ABSTRACT
At first glance a comparison between Henry James's The Beast in the Jungle and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice may appear farfetched. In The Beast in the Jungle, Ruth Bernard Yeazell claims, the beast is a metaphor signifying experience and flight from experience, sensual love and the fear of love, knowledge and retreat from knowledge, "the failure of self-knowledge and the pain of that knowledge come too late." A reading of The Beast in the Jungle as a work "whose theme tragically mirrors that of The Ambassadors," yields an interpretation according to which, in a paraphrase of Fnedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, John Marcher's terrible confrontation with his beast is the consequence of his inability to see the tiger on whose back he dreams. Part of the text's effect on the reader stems, in The Beast in the Jungle and Death in Venice, from the aestheticism the texts reflect.
