ABSTRACT
In the 1890s Henry James sought the safety of the stage to prevent himself from relaxing into any representation of 'internalized' dimensions. Or, put another way, having abandoned the long novel as a form whose public demanded the internal dimension of the psyche, James returned to full-time story writing determined never to represent this area again. His interest in writing for the stage spanned his whole career, recurring not in some sporadic fashion but manifested in an inter-related set of writings. This interest had an increasingly detectable effect upon his narrative style. In Drama From Ibsen to Brecht and 'The Case of English Naturalism' Raymond Williams's description of Ibsen and Strindberg contextualizes the structures that represent consciousness in James's work of the 1890s. According to Williams, naturalism chased the soliloquy from the stage in order to render the space unselfconscious, to rid the site of performance.
