ABSTRACT
Within the first few pages of Roderick Hudson, Henry James gives us one of the most seductive passages in his entire oeuvre: the description of a nude young man fashioned as a statue, aptly titled Thirst. Given the paucity of live models in provincial Northampton, Massachusetts, the prototype for Thirst is likely none other than the sculptor, Roderick himself, who offers a stand-in for his naked body, publically, as an aestheticized object to be admired for its form and symmetry and, privately, for the delectation of viewers like Rowland Mallet, who falls in love and consequently destroys the sculptor due to an inexpressible erotic pull. The tension James gives us in Thirst – a nude acceptable for public scrutiny because he is clothed by a classicism that hides, in plain sight, his very obvious erotic charge – centres this chapter, which explores the means by which young men’s bodies could gain cultural capital through travel narratives that elevated them, as classicized forms, beyond erotic suggestion – precisely so that their ephebic eros could infuse Gilded Age culture, to both pleasurable and dangerous ends.
