The theory of the sacred fount constructed by the unnamed first-person narrator in The Sacred Fount has baffled its readers since its publication in 1902. For most Jamesian critics, this theory is merely a whimsical and prurient fantasy of the narrator. However, this article argues that, more than a private fantasy of the narrator, the theory of the fount is inscribed within the sexual ideology of the late-Victorian age. This approach allows us to see the theory not simply as the outcome of the narrator's solipsistic idealism as many illustrious scholars hold it to be: it is a logical consequence of his belief in the late-Victorian sexual ideology. This article examines the complex interchanges whereby the ideological structure of beliefs is translated into a narrative structure that encodes and perpetuates those beliefs. However, as this article also attempts to show, the very act of deciphering the plot and characterization uncovers a simultaneous counter-narrative: the persistent undermining of the dominant sexual ideology by the contradictions concealed within the specific form that its representation has assumed. Therefore, the aggressivity of the novel is not, as some critics have asserted, aimed at its reader, so much as it is targeted at the sexual ideology itself: embedded and inscribed within the repressive sexual ideology, The Sacred Fount simultaneously represents and undermines that ideology by locating its inherent fissures and gaps and thus maps out, for the individual's desires, a(n) (im-)possible route of escape from the surveillance of that ideology.
Relation:
Chung Hsing Journal of Humanities, NCHU 39:401-440.
