Understanding James, Understanding Modernism by David H. Evans;

Author:David H. Evans; [Evans;, David H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501302756
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2019-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Already in next story, however, things seem to have changed. In fact, the failure of conventional and abstract language, the troubled relation between words and reality, could be said to be the central theme of “Melanchtha,” allegorized in the troubled relation between the two main characters, Jeff and Melanctha. Jeff is a man characterized by restraint and rationality; as a doctor he is committed to the assumption that the chaotic world of subjective feelings and somatic responses can be reduced to symptoms of classifiable conditions. But Melanctha presents an unprecedented challenge to his diagnostic abilities. She resists clear and stable classification, and throughout the story she displays constant emotional lability and a tendency to “wander,” with the clear implication of sexual promiscuity. Their potential incompatibility is indicated early on in linguistic terms, in the form of a dispute over what each means by the word “love.” Jeff insists that he believes “strong in loving,” and his notion of love clearly tends in the direction of a sort of generalized benevolence insofar as it involves “being good to everybody, and trying to understand what they all need, to help them.” But Melanctha has little time for such dispassionate lofty-mindedness, and objects: “That certainly ain’t the kind of love I mean when I am talking. I mean real, strong, hot love Dr. Campbell, that makes you do anything for somebody that loves you.” Real, strong, and hot is exactly what love should not be, for Jeff, since he does not, as he calmly explains, “like to get excited, and that kind of loving hard does seem always to mean just getting all the time excited” (GSW, 1.152).

As Jeff becomes more infatuated with Melanctha, however, he does get more “all the time excited,” and ever more confused about how to classify her. The good Anna might be simply defined by her abstract goodness, but Melanctha’s goodness is a far less certain quantity, as Jeff gradually comes to understand: “He was beginning to feel he could almost trust the goodness in her. But then, always, really, he was not very sure about her” (GSW, 1.162–3). At times, he complains directly to Melanctha about her duplicitous evasion of the limitations of any categorization: “Sometimes you seem like one kind of a girl to me, and sometimes you are like a girl that is all different to me, and the two kinds of girls is certainly very different to each other, and I can’t see any way they seem to have much to do, to be together in you” (GSW, 1.164).

Jeff’s failure to classify Melanctha represents a failure of words. What James would call “the whole organization of [his] speech” inclines Jeff to believe in “unchanging simple ideas,” specifically the unchanging and simple idea that he wants to label with the signifier “Melanctha.” Words, however, fail him, and he in turn abandons them: “Melanctha always had ways that made him feel uncertain with her, and yet he was so near, in his feeling for her. He now never thought about all this in real words any more.

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