“As an artist and as a bachelor”: The Sexual Dynamics of “The Liar”

This essay examines the performances both public and subjective of two male protagonists in this story whose title anticipates dissimulation and whose plot ostensibly deals with portraiture and one man’s wish to expose the other’s facility in lying. Their nominal romantic object is a woman, but her presence becomes merely token within this triangulated relationship. The representation of assumed norms of social, sexual, or cultural behaviors to which males must subscribe is undermined by the deviant tendencies of James’s discourse within scenes where the artist is licensed to gaze upon his subject, culminating in moments of homoerotic intensity.