Henry James, Minny Temple, and the “Demon of the Why, Whence, and Whither”

Abstract In the letters he wrote on the occasion of his cousin, Minny Temple's, death, Henry James moves from fierce lament to a manic pleasure in her demise, one premised on the belief that she will now remain forever young, untouched, unchanged—the Platonic ideal of the young American girl. Across his writing life, in his letters, notebooks, novels, stories, plays, travel writing, literary criticism, and memoirs, he both struggles to project this ideal image and continually, persistently, undermines it as he rewrites Temple's story. This essay examines the role that belief plays in this most apparently secular of authors, particularly as it bears on the dead. By attending to James's insistent return to his dead—Minny Temple is perhaps synecdochic for all of his losses—the essay undoes the putatively clear distinction between the life and literature, the person and the character, the autobiographical and the fictional, the personal and the impersonal, so important to the strands of literary scholarship themselves dependent on James's own account of the novel.