Unfulfilled Lives: Mary Lavin's A Memory and Henry James's The Beast in the Jungle

Pellérdi, Márta (2026) Unfulfilled Lives: Mary Lavin's A Memory and Henry James's The Beast in the Jungle. In: Hungarian Perspectives on Ireland. Károli Könyvek. Tanulmánykötet . L'Harmattan Kiadó; Károli Gáspár Református Egyetem; Éditions L'Harmattan; L’Harmattan Open Access, Budapest, Paris, pp. 183-194. ISBN 9782336615448; 9789636465940

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Abstract

This essay explores the extent to which Mary Lavin’s A Memory echoes Henry James’s novella The Beast in the Jungle, and how this relationship reshapes the treatment of time, memory, and inaction. Although James has rarely, if at all, been acknowledged as a major influence on Lavin, the structural and thematic correspondence between the two stories invites closer analysis. Drawing on Henri Bergson’s concept of duration and its relation to memory and perception, this study reads both narratives as explorations of lives in which the protagonists fail to integrate the past into their present experience as a continuous, shaping force. In Henry James’s work, John Marcher is obsessed with anticipation of the future and arrives only belatedly at the recognition that his passivity has emptied both his past and his future meaning. Lavin radicalizes this pattern: her researcher-protagonist, James, clings to the safety of a static present and suppresses the implications of earlier emotional failure, eventually collapsing under the strain of resurfacing memory. Lavin thus sharpens James’s parable into a critique of intellectual ambition detached from lived experience and intensifies the gendered dynamics implicit in the earlier text. Through this intertextual reworking, A Memory transforms the Jamesian paradigm into a meditation on the relationship between memory, perception, and wasted life.

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