The Semiotics of Economic Language in James's Fiction

Abstract

H ENRY James's fiction and criticism abound with literal and metaphorical instances of business and financial terms. While metaphors far outnumber literal discussions about dollars and cents, both are so pervasive that this economic language acquires a privileged status among his linguistic codes. For just as money is a universal equivalent into which all other commodities must be translated to establish their value, so also James uses economic language as the dominant code to fix the value of characters and ideas in his writing. In this essay, I will explore, through a variety of approaches, the complex uses and meaning of James's appropriation of economic currency. The majority of criticism of James's economic language in the last twenty years has been formalist; most notably, four studies, by Laurence Holland, Jan Dietrichson, Donald Mull, and Daniel Schneider, have demonstrated unquestionably the quantity and difficulty of these terms.' More recently, Carolyn Porter, Jean-Christophe Agnew, and Mimi Kairschner have focussed Marxist critical lenses upon his business rhetoric.2 All critics who have studied this idea agree that James portrays a gilded world of seductively available commodities and, in addition, that this imagery reveals a quantifying mentality among his characters and their author.3