Stransom’s Secular Altar, or, James’s Pragmatics of Dying

This essay argues that James represents nascent secular forms for ethically consequential mortuary and mourning practices in an age of death’s modernization. With a focus on “The Altar of the Dead” and, more briefly, passages from other middle and late fictions, this essay considers James’s secular ways of imagining relations between the living and dead, as these relations reach an ethical impasse in modernizing cultures. In evoking the possibility of renovating these posthumous relations, James suggests the possibility of a new pragmatics of dying.