Mind, absent characters, and the deployment of ideology in Henry James’s short fiction

Abstract

This paper examines the role of ideology in the construction of absent characters in Henry James’s short fiction against a methodological background of cognitive narratology and the attendant notions of metarepresentation, extended mind, and distributed identity. Building on the conviction that those minds that communally assemble absent characters by projecting subjective images of them do form identifiable ideological systems rather than arbitrary arrays, an approach to the construction of absent Louisa Brash in “The Beldonald Holbein” (1901) is made in the context of “Daisy Miller” (1878), “The Author of Beltraffio” (1884), and “The Next Time” (1895). Published in three different decades, these stories display absent and quasi‐absent characters who are conjured up for the reader in much the same way as Mrs. Brash is, namely as functions of a priori ideological positions based on sequenced degrees of commitment to the thematic dominant of a tale, a process that often results in deeply conflicted identities.