1. Henry James, “Rose-Agathe,” in The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel, vol. 4 (Philadelphia: Lippincot, 1962), 125. Further references appear parenthetically within the text.
2. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, ed. Hershel Parker (New York: Norton, 1971), 199.
3. Sigmund Freud, “‘The Uncanny,’” in An Infantile Neurosis and Other
Works, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
vol. 17, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 229. 4. Mark Seltzer, “Physical Capital: The Romance of the Market in Machine Culture,” in Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), 45–90. Seltzer’s observation that the plate-glass windows of urban scenes of consumption almost inevitably become mirrors in which the consuming subject sees himself or herself very usefully glosses the way James depicts the coiffeur’s window in “Rose-Agathe” (Bodies
and Machines, 52). For further discussion of late-nineteenth-century America as a
“society radically confused about what people are,” and about “what is imitation and what is real,” see Susan Gillman, Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s
America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), quotation on 78.
5. For a superb analysis of the manikin and how it incites mimetic desire, see Stuart Culver, “What Manikins Want: The Wonderful World of Oz and The Art of
Decorating Dry Goods Windows,” Representations 21 (1988): 97–116. Culver’s
analysis makes clear how late-nineteenth-century marketing experts like L. Frank Baum assume that the live model or manikin’s perpetual motion will incite end- less longings in consumers (106–10).
6. For an early effort to question this presupposition that consciousness stays centered, see Leo Bersani, “The Narrator as Center in The Wings of the Dove,”
Modern Fiction Studies 6 (1960): 131–44; for a recent, full-scale dismantling of
the principle and of its applicability to the fiction it supposedly describes, see Sharon Cameron, Thinking in Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). My own concern here is much less with whether the figure of the center of consciousness can be maintained as a reliable and coherent reflection of James’s texts when those texts are read rigorously—Bersani and Cameron convincingly argue that it cannot—than with the way in which the figure carries with it and simultaneously effaces the presence of the body and its objects. In chapter 2, I will return to this issue in order to make a historical critique of Cameron by detailing the unacknowledged materialist assumptions that underlie her study.
7. For a deconstructive reading, see John Carlos Rowe, The Theoretical
Dimensions of Henry James (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 4–24;
for a historicist one, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, “A House of Fiction: Domestic Interiors and the Commodity Aesthetic,” in Consuming Visions: Accumulation and
Display of Goods in America, 1880–1920, ed. Simon J. Bronner (New York:
Norton, 1989), 133–56.
8. Even renunciation would be understood in late-nineteenth-century aes- thetic culture as retaining a material edge because of the organic traces the renounced object leaves behind in the body. This trace and the theories behind it will become important later in this book’s historical revision of seeing in James and his culture, especially in the brief discussion of empathy at the end of chap- ter 3 and then in the longer analysis of Bernard Berenson’s career in chapter 4.
9. Three studies of defacement and creation have influenced strands of this one: Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of
Museums (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1987); David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the
Notes to Chapter 2
1. This kind of passage has seemed to some critics to authorize a conservative- ly humanist interpretation of the material world, an interpretation like that of Charles R. Anderson in Person, Place, and Thing in Henry James’s Novels (Durham: Duke University Press, 1977). In singling out from the novels’ profusion of mate- rial things one object for each character—a thing which serves as a “symbol” of the character’s personality—Anderson both imposes an artificial stability on the mate- rial world as James represents it and wrongly insists on the priority of character to material things (4). Even the passage from The Spoils quoted above undermines Anderson’s approach, with the ambiguity that hovers around its use of the word “make”: there is a strong implication operating that Mrs. Gereth’s house makes her, shapes her consciousness and habits, an implication that participates in the turn- of-the-century cultural poetics of art and the senses (a claim worked out at length in chapter 3).
2. Henry James, The Other House, ed. Tony Tanner (London: Dent, 1996), 10. Further references appear parenthetically within the text.
3. I want to acknowledge at the outset that taking James’s exaggerated atten- tion to ornament as an inversion of values—those of essence and accident, say— and as a study in the cultural poetics of embodiment are not the only ways to read this strand of James’s fiction. In The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and
Modern Social Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), Susan L.
Mizruchi reads the ribbons and feathers that so frequently festoon the Jamesian heroine in terms of the adornment of the sacrificial victim, the scapegoat (202–3); the ornaments that I label “accessories” can thus be understood as evidence of the crucial role that the metaphor of religious ritual plays in James’s imagination and in the works of historical theology and social theory that James read. Mizruchi’s analysis focuses on the adornment of Nanda in The Awkward Age, a moment where accessories take on a “a unique gravity” in James’s fiction, as Mizruchi notes (203), but the point helps to make sense as well of the way in which Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady combine an interest in ancient religious settings with an interest in clothing and personal ornament. For the purposes of my own work, what is most valuable about Mizruchi’s argument is that it provides an additional explanation for why the Jamesian accessory is so unstable and hence so productive of meaning: “all sacrificial objects . . . are sacred and profane,” combining in a sin- gle process what a community most values and what it needs to exclude (81).
4. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 263. For Frye, prose is a “transparent medium” compara- ble to the “plate glass in a shop window,” a remark which reinforces my suggestion that prose is often conceived as a medium that displays objects, a suggestion also borne out by Frye’s characterization of the long sentences of James’s late style as “containing sentences” (265, 267).
5. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the
Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 125.
6. Henry James, “The Papers,” in The Better Sort (New York: Scribner’s, 1903), 378.
7. For my knowledge of the Renaissance cabinet, I have relied on Lorraine J. Daston, “The Factual Sensibility,” Isis 79 (1988): 452–70; for Daston’s analysis of
the Ovidian poetics which governed the assemblage of cabinets (a taste that led to the acquisition of objects such as “corals arranged in scenes of mountains or forests, or fragments of marble . . . incorporated into paintings as clouds or water”), see 456–57.
8. In England, the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 rendered the term legally obsolete because it allowed married women the right to earn money and hold property apart from their husbands—with many loopholes and caveats. The act did not resolve issues such as the disinheritance of a widow from her house, an unresolved issue central to The Spoils of Poynton, and while legally dead the con- cept of paraphernalia is still alive in the late-Victorian cultural imagination, hov- ering along the margins of The Golden Bowl, for example, which begins with Charlotte’s attempt to find a wedding gift for Maggie. On paraphernalia as a legal entity and women’s property more generally, see Lee Holcombe, Wives and
Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth-Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 23, 41.
9. Commentaries that abstract this passage both from a world of concrete making and from the gendered (and gendering) labor which that making implies include R. P. Blackmur, “Introduction,” in Henry James, The Art of the Novel (New York: Scribner’s, 1934), xxvii; J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant,
de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1987), 103; Sharon Cameron, Thinking in Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 47–50.
10. Here it is revealing to note the material metaphors that Georges Poulet uses in characterizing the Jamesian circle of consciousness: a spider web, a silken iridescence, a sea wave. All of these hover on the edge of material concreteness, as if Poulet needs to give the metaphor concrete shape and keep it immaterial at the same time (Poulet, The Metamorphoses of the Circle, trans. Carley Dawson and Elliott Coleman [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966], 307). In an essay that partially anticipates my own attempt to demonstrate that the general aesthetic which emerges out of James’s work is generated by a practical aesthetics of everyday life, Sara Blair identifies some of the substances and economies that compose the kind of immaterial materiality I am discussing here. Blair com- pellingly argues that James resembles “that emerging modern persona, the lady of the house,” whose hidden labor yields the “finished products” of “beauty, leisure, or in James’s case, literary mastery” (“In the House of Fiction: Henry James and the Engendering of Literary Mastery,” in David McWhirter, ed., Henry James’s
New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship [Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1995], 64).
11. In arguing for a James who identifies bodily ambiguity with rhetorical ambiguity—or even rhetorical play—my critical terms fall in line with those of other recent critics who treat James’s sense of gender and sexuality as matters of playful irony, parody, experiment, and performativity. See especially Leland S. Person, Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Eric Haralson, Henry James and Queer Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Eric Savoy, “Embarrassments: Figure in the Closet,” Henry James Review 20 (Fall 1999): 227–36. Like my own work, these studies owe a general debt to Ross Posnock’s revisionary emphasis on a James who treats identity itself as fluid, who “submit-
ted his own selfhood, and the very concept of selfhood, to an extended ordeal of vulnerability,” experiment, and risk (Posnock, The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James,
William James, and the Challenge of Modernity [New York: Oxford University Press,
1991] 19).
12. Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron-Mills, ed. Cecelia Tichi (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998), 52–53.
13. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man That Was Used Up,” in Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984), 307, 315–15.
14. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (New York: Library of America, 1982), 940, 409.
15. This stage of my argument partially reprises what has become more or less a consensus in studies of nineteenth-century American literature: that the inter- twining of persons and things takes on a new intimacy and inextricability. Gillian Brown finds in the “personalization” of objects the confluence of true womanhood and possessive individualism, an argument that forges an illuminating link between the political assumptions that govern antebellum culture and the material texture of that culture’s novels and lady’s books. Mark Seltzer outlines the logic of “the aes- theticization of the natural body that market culture promises.” Lori Merish argues that “sentimental discourses of consumption . . . instated a particular form” of sub- jectivity so that “personal possessions are endowed with characterological import.” Bill Brown characterizes the cultural logic of the 1890s as operating in and creating an “indeterminate ontology where things seem slightly human and humans seem slightly thing-like.” My own contribution in this chapter lies in linking a prose style—a textual effect—and a minute sensory experience to the large cultural shift discussed by those whose works have preceded my own. See Gillian Brown,
Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990), 42–43; Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), 125; Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender,
Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2000), 2; Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of
American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 13.
16. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, ed. Nina Baym (New York: Penguin, 1983), 35. Further references appear parenthetically within the text.
17. Walter Benn Michaels analyzes the American Renaissance romance in terms of the fluctuations of the market—including the slave market—in “Romance and Real Estate,” The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism:
American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1987), 85–112. My own interest is more in the vicissitudes of the middle- class body than in the markets upon which Michaels centers, but my sense of the instabilities of romance as intertwined with the alienability of property is certain- ly indebted to him, and as a reading of Hawthorne or Poe (for example) makes clear, the market and the body cannot be held as discrete realms in the period under discussion.
18. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, ed. Richard H. Brodhead (New York: Penguin, 1990), 467.
19. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, ed. Seymour Gross and Rosalie Murphy (New York: Norton, 1978), 106. Further references appear paren- thetically within the text.
20. Sharon Cameron, The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and
Hawthorne (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), esp. 1–3, 11–13.
21. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York: Norton, 1967), 430. Further references appear parenthetically within the text.
22. Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 5, 4.
23. For information on Henry, Sr.’s, injury, I have relied on Alfred Habegger,
The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr. (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994),
66–82.
24. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Human Wheel, Its Spokes and Felloes,”
Atlantic Monthly 11 (May 1863): 578, 574. Further references appear parentheti-
cally in the text.
25. William James, “The Consciousness of Lost Limbs,” in Essays in
Psychology, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1983), 207.
26. William James, “The Consciousness of Lost Limbs,” 208–9n5.
27. My characterization of still life painting here is much indebted to Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), esp. 60–95; and to Richard Shiff, “Cézanne’s Physicality: The Politics of Touch,” in The Language of Art History, ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 129–80.
28. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xii, xvii.
29. Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother, in Autobiography, ed. Frederick W. Dupee (New York: Criterion, 1956), 415. Further references appear parenthet- ically within the text.
30. For an example of a psycho-sexual reading of the obscure hurt—the kind of reading I am not pursuing here—see Carol Holly, Intensely Family: The
Inheritance of Family Shame and the Autobiographies of Henry James (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 119–36. For a view that complements my own approach by seeing the Jamesian wound not as a gap in the body that partic- ipation in a consumer economy might fill but instead as the visible sign of mas- culinity, see Susan M. Griffin, “Scar Texts: Tracing the Marks of Jamesian Masculinity,” Arizona Quarterly 53:4 (Winter 1997): 61–82. Griffin’s essay is unusually attentive to the prevalence of the “torn, marked, scarred body” in James, tracing that body from the first published stories to the late fictions “The Jolly Corner and “The Beast in the Jungle” (61).
31. The Correspondence of William James, vol. 1, William and Henry:
1861–1884, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1992), 142–43.
32. The Correspondence of William James, 1:113–14. 33. The Correspondence of William James, 1:114.
34. Henry James, The Europeans: A Sketch, ed. Tony Tanner and Patricia Crick (London: Penguin, 1984), 79. Further references appear parenthetically within the text.
35. Melville, Moby-Dick, 436; Davis, Life in the Iron-Mills, 69–70. 36. Poe, “The Man That Was Used Up,” 316.
37. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American
Slave, ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr. (New York: Penguin, 1982), 107.
38. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, ed. Ann Douglas (New York: Penguin, 1981), 81, 175; chapters 5, 11.
39. See Michaels, Gold Standard, 101–5, 117–31; Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, 47–48, 72–73, 80–81, 137–10; Merish, Sentimental Materialism, chapters 3–5.
40. Toni Morrison’s statement in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992) that “[i]t is possible . . .
to read Henry James scholarship exhaustively and never arrive at a nodding men- tion . . . of the black woman who lubricates the turn of the plot and becomes the agency of moral choice and meaning in What Maisie Knew” succeeded impressive- ly in bringing this issue to the center of subsequent scholarship (13). Kenneth Warren identifies the Jamesian technique of point of view—and its emphasis on the demarcation of individual perspective—with the separate-but-equal politics that became the social norm and eventually the legal doctrine of postbellum America (Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 18–47). Michaels, in a rejoinder to Morrison and Warren, argues that what repulses James is not dark-skinned people (which would be true if his politics were the same as Thomas Dixon’s) but vulgar people instead (“Jim Crow Henry James?” Henry James Review 16 [1995]: 286–91). For Rowe’s precise delin- eation of the different impulses that shape James’s representation of dark-skinned people, and for an excellent overview of the critical debate, see his The Other Henry
James (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 120–54.
Notes to Chapter 3
1. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Penguin, 1979), 111, 135.
2. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 138. Michel de Certeau makes the point even more succinctly than I do, referring to the critical term “consumers” as “euphemistic” because it begs the question of how individuals deploy what they consume (The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984], xii). In making this argument, I mean to question the model of visual and vicarious consumption that Jean-Christophe Agnew establish- es in his important essay, “The Consuming Vision of Henry James” (in The
Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980, ed.
Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears [New York: Pantheon, 1983], 65–100). While my emphasis in this chapter on what Agnew calls the “internal- ization” of commodities is clearly in the spirit of his approach, I argue that there is much to be gained by closely detailed analysis of the world of things and, further, that there are reasons to distrust the emphasis on vision and detachment that all Jamesian commentators—beginning with James himself—have maintained.
3. Mary Poovey, “The Social Constitution of ‘Class’: Toward a History of Classificatory Thinking,” in Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social
Formations, ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore (New York: Columbia
4. Poovey, “The Social Constitution of ‘Class,’” 20.
5. Philip Fisher, “A Humanism of Objects,” in Making and Effacing Art:
Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991), 233. Here I would also like to acknowledge a general debt to Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
6. Fisher, “A Humanism of Objects,” 243–44.
7. For a much fuller account of this link, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain:
The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press,
1985), 243–326. Scarry argues that “the act of human creating includes both the creating of the object and the object’s recreating of the human being” who uses it (310). In what follows, I extend Scarry’s argument by showing how this process of recreation realizes class distinctions. This recursive movement between bodies and things, highly characteristic of James’s thinking about the object world in The
Spoils, means that objects are understood as made present by bodies even when
those things are not explicitly present. This sublimated presence is the reason I dis-