Diminishing Returns: Henry James, Alice Munro, and the Foreshortened Future

Abstract: This essay considers the micro-genre of the “heiress narrative” in Alice Munro’s “Corrie” and Henry James’s Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady . It argues that both writers use the formal technique of “foreshortening,” a term James borrowed from the pictorial arts, as a means of conjuring a sense of character dimensionality that also serves as a vector of social critique. Both employ foreshortening to create a characterological depth-effect that is pitched against a male-dominated consumer culture that operates according to its own reductionist logic, constructing women as mere instruments of wealth accumulation.