The Statistical Aesthetics of Henry James, or Jamesian Naturalism

This essay contends that James's late fiction subscribed to notions of form and taste best described as statistical, and that statistics was in the first place modeled on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century aesthetics. James's "statistical aesthetics" refers to a form of premodernist impersonality, whereby the suppression of individuality is accomplished through the shaping of selves according to social ideals. Statisticians dubbed such a statistical character "l'homme moyen" ("average man"), indicating not mediocrity but exemplary sociability. James's interest in statistics suggests that we can understand him as a naturalist writer, but in doing so we must reevaluate the commonplace understanding of naturalism as the discourse of social determinism.