An "unnatural alliance": Realism and Revolution in Henry James's The Princess Casamassima

This article investigates Henry James's The Princess Casamassima to stress how realism emerges as a powerful personal and collective reparatory fantasy. By analyzing the "unnatural alliances" that mark Hyacinth's options throughout the novel, this article emphasizes how the personal narrative (Hyacinth's family history) is entangled in the collective narrative (the Revolution), and how the realist plot of personal drama echoes the revolutionary plot written out on the grand social scale. In fact, it is argued, both evolve as responses to a highly conflicted drama of filiation (akin to a Freudian family romance), in which deficient origins demand reenactment and supplementation.