In The Ambassadors, traditionally hailed as James's masterpiece, Lambert Strether, an aging male character, performs the role of the observer. Strether travels to Paris, on behalf of his fiancée, to watch over and return to her her errant son, Chad Newsome. Through Chad and his paramour, Marie de Vionnet, Strether learns to embrace life and to "live all you can."

Sponsor Message.

Repudiating his fiancée and his female confidante in Paris, Newsome embarks on a new life, alone, but rejuvenated. The seemingly disinterested position of the observer, therefore, often gives way to a friendship with a younger man, which empowers the observer to repudiate conventional restrictions.

Male Friendship in James's Short Stories

James's short stories frequently focus on the theme of male friendship. Texts like "The Pupil" (1890) portray relationships between older men and their protégés, and trace enriching, if short-lived, associations.

In "The Author of Beltraffio" (1884), a young critic attempts to resolve the domestic difficulties of his literary hero, Mark Ambient, only to find that his intervention into Ambient's marriage indirectly causes the death of Ambient's son.

In "The Middle Years" (1893), a relationship develops between a dying author and a young doctor at a resort. This relationship enriches the doctor's cultural existence, but also results in his poverty, since his attention to the author enrages his female patron, who cuts the doctor out of her will.

As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has argued, The Beast in the Jungle (1903) comprises a case study of "homosexual panic." Moreover, stories like "The Jolly Corner" (1908), which involves a protagonist who confronts himself as he might have been had he not left America for a solitary existence in Europe, dramatize the ways in which the protagonist comes to embrace heterosexual love.

Even though the above might suggest that James's portrayals of women suffer as a result of the privileged male relationships in his short stories, and to a certain extent this is so, at the same time, James's treatment of women is also deft and skillful, and has led many feminist critics to applaud his representations of femininity.

James, a man of his time, did not support women's rights (and was frequently quite dismissive of female writers), but his female characters are among the most positively represented in British and American literature.

Conclusion

In turn, although James's ambivalence toward gay love and lifestyles propels his fiction, his portrayals of male friendships are provocative and powerful. Indeed, the fated nature of these relationships testifies not only to James's inability to conceive of a space wherein homosexual love might be dramatized in fruition, it also points to the pall cast by the Wilde trials, wherein the specter of Oscar shadowed the comportment of many gay men of his age.

James, caught within a myriad of conflicting cultural positions--an American living in Europe, a gay man living in a normative heterosexual world--was able to channel his own marginality into literary texts that document the anxieties of his age, be they social, sexual, or cultural. In so doing, this closeted gay man was able to transform his personal difficulties into novels that represent and document a crucial stage in the development of homotextual traditions.

A theory of art and an approach to living that influenced many European and American gay male and lesbian writers at the turn of the twentieth century, aestheticism stressed the independence of art from all moral and social conditions and judgments.

Although largely invisible to the general public, a large body of twentieth-century gay male literature by American authors was published prior to Stonewall, some of it positive but most of it tinged with misery or bleakness as the price of being published and disseminated.

Although sometimes coded as romantic friendship, both gay male and lesbian attractions are reflected in nineteenth-century American poetry and fiction, including works by such major figures as Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson.

Combining elements of incongruity, theatricality, and exaggeration, camp is a form of humor that helps homosexuals cope with a hostile environment.

Both male and female homosexuality or homosexual elements appear throughout the broad scope of ghost and horror fiction.

The Gothic has always offered writers and readers the chance to experience the excitement of transgressive sexuality of various kinds, including male and female homosexuality.

In his novels and short stories, plays, and critical writings, Richard Hall focused almost exclusively on issues of gay identity and community.

English novelist and short story writer L. P. Hartley created psychologically subtle works of fiction in which the danger of abandoning oneself to love is a recurrent theme.

Noted for his elegant prose style and subtle representations of moral ambiguities, Alan Hollinghurst has in recent years emerged as Great Britain's most significant contemporary gay novelist.

Rudyard Kipling, England's "Laureate of Empire," fashioned himself as the conscience of the English-speaking world, but the great love of his life was a young man who spurned him and whose sister he married after his friend's sudden death.

The recent novels of acclaimed Irish writer Colm Tóibín are astutely observed, unsentimental explorations of gay men trying to fit into an unwelcoming, and often openly hostile, world.

Siegfried Wagner, the son of composer Richard Wagner, was himself a prolific composer and conductor; his bisexuality was the source of both scandal and also of elaborate attempts to erase it from histories of the Wagner family.

Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.

The works of nineteenth-century American realist writer Constance Fenimore Woolson display a startlingly modern self-consciousness about lesbian desire and its effects on the female artist.