Textual and Sexual Revisions: The Dynamics of Queer Identification(s) in Henry James’ The Middle Years

Abstract

As one way of approaching the heterogeneity of potential textual meanings, the present discussion on one of James’ earlier short stories, “The Middle Years,” serves the objective of reading a self-questioning and ultimately queer identity formation process into the protagonist’s pursuit of meaning. More precisely, it will be set forth how the story’s central motifs, the reading and the revisioning routine, can be considered as allegorizing a quest for signification of which an unambiguous meaning can never be ascertained. Moreover, within this process of identity formation the developed pursuit of signification will be deliberated as marking an internal negotiation process of the central and unfixed self’s various failed and/or queer identity possibilities. Ultimately, the close considerations of the process of introspection will be substantiated as intensely unsettling, but also as opening up ways to generate a complex and dynamic concept of the self, which constantly strives to repudiate other possibilities and which struggles to set up boundaries against alternative selves. By means of defamiliarizing the self, a new, more diffuse and dissonant, in other words, queer self is given birth to.