Henry James, "The Beast in the Jungle"

What is it that we demand of sex, beyond its possible pleasures, that makes us so persistent? What is this patience or eagerness to constitute it as the secret, the omnipotent cause, the hidden meaning, the unremitting fear? 
     —Foucault, History of Sexuality vol. 1, pp. 79-80

I believe that Dora only wanted to play "secrets" with me, and to hint that she was on the point of allowing her secret to be torn from her by her physician.
     —Freud, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Dora), p. 70

"The Beast in the Jungle" isn't, at least at first, very obviously a story about sex or sexuality. It is, though, about a secret.

That secret's meaning will remain elusive to John Marcher (the main character) until the end of the story, and to many of James's readers it has remained a source of interest well beyond that endpoint.

Henry James wrote "The Beast in the Jungle" in the first years of the 20th century: he recorded the very brief, early idea for the story in a notebook entry of 1901, and published the completed story in 1903. These are the years when he was also working on the three great novels of his "late" period, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904).

Henry James

During this period of his life James was dictating his fiction to a secretary rather than writing it out himself; a long career as a writer--he had begun publishing fiction in the 1860s--had given him an almost preternatural narrative fluency, and his late style is at once colloquial and elaborate. At its best, this late style is subtle in the way that human minds and relationships are necessarily subtle, capturing the play of consciousness through a world whose meanings it at once expects and creates. At its worst, it can just feel tiresomely oblique and longwinded. It can be hard to separate what's great in late James from what's not so great, and I'll be the first to admit that "Beast" and its contemporaries in his oeuvre can be hard going--but I've also found them to more than repay the effort of reading they demand. One of my favorite words in James's lexicon is "meeting," which he often uses to describe something like the spirit in which one person hears and responds to another: to "meet" a person in this sense isn't just to be present before her, but to rise (or fall) to an intellectual and emotional and ethical level answerable (responsible) to her own. (Cf. p. 332: "She met him, perhaps, less directly, but she met him unperturbed.") To read James well, you'll need to meet him in this way.

This is especially true in a story like "The Beast in the Jungle," which is at once deeply suspenseful and deeply boring: we're waiting (with May and Marcher) for something to happen, and it never happens, or happens only when we're looking at something else. If the sort of suspenseful narrative that this story's title usually suggests rewards our waiting with a dramatic event, James is interested rather in how that kind of waiting can be a form of blindness, in reading as in life. This sort of experience seems at once quite odd and particular to Marcher's almost paranoid fantasy about the 'beast,' but it's of course perfectly ordinary as well. We miss the experience that matters all the time, because our attentions and energies are aimed elsewhere, because it's hard to know where meaning resides.

It's perfectly intelligible though extraordinarily complex for a parent to say that he has "missed my child growing up," or, as in Ibsen's The Doll House, for a wife to say that she has never really known her husband of many years. How do such things happen? It will be hard to know if we understand all experience as made up of events that are available to perception independently of our desires and beliefs; that sort of a model will help us to understand how one might miss, say, a solar eclipse (I had the time wrong; I was in the wrong hemisphere) but not how one misses a declaration of love that was implied rather than avowed, or the muted pain in a friend's voice. James, then, is going to focus not so much on the event or thing to be missed, but rather on the beliefs and feelings that structure Marcher's (and May's) experience so as to make missing possible.

During the first five sections of the story, then, you may well begin to develop hunch about what the secret is, about what the "beast" will prove to be an image of. I'd like us to bracket that curiosity, though--the story's ending will satisfy it at least provisionally--to ask other questions about Marcher's secret. Foucault's admonitions about the sorts of question useful to ask about sexuality are useful here: he urges us, rather than becoming fixated on unveiling "the" secret, to ask about the structure and and the effects of that secret and our will to know it.

In "The Beast in the Jungle," then:

*What is the structure of Marcher's secret? (That is, who knows it, and in what ways is it knowable? For example, I might know that I was and born in Kenya, and keep that a secret from you: this would be a secret transparent to myself and opaque to you, but you might find out by searching for my birth certificate. Marcher's secret is of a different sort, and knowable in different ways. In some ways, it changes over the course of the story, in which what it means to "know" something (see e.g. pp. 327-332) is itself a matter of debate).

* What are the effects of Marcher's secret? What sorts of relationship does it make possible? How, in particular, does it affect Marcher's relationship to May? His relationship to his own experience? The relation of each of them to society at large?

*While the story never turns explicitly to the topic of sex or sexuality, it will occasionally discuss gender. What do Marcher and the narrator say about women generally, and about May in particular? (Her aunt, a very minor character but an important one for her influence on May, is also interesting in this context). Conversely, what is said or implied about being male?

*The story's title is a clue to one important strain of thematic language in the story, about the jungle and its opposite, the desert; watch for related language about lushness, on the one hand, and aridity and emptiness on the other.

*We might look at the story's opening, at the Weatherend estate, as a sort of model in miniature for the concerns of the story as a whole. May is a sort of informal tour guide there, a service she performs as a condition of her aunt's allowing her to stay there. She'll perform a kind of analogous service for Marcher, guiding him not through the estate but rather through his own memories and into his future experience. Look carefully, then, at how James describes the experience of the visitors to Weatherend, and at the particular things that May helps Marcher recover about his memory of her.