Stereotyping Henry James

Abstract

Henry James's 1892 short story "The Real Thing" opens with a moment of vision that proves deceptive: "When the porter's wife (she used to answer the house-bell) announced 'A gentleman—with a lady, sir,' I had, as I often had in those days, for the wish was father to the thought, an immediate vision of sitters" (229). The gentleman and lady, however, turn out to be a down-at-heel genteel couple, come to offer themselves as models—the narrator is a struggling painter who makes a living illustrating popular novels—rather than as sitters. Their embarrassed failure to declare their situation is compounded by the narrator's failure to see his visitors for what they are. "There was nothing at first to indicate that they might not have come for a portrait" (229), he protests, adding that the couple look as if they "had ten thousand a year" (234). That the narrator should be so easily deceived by appearances is somewhat surprising; he famously declares, after all, "an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of representation. I liked things that appeared; then one was sure" (236-37). The narrator's preference depends, in the end, on a tautology—representation is more certain than the real because the real lacks representation—which in turn legitimates a rather Wildean paradox. Perversely, however, the narrator immediately contradicts himself. He contemptuously classifies the Monarchs as "the real thing" (244)—a gentleman and a lady—yet assures us that "It was odd how quickly I was sure of everything that concerned them" (235). The narrator claims both the real and the represented subject as grounds for certainty, and, in both cases, his vision proves far from sure. [End Page 255]