The Double Life in the Cage: The Queering of the Social in Henry James's Late Short Fiction

It is now widely accepted that a thematic of male-male desire operates within the matrices of a Jamesian freeplay of the signifier. Yet the fate of a proper homosexual subject is confined to the closet, as James's rhetoric doubles back on itself. This article proposes that while the frustrated, and at times contradictory, narrative economies of exposure and retreat in James's late short fiction clearly problematize subjectivity and same-sex sexual identity, they also work to reveal a rich and dynamic interrelation of selves and others that is always already in operation.