Public Intellectuals by Richard A. POSNER

Author:Richard A. POSNER [POSNER, Richard A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Process, General
ISBN: 9780674042278
Google: gsoqJtai7moC
Publisher: HarvardUP
Published: 2009-06-30T21:46:17+00:00

17. Shakespeare’s play, like Marlowe’s, vividly parades all the traditional scary stereotypes about Jews, see James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (1996), but with greater realism.

18. Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature 164 (1990), cited in this chapter as Love’s Knowledge. The quoted passage could serve as the motto of moralistic criticism.

In a discussion of The Ambassadors, Nussbaum casts Mrs. Newsome as Kant and Lambert Strether as Aristotle (Love’s Knowledge, ch. 6). I would prefer to call Mrs. Newsome a Calvinist and Strether a Calvinist shaken in his beliefs by his encounter with French worldliness and sensuality. But I accept Nussbaum’s point that literary characters can sometimes be recast as spokesmen for rival philosophical positions, even in a less overtly “philosophical” novel than La Nausée or The Magic Mountain. Can be, but should they be? They are less interesting when they are made the poster children of philosophical doctrines.

One of James’s late novels that Nussbaum does not discuss—it would be particularly difficult to fit to her thesis—is the penultimate one, The Wings of the Dove. Kate Croy, the novel’s central character, is a monster. But she is a monster for whom the novel engenders in the reader a deep sympathy because of her strength, purposefulness, beauty, charm, intelligence, boldness, and ambition. She stands for life, in contrast not only to Millie Theale, the ostensible heroine of the novel, sickly and dying, but also to Merton Densher, Kate’s fiancé, who like most men in James’s novels is weak.21 It is also and critically the case that Kate lacks money, as does Charlotte in The Golden Bowl, a Kate-like character whom I am not alone in finding more endearing than Maggie, the ostensible, and to Nussbaum the actual, heroine.22 But Kate and Charlotte are not poor, and it would be odd to describe Henry James as an egalitarian and even odder to describe Aristotle so.

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