ABSTRACT
The Tragic Muse is a novel marked both internally and in terms of critical estimations of it by a series of anomalies. It has a reputation, encouraged by many of the most prominent of critics, as James's roman a these.2 To varying degrees James's novel of 1890, his major novel of that decade, has been seen by critics as essayistic in handling the issue of 'art and the world', as diagrammatic in its construction, and - by implication - as inherently different from James's other major novels. Its essayistic aspects have been seen as weaknesses and a certain critical consensus that has developed on The Tragic Muse, a consensus from which there have been some eloquent exceptions, is that it is a little flat, a little uninteresting.3 According to this consensus its reader is definitely not, as Peter Brooks has claimed in relation to The Wings of the Dove, 'engaged in a particularly complex and rewarding exercise of intelligence and passion'.4 I wish to suggest in this chapter that it is precisely in such a process that The Tragic Muse involves its reader. Furthermore, I want to suggest that this process is initiated through the novel's treatment of illusion.
