1. Differing Interpretations of ―The Beast in the Jungle‖

2. First Take

3. The Western (i.e., British tradition) English-language novel
traditionally ends with a wedding or a funeral. The marriage
plot—man and woman meet, overcome obstacles to love, and
marry at the conclusion of the story—has been a significant
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, all-
organizing, 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

4. • 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 Marcher…does 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 Bartram‘s 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
Marcher‘s or of the story‘s own laws.‖ –Eve Sedgwick

5. ―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)

6. ―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)

7. Second Take

8. • 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

9. • Four-part theory of the mind
• Super-ego & ego function akin to Freud
• But your unconscious now has 2 parts:
• Personal Unconscious: similar to Freud‘s 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)

10. • ―the outer secret, the secret of having a secret, functions, in Marcher‘s
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 name‘—such
were the speakable nonmedical terms…for the homosexual possibility
for men. …it is mostly in the reifying grammar of…preterition…that a
homosexual meaning‖ emerges.

11. ―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)

12. ―Yes, but since, as you say, I'm only, so far as people make out,
ordinary, you're—aren'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 it‘—and she seemed to hesitate an
instant to deal with this—‗your 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.‘

13. • 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)

14. Third Take

15. • ―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.

16. Ferdinand de Saussure:
• SIGNIFIER (signifiant) - the form which the sign takes;
and
• SIGNIFIED (signifié) - 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

17. ―‗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)

18. 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.

19. ―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)