"Conventional Signs and Consecrations": Henry James's Theatrical Forms, from "The Théâtre Français" to The Portrait of a Lady

This essay traces James’s ideas about formal conventions in art and life according to the discourse established in his 1876 essay on “The Théâtre Français.” James celebrated the way in which the conventions of the famed company “have been preserved, transmitted, respected.” This essay argues that this discourse of convention, consecration and tradition became central to James’s fictional accounts of personal self-fashioning, informing his representation of aristocratic form and convention in The American and Aestheticism in The Portrait of a Lady.