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"Delusive Hopes of Matrimony and Dollars": Confidence and the Marriage Market in Henry James's Early Fiction
- The Henry James Review
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 38, Number 2, Spring 2017
- pp. 157-175
- 10.1353/hjr.2017.0013
- Article
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Abstract:
This essay traces Henry James's use of the word confidence through a series of works from the 1870s, concluding with an analysis of the novel Confidence (1879). James's fascination with confidence is provoked by both the popularization of the confidence man archetype and the expansion of organized finance. But, while he alludes repeatedly to the economic, legal, literary, and religious connotation of confidence, he primarily uses the word to interrogate the conventions of courtship and matrimony, particularly the use of social pretenses to disguise the trafficking of young American women in Europe.