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Kim, Hera. “John Marcher’s Self-Becoming in Queer Temporality in Henry James’s ‘The Beast in the Jungle.’” Studies in English Language & Literature 46.3 (2020): 41-59. Ever since Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Leo Bersani showed two ground-breaking analyses, criticism of the male protagonist John Marcher in Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” has followed their two main leads. Between Sedgwick and Bersani, this essay on Bersani’s side keeps a critical distance from psychoanalytical approach that probes into Marcher’s identity as a hidden secret, what Sedgwick calls homosexual panic in heteronormativity. Employing recent queer theory’s discussion of queer temporality, this essay examines Marcher’s alternative mode of selfhood that does not follow the dominant timeline of heteronormativity. In the frame of queer temporality, I focus on how James undermines the factual sense of timeliness through the failed remembrance of past in Marcher and May’s first encounter in the first half of this essay. Doing so, I illuminate the significance of the blurred timeliness in the past temporality on account of its destabilization of the legitimacy of the hidden truth in the past in psychoanalysis. In the second half of this essay, I examine how James pushes the complexity of the temporality through Marcher’s mobilizing consciousness in the immediacy of present moment. Along with Marcher’s intensified sense of mobilizing consciousness, I conclude that such psychic mobility in the consciousness only in the present is James’s profound means of inventing the self as becoming in its constant revision of the past. (Chonnam National University)
