“Killing Mothers: Decadent Women in James’s Literary Tales”

James’s stories of writers have been mostly read in terms of male-male relations, whether in the form of an exclusive dedication to art (coded as a male profession) or of a homoaesthetic and homoerotic desire. Women are thus doubly rejected, both as objects of desire and as representatives of the bourgeois world that the artist needs to repudiate if he is to be true to his aesthetic calling. This essay attempts to probe the function of women as characters and readers in the complex nexus created by aestheticism and homoeroticism. Through an analysis of the textual representation of the two women characters in “The Author of Beltraffio,” it attempts to show that James’s story represents women as in fact deeply involved in the aesthetic sphere on several levels. By self-awarely foregrounding the operation of women’s rejection from the world of art, the story undermines the dichotomous gender arrangement that regulates both the social and the aesthetic sphere.