SOURCE: "The Marine Metaphor, Henry James, and the Moral Center of 'The Awkward Age'," in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 1, Winter, 1990, pp. 91-105.

In the following essay, Zacharias examines the ways in which Henry James uses metaphors of the sea in his correspondence and his novel The Awkward Age to illuminate his moral outlook.

The meaning that James invests in the marine metaphor is worth discussing because of the prevalence and placement of the trope in James's fiction and non-fiction. Gale's descriptive analysis of James's imagery in the fiction shows that the water image occurs more frequently than any other, accounting for fully one-twelfth of all images.¹ Daniel Mark Fogel writes that in The Wings of the Dove the sea "stands for life itself and suggests that a "profoundly beautiful moral change" occurs.² With the importance of the marine metaphor in the fiction having been asserted, there are prior...