The Jolly Corner (Criticism)

Criticism

Kendall Johnson

Johnson teaches American literature at the University of Pennsylvania where he recently received his Ph.D. In the following essay, Johnson explores the function of windows in “The Jolly Corner.”

Opening a window may not seem an important event in life; after all, Brydon hired Mrs. Muldoon “for a daily hour to open windows and dust and sweep.” Yet when Brydon opens the window after retreating from his alter ego, the effect is nearly magical, “a sharp rupture of his spell.” By looking closely at how windows function literally and figuratively in the story, one can understand both Brydon’s limitation as a hero and James’s subtle criticism of the protagonist’s simplistically oppositional thinking. With images of architecture and specifically of windows, James explores the boundaries between public and private, as well as individual and community.

In the 1908 preface to his New York Edition of The Portrait of a Lady (1881), James proposes that fiction can best be described as a house. Like a house, the plot of a story depends on a certain structure; like a comfortable home a good story is something the writer and reader share in personal ways.

Describing fiction as a house may ostensibly imply an inflexibility of form, conformity to blueprint, and hostility to individuality; however, James explains that it is up to the individual writer to make the house of fiction her or his own, carving a window into the structure, a window through which he or she can see the outside and communicate that vision to the world. For James, “the house of fiction” theoretically has potential windows to accommodate everyone’s perspective.

In James’s metaphor, the window is not a given fact but the product of individual will. The author’s “vision” and “pressure of individual will” pierces the house of fiction with unique perspective. Every individual sees something different although watching the same material world. The “house of fiction” is theoretically moldable to any perspective. It contains not “one window” “but a million” or rather, “a number of possible windows not to be reckoned.” For James, the structure of fiction is not in itself interesting. Instead, the eyes and I’s behind each window and each story are the true curiosity.

James’s metaphor seems particularly apt for Spencer Brydon. Following the preface’s logic, one can surmise what motivates Spencer by considering the view he manages from his room. Through most of the story, the window operates as a lens to the world, emphasizing Spencer’s feeling of transcendence above the vulgar, “awful modern crush” of the public life below. At night he opens the shutters, allowing the light from the street to illuminate his own private theater of nostalgia. The window is more than a transparent glass-plate but a psychological buffer to the world. The elevated point of his view is important to his world view, setting him literally over the city that he judges and condemns.

Importantly, Spencer does not feel that he is doing anything as he stands before the window feeling powerful. Effortlessly, his window acts as a lens, providing the focal point through which the disparate elements of the world are arranged for his vision.

The magisterial attitude with which Spencer surveys the world scene complements his hyperbolic self-image as a heroic knight, a big-game hunter tracking the “beast in the forest,” or as “the traveller emerging from an Egyptian tomb,” “assaulted” by the “outer light of the Desert.” When Spencer performs his midnight vigil he characterizes his reflections as requiring the concentrated force of an exceptional individual will. This sacred routine generates his life’s most concentrated tension and he finds “no pleasure so fine” as his “stalking” the alter ego.

Like the Greek hero Ulysses, Spencer has traveled the world for many years, leaving behind his Penelope in Alice Staverton. The story evokes a potentially epic melancholy, spotlighting a man whose world has passed him by while he wandered. During the night of the final showdown, Spencer chooses a self-description that makes the heroic nature of his inner conflict explicit.

Keenly aware of his alter ego’s presence, he holds to the conviction “to show himself, in a word, that he wasn’t afraid.” While walking down the stairs he imagines himself “a physical image, an image almost worthy of an age of greater romance.” The hyperbole intensifies as Spencer gauges his present showdown as unmatched by any “age of romance.” By proving to himself that he is not spooked by his alter ego, Spencer envisions himself “[proceeding] downstairs with a drawn sword.”

This exaggeration foreshadows Spencer’s exceptional opening of the window even as it threatens to disturb the structure of Spencer’s story. His hyperbolic terms invite the reader to scrutinize Spencer and to doubt that he offers a reliable window onto the world. After all, what value does Spencer claim to hold that makes him feel so superior to the world below?

Throughout the story, Spencer considers himself brave because he has resisted the call of the New York business world. Instead he wants to find “values” other than those that depend on the “beastly rent-values” of New York. As a young man he rejected his father’s advice and turned his back on business and the United States, leaving for Europe where he pursued his interest in art.

Spencer’s alternative idea of “value” is hard to discern. He seems unable to explain a positive ideal behind his decisions, characterizing his thirty-year absence as “a selfish frivolous scandalous life.” In order to prove himself, Spencer prepares for a series of showdowns — with the construction representative, his alter ego, and Alice’s implicit request for him to stay with her in New York. Spencer’s heroism is a series of confrontations through which he makes himself “stand up.” His operating logic is binary opposition, yes or no propositions that he accepts or rejects. The properties he returns to administer reflect this polarity. One is sacred, “consecrated,” and the other a symbol of vulgar money interest.

Spencer’s confrontational egotism saturates the image of the honorable knight. He manages to build his heroic status only by dominating someone else. His search for the alter ego runs parallel to his confrontation with the “representative of the building firm” at his other property to whom Spencer also “[stood] up.” In both instances, Spencer masters a threatening adversary. His alter ego is a personification of this violent opposition: “some erect confronting presence, something planted in the middle of the place and facing him through the dusk.” Spencer yearns to win, to “turn the table on the apparition,” proving again that he is not scared by scaring someone else.

The broader effect of this attitude is that Spencer seems incapable of recognizing those around him, even when they are crucial to his happiness. The narrator characterizes Alice as “[listening] to everything” and as “a woman who answered intimately but who utterly didn’t chatter.” In these terms, Alice seems to be a mere complement to Spencer’s heroic musings. Later, he characterizes her in a static, one-dimensional fashion as “you were born to be what you are,” “you’re a person whom nothing can have altered.” Such terms erase Alice’s entire life experience and feeling through a gross generalization in contrast to which Spencer fills his own crisis with dramatic depth.

In the end, Spencer learns that life is not a series of oppositions but a vast network of decisions that prevent such easy victory. While opposing the business world has been his primary goal, he realizes in front of his fourth-floor window that the extremes are themselves related. In the end, Spencer’s opposition of business and art fails as he is unable to locate a space outside of the economic space. His attempt to maintain private sanctity by holding the publicly commercial at bay is unworkable. Alice sums up the situation well when she remarks that he makes “so good a thing of [his] sky-scraper that, living in luxury on those ill-gotten gains, [he] can afford for a while to be sentimental” in the house on the jolly corner.

The plot’s thickening depends on questioning the way Spencer has lived his life. As Spencer stands at the window, he realizes the full force of his isolation. The landscape has changed dramatically since he abandoned the United States and as he looks out from his fourth-floor window near dawn, the homes seem “hard-faced houses” that speak “so little to any need of his spirit.” Instead of seeing a vulgar world against which he can elevate himself, he sees a “void.” The void lacks any sense of proportion or measure and reflects a deeper crisis in Spencer’s perspective on the world. His confusion at the window represents his final inability to separate himself from the world he had believed himself to have transcended.

In perceiving the world as an “incalculable void,” Spencer recognizes the emptiness at the heart of his own oppositional thinking. When there is nothing left to reject, who is Spencer? Is his art really separate from business, and if not, what is the relationship of art to business? Instead of a sacred space apart from the money-lust of the public “void,” his private sanctuary is merely another “door into a room shuttered and void.”

The scene at the window emphasizes the blurred relationship between these oppositions. It is not enough to open or shut the window as it was to open or shut the doors of the house while tracking the apparition. Standing at the window, Spencer’s pretension to have derived a transcendent value erodes as he realizes that he is trapped not by “others” but by his own methods of establishing himself through confrontation and equating truth with the either/or polarity of ultimatum.

Spencer struggles with the scene’s “large collective negation” even as dawn breaks. In opening the window, Spencer addresses the terms through which he reads the world. He will do anything to shake up the system. First he tries to make contact with those he watched from his window. In order to circumvent the vacuity of his vision, he looks on to “The empty street... the great lamplit vacancy” and decides it “was within call, within touch.” He yearns for “some comforting common fact, some vulgar human note, the passage of a scavenger or a thief, some night-bird however base.”

The condescending terms (“vulgar human note,” “night-bird however base”) are echoes of his binary logic and self-assured egotism, echoes resonating even in his most vulnerable moment. The policeman walking his beat, “whom [Spencer] had hitherto only sought to avoid” now desperately becomes his “friend” whom Spencer wants “to get into relation with” or “to hail” from his fourth floor.

But, despite his “choked appeal from his own open window” no “vulgar human note” appears, and Spencer continues to fall deeper into isolation. The story takes on a nearly comic note as Spencer struggles to reinvent his vision, to situate himself with a significant difference in relation to the window. Unable to connect with a human presence in the street, Spencer imagines himself clumsily “astride of the window-sill,” flailing an “outstretched leg and arm” to a ladder or scaffolding with which he can descend to the street.

With these pathetically desperate moments, James explodes Spencer’s self-inflated heroism of romantic knighthood. Finally, the comedy turns gruesome as Spencer imagines throwing himself out of the window, “uncontrollably insanely fatally [taking] his way to the street.”

This turn from physical humor into deep despair demonstrates how radically Spencer needs to shift his thinking. It is not enough that the window is open or shut, instead Spencer must entirely reconsider his method of seeing. In this line of argument, recent critics have looked at the story through different windows asking: What is Alice’s window, or Mrs. Muldoon’s?

Reading the story, one can glimpse shadows of these different perspectives. In Alice’s acceptance of Spencer either as he is or as he might have been, she is able to locate the contradictions of life and not shirk admitting her role in the machinery of economic existence. This is not to say that Alice’s window to life is without its limitations — how different might her impression of Spencer’s drama be than Mrs. Muldoon’s? How might Mrs. Muldoon’s window reflect critiques of the economic privilege on which the story stages Alice and Spencer’s reunion?

Source: Kendall Johnson, “World View, World Void: Brydon at His Window in ‘The Jolly Corner’,” for Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2000.

What Do I Read Next?

• Published in 1887, The American is James’s third novel. The protagonist, Christopher Newman, is a brash, young American businessman. He travels in Europe, learning about art and European culture. Newman and Spencer offer a fascinating contrast.
• James’s “In the Cage” is a short story published in 1898. It chronicles the life of an English, working-class woman who works in a telegraph booth. She reads the messages of her upper-class clientele, obsessed by their correspondence and personal intrigues.
• The novels The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1921), written by Edith Wharton, focus on the lives of upper-class American families in the Gilded Age.
• The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of essays by W. E. B. Dubois, cuts to the heart of social conflict in the early twentieth century. Published in 1904, the essays record his impressions of living in the North and in the South as an African-American.
• Published in 1910, Twenty Years at Hull-House by Jane Addams documents the poverty and exploitation of immigrants settling in the major cities of the United States.