Henry James’s New Approach to the Autobiographical Genre: The Growing Consciousness of A Small Boy

Year 1997, Issue: 5, 59 - 68, 01.04.1997

María Antonia Alvarez

Abstract

Autobiography is essential to American literature, since it is not only a genre with the most significant origins and famous classics, but also “a necessity in order to say who we are and where we have been.” It is both a part of “our daily vernacular and our earliest heritage,” which can be traced back to the Puritan diaries and the travel narratives popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Sayre 147 . An authentic autobiography must be “a weave in which self-consciousness is delicately threaded throughout interrelated experience.” It may have such varied functions as “self-explication, self-discovery, self-clarification, self-formation, selfpresentation, self-justification.” All these functions “interpenetrate easily, but all are centered upon an aware self, aware of its relation to its experiences” Weintraub 842 . This is the case of Henry James’s Autobiography, since in the form of a dramatic, distended monologue, he draws the evolution of his conscience in a timeless, spaceless world, as the best example of his stream of consciousness technique. Written in the most refined style of his latest novels, it can be considered a literary experiment in the genre by a writer consistently devoted to change. This article argues that without reading James’s memoirs, we cannot understand the rest of his work.

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