As a result of the post-structuralist tendency to scrutinize the social layers that construct identity, much interest has turned towards the subject position of childhood. This interest is not new: the factors of difference suggested by age have long been recognized by realists attempting to depict children. In this essay I will discuss how Henry James saw children as inaccessible subjects, and how this inaccessibility provided the perfect challenge for him as a realist who constantly tried to expose and work through the limitations of language and subjectivity. In James, children are ever elusive, both representationally and narratively. His unique combination of externalized focalization, visual objectivity, and dramatic irony anticipates post-structuralist approaches to the social subject and draws attention to the one-sided and unchecked power of adults constructing children. To represent creatively requires models as common frames of reference for author and reader. Models, always generalizing (thus, essentializing), appeal to the adult thinker’s rationalist tendency to categorize, explain, pin truths. For the novelist, whose task depends upon language entirely, whose narrative mode, no matter how experimental in terms of chronology, depends upon linearity, whose genre, no matter how “objective” in point of view, springs from and inspires interpretive thought, these rationalist tendencies are central. However, the impulse to conveniently essentialize identity can be frustrated by the need to realistically represent others. Dorrit Cohn has pointed out that “Narrative fiction is the only literary genre, as well as the only kind of narrative, in which the unspoken thoughts, feelings, perceptions of a person other than the speaker can be portrayed”(Transparent Minds7). When the novelist tries to bridge subjectivities to convincingly “get into the mind” of and create a character, s/he must convincingly speculate. Yet, as Cohn states,“the special life-likeness of narrative fiction—as compared to dramatic and cinematic fictions—depends on what