ABSTRACT
In Chapter 5, I will show that the presumably more rarefied air of Henry James’s representations of states of mind and feeling are, like world and psyche in Victorian realism, scrolls within written by the world without. I will examine a series of James’s short novels in order to show that the psychological self is a function of social protocols, particularly the protocols of language and the manners that represent them. Misreading is the key to the tragic mistakes that James’s characters make and that make their unfortunate ends the result of blunders as a rule represented by metaphors of reading and writing. The linguistic metaphor is key to James from early to late and unifies his fiction as a motif no matter the difference in technique between the social realism of his early work and the psychological realism of the late phase.
