Reading Between the Minds: Intersubjectivity and the Emergence of Modernism from Robert Browning to Henry James

“Reading Between the Minds” offers a revisionist history of the literary development of intersubjectivity, a concept derived from the phenomenology of fin-de-siècle German philosopher Edmund Husserl and later adopted by theorists from a wide range of critical schools, from hermeneutics to reader-response to psychoanalysis. In its broadest definition, intersubjectivity connotes the dynamic mental and emotional interactions that take place between discrete individuals. Depending on the philosophical context in which it is used, the term can refer to either how the self experiences relations with others as subjects fundamentally unknowable to itself (what is called “skepticism” or “the problem of other minds”), or, somewhat differently, how the self and the other converge to create an experience of shared meaning, often although not always through linguistic communication. As a thematic concern that raises questions of perspective and reference which in turn have natural consequences for literary form, intersubjectivity has long been regarded as a hallmark—even a trademark—feature of modernist narrative technique, with the stream-of-consciousness being perhaps the most well known example and Henry James generally hailed as its earliest English-language practitioner. According to this conventional account, the modernist novel emerged as a deliberate contrast to the panoramic social realism of its hefty Victorian predecessor, following James’s example to become more “psychological” or “subjective” in its orientation and adopting a more “poetic” or “lyrical” style to represent the vicissitudes of interiority, the life of the mind, and the workings of consciousness. While some critical efforts have been made to nuance this account, the vast majority do so either by focusing on the psychological dimensions of the nineteen-century novel, typically in a way that underscores the genre’s ethical imperatives, or by choosing to foreground the material and socio-political aspects of modernism, frequently at the expense of its concern with psychic experience as such. In “Reading Between the Minds,” I demonstrate how the formal techniques pioneered by Robert Browning in the dramatic monologue, generally considered Victorian poetry’s “flagship genre,” generate a new, implicit relationship between text and reader that, in turn, inflects modernist prose fiction’s generic experiments with the philosophical and representational questions raised by intersubjectivity. I examine the relationship between Browning and James in depth and analyze several of the latter’s rarely studied tales, reviews, and essays in this context. In the process, I show how Browning—both as an other mind in his own right and as he rendered other minds in his verse—influenced the development of narrative perspective across James’s œuvre, an evolution that reaches fullest and most recognizably modernist expression in the interpersonal convolutions of late novels like The Wings of the Dove. At the same time, I consider how, for both Browning and James, intersubjectivity emerges out of a preoccupation with aesthetic objects from the historical past, from letters to portraits to statues.