Henry James's Capricciosa: Christina Light in Roderick Hudson and the Princess Casamassima

• Published in: PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 1960-06, Vol.75 (3), p.309-319
• Main Author: Grenander, M. E.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Boggarts; Bookbinding; Friendship; Literature; Mallets; Pity; Poverty; Princesses; Sculptors; Sympathy
• ISSN: 0030-8129; 1938-1530
• DOI: 10.2307/460342

In recent years, critical attention has focussed increasingly on The Princess Casamassima , Henry James's novel of the international revolutionary movement seething beneath the surface of society. The sad wisdom of the mid-twentieth century no longer finds incredible the plot earlier critics dismissed as footling melodrama; and with a recognition of its probability, students of James have undertaken a re-examination of the whole novel. Oddly enough, however, little attention has been paid to its reliance on Roderick Hudson , where the Princess Casamassima first appears. The one significant exception has been a short essay by Louise Bogan, though Christina's complexity and interest have attracted other writers. Yet Roderick Hudson deserves study for its own merits; and, as Miss Bogan has pointed out, the character of the Princess is difficult to interpret unless one also remembers her as Christina Light. It is not true, as Miss Bogan asserts (p. 472), that Christina is “the only figure [James] ever ‘revived’ and carried from one book to another,” for not only do Madame Grandoni and the Prince Casamassima share her transposition; the sculptor Gloriani, who makes his debut in Roderick Hudson , reappears in The Ambassadors. But it is true, as Cargill more accurately points out (p. 108), that “Christina is the only major [italics mine] character that James ever revived from an earlier work,” for he questioned the wisdom of indulging wholesale the writer's “revivalist impulse” to “go on with a character.” Hence Christina Light must have struck him as a very special case. He tells us that he felt, “toward the end of ‘Roderick,‘ that the Princess Casamassima had been launched, that, wound-up with the right silver key, she would go on a certain time by the motion communicated” ( AN , p. 18). In the Preface to The Princess Casamassima he continues this train of thought: Christina Light, “extremely disponible” and knowing herself “striking, in the earlier connexion,… couldn't resign herself not to strike again” ( AN , pp. 73, 74).