Differing Interpretations of The Beast in the Jungle

First Take

The Western (i.e., British tradition) English-language novel traditionally ends with a wedding or a funeral. The marriage plotman and woman meet, overcome obstacles to love, and marry at the conclusion of the storyhas been a feature of the novel since it emerged as a genre (see Pamela, Samuel Richardson, 1740). 18th Century Initially reflects the emerging middle class in European industrialized society (i.e., those most likely to buy and read novels) For bourgeois society marriage is the all-subsuming, allorganizing, all-containing contract. The bourgeois novelist has no choice but to engage the subject of marriage in one way or another, at no matter what extreme of celebration or contestation. Tony Tanner

 Reflects changing relationships between men and women

as the contract between man and wife loses its sense of necessity and binding power, so does the contract between novelist and reader. . . . In confronting the problems of marriage and adultery, the bourgeois novel finally has to confront not only the provisionality of social laws and rules and structures but the provisionality of its own procedures and assumptions Tony Tanner

What we learn about John and May

John Marcherdoes not even know that desire is absent from his life, nor that May Bartram desires him, until after she has died from his obtuseness. Of May Bartrams history, of her emotional determinants, of her erotic structures the reader learns very little; we are permitted, if we pay attention at all, to know that we have learned very little. The Beast in the Jungle seems to give the reader permission to imagine some female needs and desires and gratifications that are not structured exactly in the image of Marchers or of the storys own laws. Eve Sedgwick

Marcher could only feel he ought to have rendered her some service-saved her from a capsized boat in the bay or at least recovered her dressing-bag, filched from her cab in the streets of Naples by a lazzarone with a stiletto. Or it would have been nice if he could have been taken with fever all alone at his hotel, and she could have come to look after him, to write to his people, to drive him out in convalescence. Then they would be in possession of the something or other that their actual show seemed to lack. (Chapter I, p. 36) The real form it should have taken on the basis that stood out large was the form of their marrying. But the devil in this was that the very basis itself put marrying out of the question. His conviction, his apprehension, his obsession, in short, wasn't a privilege he could invite a woman to share; and that consequence of it was precisely what was the matter with him. Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like a crouching Beast in the Jungle. It signified little whether the crouching Beast were destined to slay him or to be slain. The definite point was the inevitable spring of the creature; and the definite lesson from that was that a man of feeling didn't cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt. (Chapter II, pp. 43-44)

It had become suddenly, from her movement and attitude, beautiful and vivid to him that she had something more to give him; her wasted face delicately shone with it--it glittered almost as with the white lustre of silver in her expression. She was right, incontestably, for what he saw in her face was the truth, and strangely, without consequence, while their talk of it as dreadful was still in the air, she appeared to present it as inordinately soft. This, prompting bewilderment, made him but gape the more gratefully for her revelation (Chapter IV, p. 59) The escape would have been to love her; then, then, he would have lived. (Chapter VI, p. 70)

Second Take

 Tripartite mind (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900)

Id: unconscious mind Ego: conscious/waking mind Super-ego: morality, sense of right and wrong (instilled by family/society)

Freudian repression (Second Lecture, 1909)

When uncomfortable desires emerge in the conscious mind, the super-ego pushes them back down into the id (repression) Repressed wishes continue to exist in the unconscious. What to do? A patient can Accept the wish Redirect it to something unobjectionable Condemn it and thus control it

 Four-part theory of the mind

Super-ego & ego function akin to Freud But your unconscious now has 2 parts: ersonal Unconscious: similar to Freuds id Collective Unconscious: archetypes and universal symbols and myths we all have access to/know innately

Dream States: Freud vs. Jung

Dreams are where we can access our repressed ideas (Freud) Dreams are where we tap into the collective unconscious (Jung)

 the outer secret, the secret of having a secret, functions, in Marchers life, precisely as the closet. James often, though not always, attempted such a disguise or transmutation, but reliably left a residue both of material that he did not attempt to transmute and of material that could only be transmuted rather violently and messily
A more frankly full meaning for that unspeakable fate might come from the centuries-long historical chain of substantive uses of space-clearing negatives to void and at the same time to underline the possibility of male same-sex genitality. The rhetorical name for this figure is preterition. Unspeakable, unmentionable, nefandem libidinem, that sin which should be neither named nor committed, the detestable and abominable sin, amongst Christians not to be named, things fearful to name, the obscene sound of the unbeseeming words, the love that dare not speak its namesuch were the speakable nonmedical termsfor the homosexual possibility for men. it is mostly in the reifying grammar ofpreteritionthat a homosexual meaning emerges.

They were literally afloat together; for our gentleman this was marked, quite as marked as that the fortunate cause of it was just the buried treasure of her knowledge. He had with his own hands dug up this little hoard, brought to light--that is to within reach of the dim day constituted by their discretions and privacies--the object of value the hiding-place of which he had, after putting it into the ground himself, so strangely, so long forgotten. (Chapter II, p. 42) You said you had had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and the conviction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you. (Chapter I, p. 39)

Yes, but since, as you say, I'm only, so far as people make out, ordinary, you'rearen't you?no more than ordinary either. You help me to pass for a man like another. (Chapter III, pp. 50-51) your not being aware of itand she seemed to hesitate an instant to deal with thisyour not being aware of it is the strangeness in the strangeness. It's the wonder of the wonder. She spoke as with the softness almost of a sick child, yet now at last, at the end of all, with the perfect straightness of a sibyl. She visibly knew that she knew, and the effect on him was of something co-ordinate, in its high character, with the law that had ruled him. It was the true voice of the law; so on her lips would the law itself have sounded. It has touched you, she went on. It has done its office. It has made you all its own. (Chapter V, p. 61) Well, she quickly replied, I myself have never spoken. I've never, never repeated of you what you told me. Please don't then. We're just right as it is. Oh I am, she laughed, if you are! (Chapter I, p. 38)

 By the end of The Beast in the Jungle, both James and Marcher are operating under the assumption, common to patriarchal societies, that the only satisfying or normal sexual relationship is between a man and a woman, or that the only sexual orientation available to an adult is straight. What I long ago said is true. You'll never know now, and I think you ought to be content. You've had it, said May Bartram. But had what? Why what was to have marked you out. The proof of your law. It has acted. I'm too glad, she then bravely added, to have been able to see what it's not. (Chapter V, p.62)

Third Take

 The limits of my language means the limits of my world. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922 Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is different and always going to be different everything is not the same. Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation, 1926 A third way of interpreting The Beast in the Jungle is not in its attempt to examine the limits of the marriage plot, nor an effort to depict repressed homosexuality and its consequences, but as a comment on the variability and inexactitude of language itself.

Ferdinand de Saussure: SIGNIFIER (signifiant) - the form which the sign takes; and SIGNIFIED (signifi) - the concept it represents. The SIGN is the whole that results from the association of the signifier with the signified. Signifier + Signified = Sign
Imagine you see this Open sign in a doorway. SIGNIFIER: the word Open + SIGNIFIED: that the shop is open for business = SIGN

It would be the worst, she finally let herself say. I mean the thing I've never said. It hushed him a moment. More monstrous than all the monstrosities we've named? More monstrous. Isn't that what you sufficiently express, she asked, in calling it the worst? (Chapter IV, p. 57) She was out of it, to Marcher's vision; her work was over; she communicated with him as across some gulf or from some island of rest that she had already reached, and it made him feel strangely abandoned. Was it--or rather wasn't it--that if for so long she had been watching with him the answer to their question must have swum into her ken and taken on its name, so that her occupation was verily gone? There was something, it seemed to him, that the wrong word would bring down on his head, something that would so at least ease off his tension. But he wanted not to speak the wrong word; that would make everything ugly. (Chapter IV, p. 55)

The phallus can only play its role when veiled, that is, as in itself as sign of the latency with which everything signifiable is struck as soon as it is raised to the function of signifier. The phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire. Here is signed the conjunction of desire, in that the phallic signifier is its mark, with the threat or nostalgia of lacking it.

The rest of the world of course thought him queer, but she, she only, knew how, and above all why, queer; which was precisely what enabled her to dispose the concealing veil in the right folds. (Chapter II, p. 45) The lost stuff of consciousness became thus for him as a strayed or stolen child to an unappeasable father; he hunted it up and down very much as if he were knocking at doors and enquiring of the police. This was the spirit in which, inevitably, he set himself to travel; he started on a journey that was to be as long as he could make it; it danced before him that, as the other side of the globe couldn't possibly have less to say to him, it might, by a possibility of suggestion, have more. (Chapter V, p. 66)