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"It's the Real Thing' Henry James, Photography, and The Golden Bowl By Julie Grossman, Wake Forest University In his autobiography, Henry James recalls in 1912 his early experience of having been daguerreotyped. When he was a small boy, James was photographed in a "queer" suit with a single row of brass buttons. Thackeray was in the studio to respond to it, saying, as James reports, "'Come here, little boy, and show me your extraordinary jacket!'" James continues: My sense of my jacket became from that hour a heavy one....I was to know later on why he had been so amused and why, after asking me if this were the common uniform of my age and class, he remarked that in England, were I to go there, I should be addressed as "Buttons." It had been revealed to me thus in a flash that we were somehow queer, and though never exactly crushed by it I became aware that I at least felt so as I stood with my head in Mr. Brady's vise. Beautiful most decidedly the lost art of daguerreotype; I remember the 'exposure' as on this occasion interminably long, yet with the result of a facial anguish far less harshly reproduced than my suffered snapshots of a later age. (SB 52) James makes a telling association between the literal and psychological exposure involved in photography. The connection suggests not only the cultural fear that The Henry James Review 15 (1994): 309-328. © 1995, The Johns Hopkins University Press 310 The Henry James Review photography preyed on its objects of vision, but also James's own anxiety about becoming publicly exposed. Chock full as it is with anguish and a sense of his own suffering, the troubled language of the passage from James's autobiography is striking, given the time that had elapsed since the experience. The episode, however, speaks directly to James's scopophobia and to his sense that the camera has the power to take something away from what it photographs. In James's own case, the things taken away were his dignity and right to privacy. As Bogardus observes, "The image, in short, was a piece of embarrassing evidence" (89).' If James resented the power of the camera negatively to expose its objects of vision, to produce humiliating "negatives" of his own vulnerable moments, this vulgar exposure was a key symbol for what was not art. James's resistance to photography as art was a result of his ambivalence toward the power of the camera to capture and potentially to torture its prey with "embarrassing evidence ." If James felt being photographed was like being held hostage (recall from above the "suffered snapshots of a later age"), he transformed this into critical antagonism toward photography in several of his works. Most notably, James uses the notion of photography as threat in his story "The Real Thing," written in 1892, and in his Preface to The Golden Bowl, both of which I will discuss in this essay. In his late works, James, unwilling to compete with photographic realism, invents new strategies for representing the real that, ironically, appropriate aspects of photography. Indeed, in the ways that James's later style incorporated elements and examples of photographic technique into narrative, the novelist changed what photography means. James's references to and subtle uses of photography transformed the vulnerability he associated with becoming an object of the photographic eye into verbal constructions of images. His relation to photography also redefined realism, I submit, in order to ensure authorial invulnerability and escape from becoming himself an image created by an authoritatively public other. Contemporary artists were ambivalent about photography, both as a facilitator of realism, and as a threat to their own activity of high art. Photography was seen by many of James's contemporaries as having the power, even before critical theory embraced it as such, to drain what it records of life or meaning. This aspect of the new art intrigued James. As critics have noted, James's feelings about photography changed significantly as he grew older. As he explains in the Preface to The Golden Bowl (and demonstrates in the novel itself), James proceeds, late...

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