ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the faltering attempts of writers and mental science alike to police the boundaries of identity and map the mind. Close readings of Jamess In the Cage and Rudyard Kipling's Wireless suggest that the technological innovations that were themselves writing machines contributed to the development of an uncannily multiplied selfhood. The chapter examines Henry Jamess desire and inability to find academic neatness within his house of fiction, looking in particular at Jamess anxieties about his writing when it reaches the reading public. The revelations of Vawdrey's private life and Mellifont's public one, and the new familiarization with their identities in an unfamiliar place, indicate that the very choice of setting for the story is uncanny. The Private Life reveals that the literary marketplace has an uncanny effect on writersThe Private Life shows, writing by hand is a ghostly private act, but dictating to a typist is haunting in a new way.
