Portraits of Contemporary Ladies: Imagination and the Anxiety of Influence in Henry James and Claire Messud

Abstract

While novelist Claire Messud has openly credited the influence of Henry James’s fiction on her work, no scholarship to date has explored the question of what influence means in this context. Here, I use James’s Portrait of a Lady and Messud’s The Woman Upstairs as case studies in arguing for the existence of what I call a poetics of indirect influence. I employ that concept as a lens through which to consider 1) the relationship between James’s and Messud’s respective works, and 2) the treatment of indirect influence internal to each of their novels. I show that indirect influence, rather than direct influence, is the best lens through which to understand the question of how one author—or character—is influenced by another in this context. In so doing, I put into question some of the conventions of the mid-20th century notion of the (implicitly direct) anxiety of influence, even while considering how Messud first tries to emulate and then overtake the master. My examination of the inner lives of James’s and Messud’s female characters through their internal narratives sheds new lights on James while contributing to the lean body of work on Messud.