The Warning in The Beast in the Jungle :: Beast in the Jungle Essays

The Warning in The wight in the Jungle          In the case of Henry pack at that place should non be much dispute about the exactness and completeness of the theatrical no man ever strove more studiously or on the whole more successfully to reproduce the shape and color and front of his     &230sthetic experience. These are the remarks of Stuart P. Sherman from his article entitled The Aesthetic Idealism of Henry James, from The Nation, p. 397, April 5, 1917. Now, whatsoever seventy-two years later critical readers are still climax to terms with James aesthetic vision. As we have discussed in class, James aestheticizes everything. intimate intercourse, carnal knowledge, painful self-discovery, human mortality, etc., are often figuratively and metaphoricly veiled so as not to disturb or snub the reader. Taking a closer look at this, one mogul say that James did this so that he himself would not be repulsed. mayhap James wasnt thinking so much of the reader as he was thinking of himself.        In The Beast in the Jungle James has esthetically hidden the reality of infantrymans destiny by treating it as a emblematical crouching beast waiting to spring. The reader will ask why James has done this? Wouldnt it be more effective to speak plainly of subsidiarys and Bartrams human relationship? The author could tell us exactly why John Marcher does not marry May Bartram. The narrator tells us that Marchers situation was not a condition he could invite a woman to partake and that a man of feeling didnt  cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger hunt (p. 417). This is nonsense. Marcher wont marry May because he doesnt want to inconvenience her with his condition or endanger her life on a tiger hunt? get-go of all, he inconveniences her right up to the day of her death with his condition, and as for the metaphorical tiger hunt, what exactly does that refer to? What is it here that James will not speak of in plain language? Simply what is the meaning of this what is the authors feeling?      One might speculate that this story is somewhat autobiographical in that James himself never married and often carried on close individualised relationships with a very select few. The various biographers of his life