The Henry James Society

CALL FOR PAPERS

Modern Language Association Convention

7 to 10 January 2027 – Los Angeles, California

The Art of Seeing Wrongly: Evil and Moral Perception in Henry James

“He had no talent for good, but he had a great talent for evil.”

In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James’s description of Gilbert Osmond offers a stark formulation of his moral imagination: evil as something refined, cultivated, and perceptual rather than transgressive or spectacular. James rarely figures evil through overt wrongdoing or melodramatic villainy. Instead, malevolence emerges through failures of perception, aestheticized control, and moral misrecognition—in the quiet tyranny that unfolds within intimacy. Evil in James is less a matter of wicked acts than of seeing wrongly: mistaking refinement for care, authority for love, or moral certainty for ethical clarity.

This panel examines how Henry James reconfigures inherited conceptions of evil through narrative form, affect, and metaphor, and invites particular attention to the familial and intellectual lineage that shapes his ethical imagination. The Swedenborgian theology of his father, Henry James Sr., framed evil as the ego’s self-enclosure opposed to “brotherly love,” while his brother William James approached moral error through psychology and pragmatism, emphasizing belief, habit, and experience as plural and corrigible. Henry James absorbs these frameworks but translates them into literary terms, relocating evil from doctrine or belief into the relational and aesthetic domains of perception, influence, and narrative control.

At the heart of Jamesian crisis lies a paradoxical attraction: what draws characters into relations of domination, and what compels others to submit to—or even seek—such enclosure? James repeatedly figures evil not as isolation but as pressure: atmosphere, possession, haunting. His formal strategies—ambiguity, restricted consciousness, delayed revelation—render evil not only a theme but a structural condition of his art.

The panel invites papers that explore how James’s fiction exposes evil as a problem of moral perception—one that emerges not from ignorance or excess, but from the ethical consequences of certainty, refinement, and care misdirected.

We welcome papers engaging James’s treatment of evil from psychological, ethical, theological, formal, or historical perspectives.

Please submit abstract of 250–300 words and a brief biographical note to Ivana Cikes (cikesi@douglascollege.ca) and (sarah.wadsworth@marquette.edu) by Sunday, March 8, 2026.