In the following essay, Bier shows how Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe provided a model and an "anti-model," respectively, for "The Jolly Corner."
We know how much James admired and identified himself with Hawthorne. He not only wrote the first extended critical study of Hawthorne but manifestly used him as a model for his own work: the general moral orientation, including Hawthorne's concept of the Unpardonable Sin of human manipulation; the cool cerebral style and distancing technique; the careful effects of subtlety and ambiguity; and the famous disenchantment, exemplary and then strategic for James, with the impoverished and sometimes repelling American scene.
But if James's conscious literary and psychological model was Hawthorne, he had also an antimodel or alter ego, and that was Hawthorne's opposite number, Poe. It was Poe, that is, in all his.....
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