Henry James's Sensitive Surfaces: Binding and Bildung in The Princess Casamassima

The Princess Casamassima's material imagination is centered on the richly superficial creative maneuvers that occur in needlework, fashion, bookbinding, and reading. This essay argues that James's sustained investment in the thematic continuity of these practices challenges 1) the conception of the relationship between body and self that governs much writing on the Victorian bildungsroman and 2) the ways in which literary criticism oriented toward book history understands nineteenth-century attitudes to textuality and attempts to re-theorize contemporary ones. Hyacinth, Millicent, and Pinnie are narrative and performance artists who each articulate, in different modalities, the interdependence of text and texture in James.