ABSTRACT

This chapter rethinks our sense of Henry James with respect to the history of the American "romance," in many senses of that much-used word. Henry James is considered a theorist of the romance as a result of his well-known 1907 Preface to the New York Edition of The American, in which he discusses the difference between romantic and realist modes of literary representation. In "The Velvet Glove," James reveals how corporate production practices work to undermine the effects of shock and cultural counterpoint rather than maximize such efforts. Promising an affective transport that it ultimately fails to deliver, the tale ends with the standardization of beauty and a neutralization of passion. Yet as the popular saying has it, of course, "the velvet glove" hides "an iron fist": in this case, the Princess's determination to get an endorsement for her book from the best-selling Berridge, again using romantic means to achieve quite realistic, monetary ends.