Throughout this story, I tried to keep the question of “what is this really about?” at the forefront of my mind. While I do have some thoughts, this question still puzzles me. The plot is fairly simple – Marcher runs into Bartram to whom he previously confessed his secret, and then as they’re waiting for this “beast” to reveal itself, she dies and he has to contend with the fact that while he was waiting, he missed out on life and on being with her. Part of me thinks this is supposed to be a metaphor for anxiety or some other affliction that causes you to be so focused on one thing that you miss out on simply living your life and being happy (this could even be extended to people focusing to heavily on a career or on achieving an arbitrary goal). Another part of me thinks it’s more specific than that, and that James’ is trying to show the devastation of missing out on love. The ending pushes me towards the latter explanation, or makes me think it’s a combination of both.
On page 339, he thinks “The escape would have been to love her; then, then he could have lived.” Here, James explicitly states that the way to ‘escape’ the affliction that Marcher suffers from is to find love, and then to allow yourself to love. While this may be getting to biographical, I wonder if he may have experienced this struggle in his own lifetime when being gay meant that understanding who you love, and accepting that you love them, was more challenging. In this sense, the story seems like a romance (or a failed romance), in which a man comes to terms with the love of his life and how he, and his own ego, selfishness, and lack of understanding of his own feelings, unconsciously messes up the relationship. I enjoy reading it through this lens as I like the added element of tragic romance, and I think the references to it are fairly clear. However, to my original point, I could also see this work being read more generally about the dangers of letting life (not just love) pass you by.
I had the same thoughts Sophia! While there was definitely a romantic element to the story, I thought the themes could be broadly applied to different aspects of life and the dangers of anticipation. Often in life we are filled with such anticipation (good, bad, anxious or otherwise) that we forget to live in the moment. In those cases life becomes simply a long stream of anticipation and often the experiences themselves pale in comparison to the versions we have built up in our head. I think particularly in this story, Marcher spends his life building up this “beast in the jungle” that when the beast finally rears its head (May dying without being truly loved by him), he misses it entirely because he has not rooted himself in his reality, but rather in the possibilities.
Sophia, I completely agree with you and had the same thoughts! I am reluctant to read the story through an authorial lens, but there were certainly parts that jumped out at me as James grappling with his sexuality. When describing what Marcher told her about his secret, May says:
While these could have simply been the musings surrounding any secret, I was struck by the nature of Marcher’s secret making him feel different and wrong, two things that I imagine a queer person might have felt in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century.
I think you’re right about the point of the novel being to not let life pass you by. By getting so caught up in himself and his own concerns, Marcher loses his chance at happiness in life even though it was right beside him all along. I think like Daisy Miller its a sort of tragic romance, the two are clearly interested in each other, but like Eliza said, the morals could also quite easily be applied to other areas of life. However, in the story itself I do see it as presented as a romance, albeit a tragic one. I really liked May’s question very early on, when she asks, “Isn’t what you describe perhaps but the expectation—or, at any rate, the sense of danger, familiar to so many people—of falling in love?” (309). May is explicitly connecting his fear with the fear of falling in love. Although Marcher denies this, it seems to me that it may have been what he feared all along, letting himself actually connect with people.