“Almost everything that was usual was iniquitous”: Suspicion and Proof in Henry James and Fredric Jameson

This essay uses the notion of suspicion, as the “imagination or conjecture of the existence of something evil or wrong without proof,” to meditate on the productive and complementary similarities between Henry James and Fredric Jameson. Both thinkers’ suspicions about the iniquities of bourgeois capitalism can be powerfully explanatory; however, their “proof” can sometimes appear reducible or reduced. Using James’s The Bostonians to examine the tension particularly between feminism and the two theorists of capitalism, the essay shows the ways together and separately James and Jameson’s suspicions and “proof” can be read expansively.