Henry James, Hotels, and the Invention of Disposable Space

Abstract

In his short story ‘Guest’s Confession’ (1872), Henry James took inspiration from The Merchant of Venice, transporting Shakespeare’s mercantile Mediterranean to an American resort hotel filled with members of the east coast business elite. 1 An embezzled sum of twenty-thousand dollars and the seduction of the embezzler’s daughter are messily entangled. Fittingly, James stages this entanglement of love and fraud inside a hotel–and in one crucial scene, in a blank and functional hotel sitting-room. Not only does this space hover ambiguously between the domestic and the commercial–bringing together two social domains that middle-class Victorian culture sought to hold apart–but the room itself seems fraudulent: its surfaces blank, slippery, and anonymous; its identity questionable. What James finds in this hotel sitting-room, and in a similarly odd hotel reading-room in The Reverberator (1888), is a ‘minor’ space whose apparent non-signification, whose resistance to the meaningmaking processes of the realist novel, is itself a form of significance. 2 The sitting- and reading-rooms are leisure spaces without leisure; offices without work; drawing-rooms without family. As such, these rooms mark an early appearance in James of a distinctly modern form of architectural space. A precursor to modern service zones like bureaucratic waiting rooms and airport lounges, the sitting- and reading-rooms are places where deep interiority and deep affect are not important. They are places of transience, plasticity, and disposal, of flirtation rather than attachment, restlessness rather than settlement, and laundered rather than fixed identities.