Stereotyping Henry James

"I spoke by metaphor, and parable, and comparison, and types."

—Roderick Random

Henry James's 1892 short story "The Real Thing" opens with a moment of vision that proves deceptive: "When the porter's wife (she used to answer the house-bell) announced 'A gentleman—with a lady, sir,' I had, as I often had in those days, for the wish was father to the thought, an immediate vision of sitters" (229). The gentleman and lady, however, turn out to be a down-at-heel genteel couple, come to offer themselves as models—the narrator is a struggling painter who makes a living illustrating popular novels—rather than as sitters. Their embarrassed failure to declare their situation is compounded by the narrator's failure to see his visitors for what they are. "There was nothing at first to indicate that they might not have come for a portrait" (229), he protests, adding that the couple look as if they "had ten thousand a year" (234). That the narrator should be so easily deceived by appearances is somewhat surprising; he famously declares, after all, "an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of representation. I liked things that appeared; then one was sure" (236-37). The narrator's preference depends, in the end, on a tautology—representation is more certain than the real because the real lacks representation—which in turn legitimates a rather Wildean paradox. Perversely, however, the narrator immediately contradicts himself. He contemptuously classifies the Monarchs as "the real thing" (244)—a gentleman and a lady—yet assures us that "It was odd how quickly I was sure of everything that concerned them" (235). The narrator claims both the real and the represented subject as grounds for certainty, and, in both cases, his vision proves far from sure.

The narrator's contradictory behavior should counsel us to be uncertain about certainty, which makes it all the more ironic that critics have typically read "The Real Thing" as a straightforward parable about James's supposed scorn for the real thing. ¹ The problem the Monarchs pose for the narrator is that they are too much like aristocrats to be used as models for aristocrats; they are "the real thing, but always the same thing" (RT 243), and it is the fact of their authenticity, the narrator insists, that renders his drawings of them "second-rate" (258). As Bruce Henriksen points out, however, critics' insistence on allegorical interpretations of the story inevitably leads to them "[r]eproducing the narrator's limited vision" (475) of the defects of the real thing. Recent attempts to avoid this critical trap owe much to Catherine Vieilledent, who persuasively reads "The Real Thing" as "really produc[ing] what the artist vainly tried to do" (37); producing, that is, "the real thing." The story is, according to Vieilledent, not an allegory about the defects of the real thing, but an allegory about writing itself—about the creation of "The Real Thing." The narrator's repeated references to "the real thing" metonymically signal his own aesthetic project; he ends his story, after all, admitting that if the Monarchs have indeed ruined his illustrative talents he is "content to have paid the price—for the memory" (258). James is in fact committed to "the real thing"; the problem is precisely that—because he uses the term at almost every opportunity in almost every novel or tale—the real thing can never safely be thought of as the same thing. ² Mrs. Guy in the story "Paste," for example, repeats the narrator's judgment in "The Real Thing" that, when it comes to representation, "the real thing falls short" (325). The representation in "Paste" is a tableaux vivant, the success of which is secured by the use of gaudy paste jewels rather than real ones. The fakes, however, turn out to be real, suggesting that James's supposed preference for...