Blooming Girls and Bad Girls: “In the Cage” and the Ha’penny Novel

This paper examines the engagement of “In the Cage” with nineteenth-century popular literature, and, in particular, with two standard female types: the “blooming girl” of the sentimental domestic novel and the “bad girl” of the sensational novel. Positioning James’s 1898 novella in the context of anxieties surrounding the emergence of the “New Woman,” I read “In the Cage” as a meditation on the insufficiency of old stories and symbols in the face of the fin-de-siècle’s ambivalent acknowledgement of new possibilities for female agency and desire.