2 - In “the thick of the stream”: Henry James and the public sphere

Summary

This chapter examines Henry James's representation of the intricate links between crowds and publics, between private and public life. While critics have attended to James's many portrayals of modern publicity's invasions of privacy and its constructions of visibility, I focus on two narratives, Washington Square (1880) and “The Papers” (1903), in which public and private are differently configured. In these texts the public-private dyad turns less on ideologically structured spatial or institutional differences (between, say, marketplace and domicile, work and family) than on formal differences between two spheres of modern experience: the rational, in which debate (and consent) is the operative mode, and the sentimental, in which force is. Both Washington Square and “The Papers” thematize urban modernity's trends toward mass culture and consumerism. But more is at stake than the commercial public's invasion of domestic relations. To be sure, Washington Square depicts New York gentility's obsessive conformism, disclosing with acerbic irony the way its members hang on consumerist values of upward mobility and treat intimate relations – marital prospects – either as melodramatic spectacle or commercial transaction, that is, either as emotional entertainment or calculated investment. In “The Papers” James turns to London's mass-circulation newspaper industry, portraying what one of the two main characters Harold Bight calls “the laws – so mysterious, so curious, so interesting – that govern the great currents of public attention.”