Henry James’s Straight Talking Style

In The Awkward Age (1899), James adopts straight talk, a newly invented style of address, to unsettle cultural norms of adolescent development that were emerging in psychological theory and social practice. During the same period, James experiments privately with straight talk in his letters to Edith Wharton. Through The Awkward Age and his correspondence, James expands the register in which intimacy can be spoken and felt in his writing, trying out a style on the periphery of normative social and sexual development, and a counter style to his infamous indirection, with the use of straight talk.