Abstract
Eugenia’s mirror, strategically placed to enclose and reflect the entire novel, proposes not only the potential liberation of otherness but the place of the female within consumer culture. Rachel Bowlby has argued strongly for the connection between ‘the figure of the narcissistic woman and the fact of women as consumers’ in terms of the reflective/reflecting gaze:
Seducer and seduced, possessor and possessed of one another, women and commodities flaunt their images at one another in an amorous regard which both extends and reinforces the classical picture of the young girl gazing into the mirror in love with herself. The private, solipsistic fascination of the lady at home in her boudoir, or Narcissus at one with his image in the lake, moves out into the worldly, public allure of publicité, the outside solicitations of advertising … Consumer culture transforms the narcissistic mirror into a shop window, the glass which reflects an idealized image of the woman (or man) who stands before it, in the form of the model she could buy or become. Through the glass, the woman sees what she wants and what she wants to be.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes and References
Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 31–2.
Jean-Christophe Agnew, ‘The Consuming Vision of Henry James’, The Culture of Consumption, ed. R.W. Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 85.
One response to Madame Merle (William T. Stafford’s ‘The Enigma of Serena Merle’, The Henry James Review, 7, 1986, pp.117–23) is a good testimony to the sheer difficulty of deciphering her, finding ‘a deep irony in this deeply ironic book that its most troubled villain is simultaneously its most persistent enigma’ (p.117).
Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 136–7.
Frank Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens, Brighton: Harvester, 1988, p.26;
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, (London: Tavistock, 1972, p. 17)
Arnold Kettle, An Introduction to the English Novel, (London: Hutchinson, 1969, Vol.II, p.30).
Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (London: Chapman & Hall, 1890), pp.36, 165, 21.
R.W. Emerson, ‘Wealth’, The Conduct of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896), p. 100.
Andrew Carnegie, ‘Wealth’, reprinted in Builders of American Institutions: Readings in United States History, ed. Frank Freidel and Norman Pollack (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963), p. 309.
Henry James Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), Vol.II, pp.105–6.
Literary Criticism. French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition, ed. Leon Edel (New York: The Library of America, 1984), pp.229–31.
Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 132.
Oscar Wilde, ‘The Relation of Dress to Art. A Note in Black and White on Mr. Whistler’s Lecture’; reprinted in The Artist as Critic. Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellman (London: W.H. Allen, 1970), p. 17.
Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 120.
Walter Pater, The Renaissance, 1873 (London: Macmillan, 1920), pp. 125–6.
Robert Clark, ‘The Transatlantic Romance of Henry James’, American Fiction: New Readings, ed. Richard Gray (London and Totowa, NJ: Vision Press and Barnes & Noble, 1983), pp. 111–12.
Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 8.
Judith Fryer, The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp.126, 127.
For a brilliant discussion of James and sexual identity, see Alfred Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); in particular the chapter on ‘Henry James and W.D. Howells as Sissies’ and the section on ‘The Gentleman of Shalott: Henry James and American Masculinity’.
Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: New Left Books, 1981), pp. 83–4.
Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981), p. 91.
Helene Keyssar, Feminist Theatre (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. xiv.
Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of ‘As If’: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, trans. C.K. Ogden (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1924), pp. 258–9.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1991 Ian F. A. Bell
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bell, I.F.A. (1991). The Self’s Representations. In: Henry James and the Past. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08056-4_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08056-4_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-08058-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-08056-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)