Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: The Moment of Henry James
- 1 Men, Women, and the American Way
- 2 The James Family Theatricals
- 3 Henry James at Work
- 4 Henry James and the Invention of Novel Theory
- 5 Henry James and the Idea of Evil
- 6 Queer Henry In the Cage
- 7 The Unmentionable Subject in "The Pupil"
- 8 Realism, Culture, and the Place of the Literary: Henry James and The Bostonians
- 9 Lambert Strether's Excellent Adventure
- 10 James's Elusive Wings
- 11 Henry James's American Dream in The Golden Bowl
- 12 Affirming the Alien: The Pragmatist Pluralism of The American Scene
- Suggestions for Further Reading
- Index
- Series List
7 - The Unmentionable Subject in "The Pupil"
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: The Moment of Henry James
- 1 Men, Women, and the American Way
- 2 The James Family Theatricals
- 3 Henry James at Work
- 4 Henry James and the Invention of Novel Theory
- 5 Henry James and the Idea of Evil
- 6 Queer Henry In the Cage
- 7 The Unmentionable Subject in "The Pupil"
- 8 Realism, Culture, and the Place of the Literary: Henry James and The Bostonians
- 9 Lambert Strether's Excellent Adventure
- 10 James's Elusive Wings
- 11 Henry James's American Dream in The Golden Bowl
- 12 Affirming the Alien: The Pragmatist Pluralism of The American Scene
- Suggestions for Further Reading
- Index
- Series List
Summary
James's great short story, “The Pupil,” is, among other things, about something considered nearly unmentionable by the genteel - money. By an extinct code of manners and taste that James examines and turns inside out, refined persons were still, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, not supposed to talk much about money, even though their liberty to avoid its mention depended on its sufficient supply. The monetary sufficiency that silenced mention varied - a moderate amount would do if it enabled the possessor to appear to have no worries about his material basis. But the decorum of reticence about money implied, clearly, upper class security. A genteel appearance of indifference to such crude facts as income and expenditure probably implied also that one had never needed to “make” money, had never been forced into a daily preoccupation with it. Ideally, a gentleman's money arrived of itself in the form of quiet, automatic increments to his bank account, which was never overdrawn.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Henry James , pp. 139 - 150Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998
- 2
- Cited by