class literary tradition of England.

By focusing on James’s later work, and reading Spencer’s crisis as a final acceptance of America, Edel recasts James’s aesthetic effort as being primarily an attempt to reconcile, understand, and depict what it means to be American in an increasing international world. Edel’s argument echoes earlier appraisals of James, the most notable appraisal by F. O. Matthiessen in Henry James: The Major Phase (1944). In these accounts, Spencer is reconciled with his alter ego.

Some critics are skeptical of Spencer’s redemption at the end of the story. In The American Henry James (1957), Quentin Anderson views Spencer as hopelessly self-centered. In “The Beast in‘The Jolly Corner’: Spencer Brydon’s Ironic Rebirth” (1974), Allen Stein argues that Spencer actually sees who he will become. Stein not only sees Spencer as lacking self-awareness but an ugly human being. Instead of redeeming Spencer, Alice may simply be an enabler, shielding him from what he really is.

Alice is considered an enigmatic figure in the story. A few critics have examined the character of Alice with interesting results. In‘“Doing Good by Stealth’: Alice Staverton and Women’s Politics in

’The Jolly Corner’” (1992), Russell Reising views Alice as a major character. Within the context of her time, Alice seems to be an anomaly or outcast — unmarried, no children and self-supporting.

However, instead of symbolizing failed femininity, Alice is viewed by some critics as manipulative and deceptive. Some have even characterized her as an artful liar. It is a bit disconcerting, however, that despite Alice’s apparent strength and independence she is so set on marriage to Spencer. Has she spent thirty-three years merely waiting for her man to come home?

Recent criticism has both emphasized Spencer’s egotism and attempted to uncover the full role of Alice in Spencer’s resurrection. In “A New Reading of Henry James’s ‘The Jolly Corner’” (1987), Daniel Mark Fogel contends that as the story ends Spencer realizes that the monstrous stranger is his alter ego. Only Alice’s love will save him. In Alice’s embrace and Spencer’s return, Spencer saves himself from tragic fate. At the story’s end, Spencer is “loving and beloved,” enjoying “at last a blessed state the beauty of which the black stranger had never tasted or could never taste.”