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John Marcher, the protagonist of “The Beast in the Jungle,” comes to understand that the tragedy of his life was that “he had been the man of his time, the man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened.” He realizes that “No passion had ever touched him.” It is a strange tale, a curious tragedy. The story reflects Henry James' sense of despair at not having lived his own life to the fullest possible extent. Something was missing. A profound insight into what was lacking in James' life has been provided by Dr. Saul Rosenzweig in his well known psychoanalytic study, “The Ghost of Henry James.” (1) The essence of his findings is that James, feeling unable to compete with his father and his gifted older brother in the Oedipus situation, “solved the problem submissively by a profound repression of aggressiveness”—an adjustment which eventually involved sexual repression as well. Additional illumination of James' psychic problems is to be found in Leon Edel's biography, Henry James: The Untried Years. (2) Their diagnosis, taken together, explains the matter admirably. Yet the subject is so rich and so complex that further study of an illustrative sort appears to be rewarding, this paper being an effort to highlight the neurotic patterns which Henry James wove into the fabric of his art by making a close textual analysis—with emphasis on theme and imagery—of what for our purpose is one of the key stories James wrote: “The Jolly Corner.”
The tale was published in 1908, and it displays the richness of symbolic imagery of a dream which, in a sense, it