In and out of the cage: informational privacy in Henry James’s In the Cage

Abstract

Abstract The issue of informational privacy emerged from the modern, technological landscape during the fin de siècle. The novelist Henry James approached this issue in his letters and novella In the Cage (1898), concurrent with lawyers Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s seminal legal discourse of the right to privacy. Despite the time affinity, James had recourse to the power of societal ethos in his works to unravel privacy issues, which diverged from the lawyers’ demand for legal rights. Still, the concurrence and divergence over informational privacy resonate in examining the tripartite relationship among informational privacy, modern technology and humans’ freedom. By analysing the epistemological dimensions of informational privacy and a crucial scene of trial in James’s In the Cage, this article argues that the protagonist’s choice to stay in or out of the informational “cage” invites the reader to reconsider between and beyond the private sphere and the public sphere. Privacy as a moral or legal right is dependent on the dynamics between the desire to know and the intention of intrusion as well as the negotiation between the public and private spheres. Tracing how the privacy issue emerged in the historical context, we hold that James’s text as the interface of law and literature echoes the texture of moral and legal complexity in today’s informational privacy issues.