Despite recent attempts to place his life and work in its familiar and literary contexts, our understanding of James remains hampered by two assumptions: the idea that his fiction is structured by a dichotomy between observation and experience and the notion that his protagonists are" passive observers"-detached, cerebral, almost disembodied beings. In The Historical Eye, Susan M. Griffin challenges this view. Bringing the psychological and aesthetic theories of James's day to bear on his late fiction, autobiography, and travel writing, Griffin shows that Jamesian seeing is a physical process. James depicts perception, she asserts, as active and bodily rather than passive and abstract. Griffin illustrates that in The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl the characters perceive their surroundings according to the functionalist model espoused by Henry James's brother, William James, in his Principles of Psychology. Taking up William James's suggestion that perception is structured like a language, Griffin explores the complex relation between the visual and the verbal in Henry James's texts. She also analyzes how James represents himself as a perceiver in such nonfiction works as The American Scene," Winchelsea, Rye, and'Denis Duval,'" and" Within the Rim.” Griffin supplements the psychological model of seeing