ABSTRACT
Just as in The Portrait of a Lady, illusion - the convincing and performatively constituent representation of reality - in this novel maps onto some hard questions. These would include gender and regionalism, as well as post-Civil War uncertainty and trauma. In James's earlier masterpiece, illusion operated insidiously in the fabric of social formation and interaction as well as in the more evident and declared realms of the aesthetic. We saw many examples of this - Henrietta Stackpole's response to the Correggio, Isabel's expectations of the real based on the mimeticism of her reading, and of course James's own illusionist aspirations for his novel.
