Jamesian Sub-Conversation and the Aesthetics of Exchange

Abstract: This article builds on Fredric Jameson’s suggestion that Henry James’s claim to greatness is his representation of the “sub-conversation”: micromovements of affect and inflection that run through the surface of conversation. Contrasting The Wings of the Dove (1902) with In the Cage (1898), I argue that the sub-conversational facility displayed by James’s heroines coincides with their powerlessness to contest material states of affairs. In particular, the working-class heroine of In the Cage illuminates a close interconnection between interpretive and economic power in James’s sub-conversational literary aesthetics, dramatizing the efforts of the Jamesian art novel itself to transcend its commodity status.