Attention to historical pressures governing constructions of sexuality enables Jame's late tales to be read as responding to anxieties surrounding sexual identities in turn-of-the-century Britain and America. These tales attend to the construction of identities, rather than the expression of identities already constituted. In late James, identity is both burden and necessity, but, even as necessity, evanescent and intangible. The burden of Jamesian identity is the burden arising from relations which stop nowhere ― if identity is predicated on the subject's placement in a chain, what James, in the Prefaces, calls a ‘tangled web’ (LC-n, 1300, 1338), then crucial to such a construction are the relations admitted by the subject and those relations the subject repudiates or cannot admit in a given context. The play of identity in James's late tales revolves around such problems, questioning the legitimacy of any received ‘map of the social relations’, asking after other ways relations might be configured (GB, 11, 324).

James's late tales are highly ironic about the laws of prohibition governing their own production. Although they thematize respect for social decorum, they also zoom in on those parts of the body and bodily relations their very gentility would seem to require they ignore. In ‘Mora Montravers’ (1909), for instance, Jane and Sidney Traffle, a childless, middle-aged couple, become alarmed at the open manner in which their beautiful ‘niece’ Mora ― the daughter of Jane's dead half-sister ― has taken up residence with the no less beautiful painter Walter Puddick.