Some of James’s short stories or ‘tales’ can seem hollow and strained, their characters thinly sketched and their plot stretched to the limits of plausibility, though of course the novella as a genre is expected to be a striking sketch and not to rival the rich and complex texture of a novel. Yet close reading, or re-reading, of James’s tales may uncover a lode of human interest or psychological subtlety that goes beyond ingenious anecdote. I believe that this is particularly true of the neglected ‘Paste,’ published in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, vol. 49, in December 1899. In order to pay for Lamb House, his elegant residence in Rye, James turned out story after story that year, for a while at the rate of one a week (at fifty pounds per story). He had enrolled in the literary ‘stable’ of a skilful agent, James B. Pinker, and rejoiced in what he called ‘the germs of a new career’ as Pinker placed his work (Edel, 319). This commercial and popular context of publication has perhaps discouraged serious attention to the tale.
James comments on ‘Paste’ as follows:
The origin of ‘Paste’ is rather more expressible [than that of ‘The Great Good Place’], since it was to consist but of the ingenious thought of transposing the terms of one of Guy de Maupassant’s admirable contes [‘La Parure’]… It seemed harmless sport simply to turn that situation round – to shift, in other words, the ground of the horrid mistake, making this a matter not of a false treasure supposed to be true and precious, but of a real treasure supposed to be false and hollow: though a new little ‘drama,’ a new setting for my pearls – and as different as possible from the other – had of course withal to be found. (NYE 16:x)
James’s deprecatory language (‘ingenious thought,’ ‘harmless sport’) further encourages critics to treat the story as a light diversion; compare his dismissal of ‘The Turn of the Screw’ as ‘rather a shameless pot-boiler’ (James 1984:88). He seems to have forgotten that Maupassant himself wrote exactly such an inversion of the 1884 story ‘La Parure’ (Maupassant, 1198-1206) in another story, ‘Les Bijoux’ (764-71); or rather (as neither Tintner nor Gale note), the former story is an inversion of the latter, published a year earlier, in 1883. ‘Les Bijoux’ has more in common with ‘Paste’ than ‘La Parure’ has. It was inspired by an anecdote reported in Le Voleur in 1870, about a ministry employee who discovers the true value of his wife’s jewels and clothes after her death, and realizes she was the Minister’s ‘charmeuse’ (Maupassant, 1520). Adeline Tintner points out echoes of ‘Les Bijoux’ which show that James had it in mind when composing ‘Paste.’ There is a parallel between the husband’s initial denial and Arthur Prime’s denial, and ‘the theater and the jewels are united in both tales’ (1987:232).
James nonetheless understates his own claim to originality and wittingly or unwittingly causes critics to treat his story as mere ‘paste’ or pastiche, though in reality it is ‘a real treasure supposed to be false and hollow.’ Rewriting Maupassant was a serious creative endeavour for James: ‘Invention was for him the transposing, rearranging, reassessing, and recycling of an idea which he had seen unsatisfactorily or incompletely realized in another writer, or realized in a way not to his taste’ (Tintner 1987:230-1). The difference between the two stories lies deeper than the trick of the inversion. Somerset Maugham, in a simpler style, similarly used pearl riddles as a framework for studying psychological interactions in ‘Mr Know-all’ and ‘A String of Beads’ (Maugham 317-22, 412-17).
Placed in a context of popular entertainment, like so many of Maupassant’s stories, the tale nonetheless deserves the closest attention, given that it lies amid a string of masterpieces in which epistemological problems turn around sexual relations, being preceded by What Maisie Knew (1897), ‘In the Cage’ (1898), ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898), The Awkward Age (1899), and followed by The Sacred Fount (written in 1900) and The Ambassadors (written in 1900-01). James, no doubt thinking of ‘Paste,’ uses the image of pearls in reference to the epistemology of the first two of these works: ‘The range of wonderment attributed in our tale [‘In the Cage’] to the young woman employed at Cocker’s differs little in essence from the speculative thread on which the pearls of Maisie’s experience… – pearls of so strange an iridiscence – are mostly strung’ (NYE 11:xx). There characters weave their complex ‘knowledge’ just as an oyster secretes a pearl. The narrator of The Sacred Fount speaks at one point of saving ‘my precious pearl of an inquiry’ (James 2006:179, which echoes Charlotte’s loss of both the precious pearls and her moral and epistemological bearings in ‘Paste.’ The Sacred Fount drew from Rebecca West the caustic description: ‘A week-end visitor spends more intellectual force than Kant can have used on The Critique of Pure Reason in an unsuccessful attempt to discover whether there exists between certain of his fellow-guests a relationship not more interesting among these vacuous people than it is among sparrows’ (Edel 1953:vii). This is unfair, for apart from the interest of the theme of sexual vampirism with which James was obsessed (ib., xxxvii-ix), the incertitudes of the narrator espouse very closely those that pervade everyday life, and that fill many a diary, especially in uncertain adolescence. The application of Kantian epistemology to the puzzles of the everyday is not beneath the dignity of a novelist.
The few comments I have found on the tale are marred by inaccuracies. Jamesians have done a poor job of defending the story against dismissive comments such as an early reviewer’s ‘rather trifling, with interesting psychology but difficult reading’ (cited, Taylor, 289) or the disgruntled reactions rife on the internet, from those who bridle at the high-class connotations of James’s elegant dialogue, being ill-attuned to its musicality, and who rehearse the old objection: ‘Why can’t he tell a simple story in a simple way, like Maupassant?’
The ‘cleverly packed’ tale (Tintner 1987:232) has a life of its own, exceeding its rather trivial occasion. Rather like the eponymous pearls, it acquires a warm, erotic inner glow with successive readings, and the lustre or polish of its style is more and more appreciated. In this it is an apt tribute to Maupassant, whose art can seem cheap, yet often sounds human nature with startling insight. James consciously raises the stylistic level of the story beyond what Maupassant would have aimed at, as part of the treatment he gives ‘my pearls’ (though as Tintner notes Maupassant wrote about diamonds, not pearls).
James does lodge another claim to originality, which makes ‘Paste’ more than a jeu d’esprit and commends it to critical attention, namely, the creation of ‘a new little “drama”… as different as possible’ from Maupassant’s. The story is indeed a drama, the sequence of its four sections resembling a ‘well-made play’ in its use of the knacks James acquired in the theatrical career that had ended ingloriously four years earlier. The timing and rhythm of the dialogue, and the precisely noted accompanying movements, would make the story worthy of the stage, though in practice the refined wit and reflective integration of Jamesian dialogue made it unstageworthy. The little drama is one of seduction, contrasting one woman who is an expert seducer with another who has no mastery of the art of seduction. Their dealings with the seductive pearls highlight this contrast.
Told from the point of view of the younger woman, a penniless governess, the story takes the form of a sequence of dialogues. In the first and third sections, Charlotte talks with her stuffy cousin Arthur Prime, whose name suggests primitive bluntness, primness, his role as primal man in her life and as the only man in the story, his relation to her as first (Ital. primo cousin). Communication between the two is inflected and hampered by her timid, muffled attraction to him. In the second and fourth sections, her interlocutor is the sexually knowing, predatory, somewhat masculine Mrs Guy (her androgynous name another allusion to Guy de Maupassant), whose passion is as overwhelming to Charlotte as her cousin’s coldness. Note, as a mark of dramatic economy, that there are no other speakers in the story than the three principals.
In this essay I shall quote the entire story in the text of the New York Edition, printing it in bold type for the reader’s convenience. When I have broken up one of James’s paragraphs I resume without an indentation. I note the few changes from the 1900 Methuen edition, as published in The Library of America, by placing this text within square brackets, in normal print. James enriched the vocabulary and phrasing here and there, but some changes are not for the better, and the omission of a considerable number of commas spoils the rhythm of several sentences and causes the narrative to lose relief. I do not reproduce the New York Edition’s strange and distracting practice of writing ‘isn’t,’ ‘wasn’t,’ ‘doesn’t,’ ‘didn’t,’ ‘haven’t,’ ‘hadn’t,’ ‘mightn’t,’ ‘couldn’t,’ and ‘shouldn’t’ as ‘is n’t,’ ‘was n’t,’ ‘does n’t,’ ‘did n’t,’ ‘have n’t,’ ‘had n’t,’ ‘might n’t,’ ‘could n’t,’ and ‘should n’t.’
I. Charlotte and Arthur after the Funeral
(315) ‘I’ve found a lot more things,’ her cousin said to her the day after the second funeral; ‘they’re up in her room – but they’re things I wish you’d look at.’
This incipit is characteristic of James’s deft narrative style. Though he does not seem to have known Chekhov’s stories, he follows Chekhov’s advice that in writing a short story one should leave out the beginning and leave out the end. Plunged in medias res we hear of two unnamed women, of a mysterious second funeral, and above all of the ‘things’ and their special relationship to the woman addressed. Questions spring up, tantalizing the readers’ curiosity and obliging us to read on for the answers. It is not even clear whether the speaker is male or female. The immediate reference to funerals casts a shadow of death over the tale, which will deal with buried jewellery, both genuine and fake, representing a buried past and a buried passion, but also with a triumphant resurrection, a return of that erased past in a new key. The opening foregrounds the twice-mentioned ‘things,’ as yet completely unidentified, and launches the fascination with their mystery which is the unifying motif of the entire story.
The pair of mourners, sufficiently stricken, were in the garden of the vicarage together, before luncheon, waiting to be summoned to that meal, and Arthur Prime had still in his face the intention, she was moved to call it rather than the expression, of feeling something or other. Some such appearance was in itself of course natural within a week of his stepmother’s death, within three of his father’s; but what was most present to the girl, herself sensitive and shrewd, was that he seemed somehow to brood without sorrow, to suffer without what she in her own case would have called pain.
The questions raised in the first paragraph are resolved one by one in the second. The ‘cousin’ is named as Arthur Prime, the deceased is his stepmother, the first funeral was that of his father the vicar.
Readers of the story are likely to think of Charlotte as dim-witted and gullible, but James goes out of the way (almost to the point of committing what his compositional principles would deem an illegitimate authorial intervention) to underline her sensitivity and shrewdness. She can assess the genuineness of her cousin’s mourning, detect that it is mere ‘paste.’ The diction itself mischievously reproduces the feel of fake pearls – ‘something or other. Some such appearance.’
The story turns on questions of appearance and reality, and its title refers not only to the fake jewellery (to which there is no further reference once the real pearls are identified less than half way through the story) but to the human pretences of the characters – the pompous respectability cultivated by Arthur, the scheming of Mrs Guy, the lies both tell Charlotte, and the secretiveness of the dead aunt and the starchiness of her married life. The distinctions Charlotte makes: ‘the intention, she was moved to call it rather than the expression’ and ‘to suffer without what she in her own case would have called pain,’ show not only a discriminating consciousness about human feelings, but also a judicious sensitivity to words (‘intention’ rather than ‘expression,’ ‘suffering’ rather than ‘pain’); the discrimination is not made from the outside but implicates the observer (‘she was moved to call it’; ‘what she in her own case would have called’). Charlotte’s own grief does not seem very deep either; both are ‘sufficiently stricken’ – bringing just the right amount of sadness to the occasion.
He turned away from her after this last speech – it was a good deal his habit to drop an observation and leave her to pick it up without assistance. If the vicar’s widow, now in her turn finally translated, had not really belonged to him it was not for want of her giving herself, so far as he ever would take her; and she had lain for three days all alone at the end of the passage, in the great cold chamber of hospitality, the dampish[,] greenish room where visitors slept and where several of the ladies of the parish had, without effect, offered, in pairs and successions, piously to watch with her. His personal connexion [connection] with the parish was now slighter (316) than ever, and he had really not waited for this opportunity to show the ladies what he thought of them.
Arthur’s stepmother had failed to ‘seduce’ him, and his response to her death is cold. He comes across as a cold fish, distinctly misogynistic – as shown in his boorish snubbing of his stepmother, the well-meaning parish ladies, and Charlotte herself. Charlotte’s attraction to him is not warm passion either but a pathetic neediness, of the sort exhibited by Miss Tita in ‘The Aspern Papers’ and the fearful governess of ‘The Turn of the Screw.’ Not passion, but perhaps a longing for domestic security, is Charlotte’s motive. Her needy attachment to Arthur is an important element in the tale, which the critics seem to overlook.
She felt that she herself had, during her doleful month’s leave from Bleet, where she was governess, rather taken her place in the same snubbed order; but it was presently, none the less, with a better little hope of coming in for some remembrance, some relic, that she went up to look at the things he had spoken of, the identity of which, as a confused cluster of bright objects on a table in the darkened room, shimmered at her as soon as she had opened the door.
Being a governess is a doleful job enough, as the sad name ‘Bleet’ suggests, but Charlotte’s leave has been even more doleful, because of the two funerals (probably the occasion of her leave) and the unfriendliness of her cousin. The ‘better little hope’ is an obscure comparative, indicating perhaps that part of Arthur’s snubbing has consisted in making no mention of any bequest to her from her aunt, no offer of any memento. It is only the newly discovered ‘things’ that he thinks suitable for Charlotte’s attention, not because he sees her as a fine connoisseur of jewellery, but because her need of a memento can be neatly met by the vulgar and valueless objects, which he wants to dispose of quickly.
The jewels seem actively to declare their identity – which ‘shimmers at her’ – and they appear as if staged in an artful setting – ‘bright objects on a table in the darkened room,’ the personal room of the dead woman. They are already exerting their seduction on Charlotte, even before she finds the genuine pearls concealed among them. (O’Leary 2008 mistakenly identified the jewels and the pearls.) James’s pearls and even his stage jewels are a richer presence than Maupassant’s, which are sparse props, described in plain language.
They met her eyes for the first time, but in a moment, before touching them, she knew them as things of the theatre, as very much too fine to have been[,] with any verisimilitude[,] things of the vicarage. They were too dreadfully good to be true, for her aunt had had no jewels to speak of, and these were coronets and girdles, diamonds, rubies and sapphires. Flagrant tinsel and glass, they looked strangely vulgar, but if[,] after the first queer shock of them[,] she found herself taking them up[,] it was for the very proof, never yet so distinct to her, of a far-off faded story.
She instantly discerns the identity of the things as theatrical trappings, again showing her sensitivity and shrewdness. They strike her as uncanny, communicating a ‘queer shock.’ From the start the jewels have a vivid life (and still more the pearls hidden among them). They are more than a Hitchcockian McGuffin. One thinks of the Socratic agalma, which the beloved possesses and which is the object of longing (Lacan 1991:163-78).
The ‘things’ have the character of a fetish, with the characteristic double aspect of something holy and venerable (the pearls) and something tawdry, obscene, idolatrous (the trash amid which the pearls are hidden). Psychoanalysts are fascinated with the fetishistic effect whereby a common thing is transformed into a sacral Thing. A postage stamp has a useful function in everyday life, but we are scarcely conscious of it as a thing in its own right. But in the philatelist's collection it shines as a precious Thing. The things are carefully ‘handled’ and the movements of those holding them are charted in detail. People hesitate to touch them, as if they were holy, dangerous, or polluting. Compare Densher’s handling of Milly’s posthumous letter at the end of The Wings of the Dove (O’Leary 1999-2001:64-79).
The financial musings on their value bring out another aspect, commodity fetishism, which can be applied to commodified human beings such as Prince Amerigo in The Golden Bowl). But commercialization has not made the pearls a fetish, rather it desacralizes them. The pearls are an intimate witness of human love and passion, and to commercialize them is to betray this human value. A fetish can lose its value, as in the case of Christina Light in Roderick Hudson, treated as a fetish by her mother: ‘The poor old fetish had been so caressed and manipulated, so thrust in and out of its niche, so passed from hand to hand, so dressed and undressed, so mumbled and fumbled over, that it had lost by this time much of its early freshness, and seemed a rather battered and disfeatured divinity’ (NYE 1:249). However, the pearls are never devalued in our story; their long burial has rather kept them fresh and they come gloriously into their own when disinterred.
We note that what most thrills Charlotte about the jewels is what would have most thrilled James: their evocation of ‘a far-off faded story.’ Things that tell stories, or around which stories are woven, loom large in Jamesian fiction: the protagonist’s rare masterworks in Roderick Hudson, the ‘papers’ in ‘The Aspern Papers,’ the eponymous things in The Spoils of Poynton and The Golden Bowl. Note how James plays with idioms – ‘too good to be true’ becomes ‘too dreadfully good to be true,’ with a serious accent on the ‘dread’ – and how smoothly the idioms subserve the thematic web of the novella.
An honest widowed cleric with a small son and a large sense of Shakespeare [Shakspeare] had, on a brave latitude of habit as well as of taste – since it implied his having in very fact dropped deep into the ‘pit’ – conceived for an obscure actress[,] several years older than himself[,] an admiration of which the prompt offer of his reverend name and hortatory hand was the sufficiently candid sign. The response had perhaps[,] in those dim years, so far as eccentricity was concerned [in the way of eccentricity], even bettered the proposal, and Charlotte, turning the tale over, had (317) long since drawn from it a measure of the career renounced by the undistinguished comédienne [comédienne] – doubtless also tragic, or perhaps pantomimic, at a pinch – of her late uncle’s dreams. This career couldn’t [could not] have been eminent and must much more probably have been comfortless.
In a second phase of response, Charlotte senses that the jewels bring to life her aunt’s disowned past, and even her uncle’s descent into the ‘pit’ – not of the theatre only, but of hell it seems. It speaks of a quaint, far-off, faded, buried past, and the true pearls, when they come to light, will speak of that past more intimately, until it becomes ‘a palpable imaginable visitable past’ (NYE 12:x). The jewels tell of a vulgar, social, theatrical past; the pearls will tell of an individual, private, refined, and truly passionate one. These variants of the magic of resurrection enrich the role of both the true and the false jewels as dramatic agents in the story. At first they have the quiet dignity of ‘relics’ or ‘survivals,’ but as the tale progresses they take on increasingly vital qualities, seducing the three protagonists one by one.
Notice the elegant humour of the diction: ‘the prompt offer of his reverend name and hortatory hand.’ The actress is older than the vicar, leaving space for a long pre-history that only now comes to light. The details necessary for the narrative about her aunt’s past are cleverly presented in the perspective of Charlotte’s memory and reconstruction. At no point does the tale need to step outside the present moment to fill in background. Exemplifying James’s ‘scenic principle’ at its most effective, it contains no sentence that does not contribute to its drama and psychological life.
‘You see what it is – old stuff of the time she never liked to mention.’
Our young woman gave a start; her companion had[,] after all[,] rejoined her and had apparently watched a moment her slightly scared recognition.
The encounter with the jewels inspires a touch of religious awe – she is ‘slightly scared’ and the intrusion of a watching Arthur on this sacred moment could be a kind of violation. His entire attitude of the jewels aims to desacralize them.
‘So I said to myself,’ she replied. Then[,] to show intelligence, yet keep clear of twaddle: ‘How peculiar they look!’
‘They look awful,’ said Arthur Prime. ‘Cheap gilt, diamonds as big as potatoes. These are trappings of a ruder age than ours. Actors do themselves better now.’
‘Oh now,’ said Charlotte, not to be less knowing, ‘actresses have real diamonds.’
‘Some of them.’ Arthur spoke dryly [drily].
‘I mean the bad ones – the nobodies too.’
‘Oh[,] some of the nobodies have the biggest. But mamma wasn’t of that sort.’
‘A nobody?’ Charlotte risked.
‘Not a nobody to whom somebody – well, not a nobody with diamonds. It isn’t all worth, this trash, five pounds.’
The dialogue in this story is marked to a great degree by one of the speakers completing the other’s sentences or taking up some phrase the other has used. Edel (1953:x) writes of The Sacred Fount: ‘The eager narrator, with that exasperating habit certain of James’s characters have of butting in, finishes the sentence for her.’ But this habit seems to be shared by all the characters in both stories. It creates an effect of mobile perceptions and a certain musicality. Consider the play on the word ‘nobody’ here, which resonates as a musical motif.
Arthur seems not to have noticed the genuine pearl necklace among the stage jewellery. It is the latter that arouses his worry. His discourse throughout the story is in the register of denial. He brushes aside any unwelcome implications in a bullying way. There is comedy in the way he shows his worry about his stepmother’s respectability in the interrupted phrase, ‘not a nobody to whom somebody’ – the continuation: ‘would give real diamonds,’ with all its sexual implications, is suppressed. Arthur claims knowledge of the theatre and Charlotte, anxious ‘to show intelligence,’ wants to appear equally ‘knowing’ – another word with sexual overtones. ‘Actresses have real diamonds’ is one of her unfortunate remarks, with unintentional reference to the sexual lives of actresses. When she qualifies it as referring to ‘the bad ones’ and to ‘nobodies,’ she again touches a nerve: the stepmother had been an undistinguished artist, a nobody, so a gift of diamonds to her would be doubly suspicious.
The jewels ‘speak’ to Charlotte, winning her over; but they do not yet speak of passion and love, as the pearls will.
There was something in the old gewgaws that spoke to her, and she continued to turn them over. ‘They’re relics. I think they have their melancholy and even their dignity.’
They already had the function of relics for the dead aunt, a solace in memory in her dull marriage, and now they are doubly relics, of the aunt’s youth in the tawdry world of the stage, quaint in long retrospect, and of her older life as respected matron. The word ‘relics’ confers on all these connotations a sacral quality.
Their melancholy dignity leaves Arthur untouched:
Arthur observed another pause. ‘Do you care (318) for them?’ he then asked. ‘I mean,’ he promptly added, ‘as a souvenir.’
‘Of you?’ Charlotte threw off.
‘Of me? What have I to do with it? Of your poor dead aunt who was so kind to you,’ he said with virtuous sternness.
‘Well, I’d [I would] rather have them than nothing.’
‘Then please take them,’ he returned in a tone of relief which expressed somehow more of the eager than of the gracious.
Charlotte’s interest in Arthur produces comedy here, as she complete his sentence with the ‘of you’ which he takes up only to rebuff. She wants a souvenir of him rather than of the dead woman, and he rejects this suggestion almost like Hippolytus rejecting the advances of Phaedra, as he has indeed previously rejected his stepmother’s kindness. Her eagerness is met with rebuffs again and again, and even with a little sermon about her duties to the poor dead aunt. ‘I’d rather have them than nothing’ sounds the plaintive note of spurned affection, though on the surface it is a complaint that Arthur up to this point has offered her no memento of the aunt.
‘Thank you.’ Charlotte lifted two or three objects up and set them down again. Though they were lighter than the materials they imitated they were so much more extravagant that they struck her in truth as rather an awkward heritage, to which she might have preferred even a matchbox or a penwiper. They were indeed shameless pinchbeck. ‘Had you any idea she had kept them?’
The lightness of the jewels reveals that they are fake.
‘I don’t at all believe she had kept them or knew they were there, and I’m very sure my father didn’t. They had quite equally worked off any tenderness for the connexion [connection]. These odds and ends, which she thought had been given away or destroyed, had simply got thrust into a dark corner and been forgotten.’’
Again, Arthur takes up and corrects an expression used by Charlotte, the seemingly innocuous word ‘kept.’
Charlotte wondered. ‘Where then did you find them?’
‘In that old tin box’ – and the young man pointed to the receptacle from which he had dislodged them and which stood on a neighbouring chair. ‘It’s rather a good box still, but I’m afraid I can’t give you that.’
Arthur’s retention of the box is of a piece with his usual stinginess about his stepmother’s things. Tintner commits a lapse in speaking of ‘a correspondence between Maupassant’s description of the “tin box” and James’s “Morocco leather box”’ (1987:231). Maupassant refers to but does not describe a Morocco leather box, in which the wife keeps her diamonds, in full view of her husband, whose neck she jokingly decks with them at one point (Maupassant, 765).
The girl took no heed of the box [gave the box no look]; she continued (319) only to look at the trinkets. ‘What corner had she found?’
The original double reference to looking suggests that the jewels attract Charlotte’s religious gaze, exerting a fascination over her.
‘She hadn’t “found” it,’ her companion sharply insisted; ‘she had simply lost it. The whole thing had passed from her mind. The box was on the top shelf of the old school-room [schoolroom] closet, which, until one put one’s head into it from a step-ladder, looked, from below, quite cleared out. The door’s [door is] narrow and the part of the closet to the left goes well into the wall. The box had stuck there for years.’
Again Arthur corrects a seeming innocent word, ‘found.’ Any language about the jewels is fraught with peril.
Even if the jewellery is obviously paste, the fact that the stepmother deliberately concealed it carries a whiff of scandal, suggesting that she clung to the theatrical past she had supposed forgotten. More denial from Arthur, who rejects Charlotte’s image of his stepmother deliberately seeking a hiding-place and insists on seeing the carefully hidden box as simply mislaid. The pearls carry a charge of pathos as relics of a tawdry theatrical world, a solace in memory to the dead aunt in her dull marriage. ‘Their melancholy and even their dignity’ leave Arthur untouched. They are also de trop, things that do not fit into the prim world of the vicarage, and that are also an awkward legacy for the governess, who would have more use for such mundane, functional, drab objects as a matchbox or a penwiper. (The two items have sexual overtones, like the notorious stick in the boat in ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ and bespeak a whole world of sexual repression.)
Charlotte was conscious of a mind divided and a vision vaguely troubled, and once more she took up two or three of the subjects of this revelation; a big bracelet in the form of a gilt serpent with many twists and beady eyes, a brazen belt studded with emeralds and rubies, a chain, of flamboyant architecture, to which, at the Theatre Royal Little Peddlington, Hamlet’s mother must have been concerned [had probably been careful] to attach the portrait of the successor to Hamlet’s father. ‘Are you very sure they’re not really worth something? Their mere weight alone – !’ she vaguely observed, balancing a moment a royal diadem that might have crowned one of the creations of the famous Mrs. Jarley.
Again her handling of the ‘subjects of this revelation’ has a ritual quality. The jewels have emerged from hiddenness like a sacred truth long concealed and now revealed. Charlotte is torn between her cousin’s dismissive respectability and the mute appeal of the theatrical jewels. The reference to Hamlet figures the stepmother in the role of Gertrude, quite the opposite of the decorous wife of a vicar. Mrs Jarley is a character in Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, and her ‘creations’ are waxworks. The dramatist John Poole (c. 1786-1872) wrote a travesty of Hamlet (1810) and a two-volume work, Little Peddlington and the Peddlingtonians (1839); Little Peddlington is a fictional place. ‘You don’t compare Oxford with Little Peddlington, or Edinburgh with Thrums,’ wrote Grant Allen in 1894, nor can one compare a city like London with a ‘squalid little village’ like Paris. (Thrums, too, is a fictional Scottish village, from J. M. Barrie, A Window in Thrums, 1889.) All of this places the aunt’s career in a tawdry, vulgar world, far from vicarage respectability. Arthur has a touch of the brooding Hamlet, suspecting his stepmother of having betrayed his father by clinging to gifts of a former love, somewhat as Gertrude betrays Hamlet’s father with his stepfather. His lectures to Charlotte might be transpositions of the lectures he would give his stepmother were she alive to hear them, echoing Hamlet’s haranguing of Gertrude in the play.
But Arthur Prime, it was clear, had already thought the question over and found the answer easy. ‘If they had been worth anything to speak of she would long ago have sold them. My father and she had unfortunately never been in a position to keep any considerable value locked up.’ And while his companion took in the obvious force of this he went on with a flourish just marked enough not to escape her: (320) ‘If they’re worth anything at all – why[,] you’re only the more welcome to them.’
Arthur’s denial is not spontaneous, but a carefully thought out rationalization. Keeping the jewellery may have been indiscreet, but at least it shows they are not compromisingly valuable, for in that case they would have been sold. It does not occur to Arthur that his stepmother could have placed sentimental values higher than monetary ones. His ‘flourish’ is noted by Charlotte, no doubt scrutinizing it as a possible gesture of generosity or affection toward herself.
Charlotte had now in her hand a small bag of faded[,] figured silk – one of those antique conveniences that speak to us, in [the] terms of evaporated camphor and lavender, of the part they have played in some personal history; but[,] though she had for the first time drawn the string[,] she looked much more at the young man than at the questionable treasure it appeared to contain.
She has now stumbled on the genuine pearls. Since these are valuable, the aunt’s keeping of them instead of selling them shows that the personal history attached to them was precious to her. Charlotte’s eyes are on Arthur, her own personal history distracting her from the treasure she holds. ‘For the first time’ suggests that Arthur has not opened the bag.
‘I shall like them. They’re all I have.’
‘All you have – ?’
‘That belonged to her.’
He swelled a little, then looked about him as if to appeal – as against her avidity – to the whole poor place. ‘Well, what else do you want?’
‘Nothing. Thank you very much.’
Notice the delicious double entendres here. ‘They’re all I have’ suggests Charlotte’s regret that she does not have Arthur’s affection, or more radically, her sexual frustration and loneliness. Arthur again takes it up, and her clarification ‘that belonged to her’ suppresses the unspoken overtone. Arthur’s ‘what else do you want?’ refers on the surface to the aunt’s legacy, but it is more deeply a defensive reaction to her desire; her ‘nothing’ stifles her discontent with this rebuff.
With which she bent her eyes on the article wrapped, and now only exposed, in her superannuated satchel – a string [necklace] of large pearls, such a shining circle as [such as] might once have graced the neck of a provincial Ophelia and borne company to a flaxen wig. ‘This perhaps is worth something. Feel it.’ And she passed him the necklace, the weight of which she had gathered for a moment into her hand.
‘Now only exposed’ again suggests that Arthur has not found the pearls. Charlotte at last turns her eyes from Arthur to the pearls. The New York text adds the description ‘shining circle’ to make vivid this first appearance of the necklace. Charlotte still sees them as theatrical, in a failure of perception. The reference to Ophelia reminds one of the similar coldness and scolding that Hamlet showed to that tragic heroine. The fake jewels were linked with Gertrude, but the genuine pearls are linked with Ophelia. ‘Nothing. Thank you very much’ is a repetition of the earlier exchange: ‘I’d rather have them than nothing… Thank you.’ Charlotte’s repetitive words and gestures show her unable to escape from the spiral of her behaviour as a ‘loser.’
He measured it in the same way with his own, but remained quite detached. ‘Worth at most thirty shillings.’
‘Not more?’
‘Surely not if it’s paste?’
‘But is it paste?’
He gave a small sniff of impatience. ‘Pearls nearly as big as filberts?’
Filberts are hazelnuts, so named after the feast of St Philibert (August 20), since in England they ripen around that date. The pearls are thoroughly deromanticized by this talk of shillings and filberts. The cousins measure the weight and monetary value of the pearls, which will be shown as insensitive and even irreverent behavior, an intrusion of money-thinking into the sacred realm of passion and love. Note that it is Arthur who launches the word ‘paste,’ which occurs seven times, always in dependence on Arthur’s judgement.
(321) ‘But they’re heavy,’ Charlotte declared.
‘No heavier than anything else.’ And he gave them back with an allowance for her simplicity. ‘Do you imagine for a moment they’re real?’
She studied them a little, feeling them, turning them round. ‘Mightn’t they possibly be?’
‘Of that size – stuck away with that trash?’
‘I admit it isn’t likely,’ Charlotte presently said. ‘And pearls are so easily imitated.’
‘That’s just what – to a person who knows – they’re not. These have no lustre, no play.’
‘No – they are dull. They’re opaque.’
Arthur's 'mansplaining' here comically reveals him to be a pompous ass but Charlotte sacrifices her own perceptions to his authority, falling in with his ver-emphatic dismissal of the pearls’ genuineness, and his pompous claim to be ‘a person who knows.’ The cousins unite in failing to perceive the quality of the pearls. The pathetic comedy of Charlotte’s unspoken affection continues.
‘Besides,’ he lucidly enquired, ‘how could she ever have come by them?’
‘Mightn’t they have been a present?’
Arthur stared at the question as if it were almost improper. ‘Because actresses are exposed – ?’ He pulled up, however, not saying to what, and before she could supply the deficiency had, with the sharp ejaculation of ‘No, they mightn’t!’ turned his back on her and walked away. His manner made her feel [that] she had probably been wanting in tact, and before he returned to the subject, the last thing that evening, she had satisfied herself of the ground of his resentment. They had been talking of her departure the next morning, the hour of her train and the fly that would come for her, and it was precisely these things that gave him his effective chance. ‘I really can’t allow you to leave the house under the impression that my stepmother was at any time of her life the sort of person to allow herself to be approached – ’
‘With pearl necklaces and that sort of thing?’ (322) Arthur had made for her somehow the difficulty that she couldn’t show him she understood him without seeming pert.
It at any rate only added to his own gravity. ‘That sort of thing, exactly.’
Again we have the play of sentences begun by one and finished by the other, as in ‘the sort of person to allow herself to be approached – ’ ‘With pearl necklaces and that sort of thing?,’ and of unfinished sentences such as ‘Because actresses are exposed – ’, which Arthur actually prevents Charlotte from completing. He actually feeds her lines that she cannot finish with good grace, or questions not to be answered without embarrassment, putting her in a false position; James is a master of this kind of transaction analysis. Note that it is Arthur who raises the delicate question of where his stepmother could have had genuine pearls from, and who again returns to the question that evening. It is not enough that the stepmother has buried a potentially shade past. She must have been above suspicion at all moments of her career.
‘I didn’t think when I spoke this morning – but I see what you mean.’
‘I mean that she was beyond reproach,’ said Arthur Prime.
‘A hundred times yes.’
‘Therefore if she couldn’t, out of her slender gains, ever have paid for a row of pearls – ’
‘She couldn’t, in that atmosphere, ever properly have had one? Of course she couldn’t. I’ve seen perfectly since our talk,’ Charlotte went on, ‘that that string of beads isn’t even[,] as an imitation[,] very good. The little clasp itself doesn’t seem even gold. With false pearls, I suppose,’ the girl mused, ‘it naturally wouldn’t be.’
Again Charlotte completes a question of Arthur’s. Piecing together the implication of the pearls is a collective enterprise, and the two interpreters here have missed the warm glow of the pearls, seeing them only as dull.
‘The whole thing’s rotten paste,’ her companion returned as if to have done with it. ‘If it were not, and she had kept it all these years hidden – ’
‘Yes?’ Charlotte sounded as he paused.
‘Why[,] I shouldn’t know what to think!’
Though anxious to have done with the question, Arthur cannot help returning to it and imagining the implications of the pearls being genuine. Now he abandons his previous hypothesis that the jewels were simply forgotten and countenances the idea that they were deliberately kept hidden. When Charlotte gives any sign of pursuing such speculation he rounds on her. His interrupted sentence, which after a nicely timed musical pause or suspension (‘“Yes?” Charlotte sounded as he paused’) finishes with, ‘Why I shouldn’t know what to think,’ opening up a space for the unspoken, a gap between surface assurances and suppressed reality, so that an air of mystery lingers. Arthur dreads the spread of stories about the vicar's wife's previous life, which would cause scandal among the parishioners,
‘Oh[,] I see.’ She had met him with a certain blankness, but adequately enough, it seemed, for him to regard the subject as dismissed; and there was no reversion to it between them before, on the morrow, when she had with difficulty made a place for them in her trunk, she carried off these florid survivals.
‘In due time Arthur tells his cousin Charlotte Prime to select whatever piece of past jewelry her stepmother left. Miss Prime chooses a string of pearls’ (Gale, 503), This is incorrect: Arthur asks her to take all the jewellery and she does so. Gale’s reference work is also inaccurate elsewhere. It refers to ‘the stepson of Charlotte Prime’ (sic), or of ‘Mrs Prine’ (89); it locates the Venetian Palazzo Barbaro in Rome (669); ‘Bradshaw,’ the railway guide, referred to in The Golden Bowl – ‘I’ve seen you with Bradshaw. It takes Anglo-Saxon blood’ (NYE ) –, is hilariously misidentified as ‘Prince Amerigo’s servant’ (89).
II. Charlotte and Mrs Guy at Bleet
At Bleet she found small occasion to revert to them (323) and, in an air charged with such quite other references, even felt, after she had laid them away, much enshrouded, beneath various piles of clothing, that [as if] they formed a collection not wholly without its note of the ridiculous.
Though the story is not divided into numbered parts, clearly a new section begins here. The phrase ‘an air charged with such quite other references’ suggests the opening up of vistas of perversity far indeed from the straitlaced world of the vicarage. The suppression of sexuality in the vicarage is repeated in Charlotte’s burial of the pearls, ‘much enshrouded.’ But just as the actress’s past resurfaced disturbingly in the pearls, so its buried sexual charge is ready to leap into life here in Bleet if given the least opening. The change from ‘that’ to ‘as if’ reduces Charlotte’s dismissiveness of the pearls.
Yet she was never, for the joke, tempted to show them to her pupils, though Gwendolen and Blanche[,] in particular[,] always wanted, on her return, to know what she had brought back; so that without an accident by which the case was quite changed they might have appeared to enter on a new phase of interment. The essence of the accident was the sudden illness, at the last moment, of Lady Bobby, whose advent had been so much counted on to spice the five days’ feast laid out for the coming of age of the eldest son of the house; and its equally marked effect was the dispatch [despatch] of a pressing message, in quite another direction, to Mrs. Guy, who, could she by a miracle be secured – she was always engaged ten parties deep – might be trusted to supply, it was believed, an element of exuberance scarcely less potent [active]. Mrs. Guy was already known to several of the visitors already on the scene, but she wasn’t [was not] yet known to our young lady, who found her, after many wires and counter-wires [counterwires] had at last determined the triumph of her arrival, a strange[,] charming little red-haired[,] black-dressed woman, a person with the face of a baby and the authority of a commodore. She took on the spot the discreet, the exceptional young governess into the confidence of her designs and, still more, of her doubts; intimating that it was a policy she almost always promptly pursued.
Bleet is a diminished Bly, or even, as its bleak, bleating sound suggests, a deflated Bly; Charlotte’s name recalls Charlotte Brontë, and thus the unnamed Jane Eyre-like governess of The Turn of the Screw; her pushy, selfish charges, Gwendolen and Blanche, are a parody of Flora and Miles; their names Gwendolen and Blanche evoke a pseudo-medievalism, as does the character of Rowena, from Walter Scott’s 1820 novel Ivanhoe, which might be considered the nearest literary equivalent to ‘paste’ (though James, in his literary criticism, generally refers apperciatively to Scott). Arthur Prime also has a medieval name, and there is something false about the Arthurian chivalry that he claims to live by; in his rude behaviour he is the opposite of chivalrous. He lives in chambers in the Temple, associated historically with the Knights Templar, who are dominated by the beautiful Rowena just as Mrs Guy will dominate Arthur.
Charlotte, like the carrier of some infection, is unaware of ‘what she had brought back.’ The ‘accident’ that ends the pearls’ ‘interment’ is connected with a celebration of sexuality: Lady Bobby was ‘to spice the five days’ feast laid out for the coming of age of the eldest son of the house,’ and Mrs Guy is counted on to supply ‘an element of exuberance scarcely less potent.’ The stage is being set for the re-emergence of the pearls from their long retirement. Mrs Guy exudes a lesbian aura – her androgynous name doubled by that of Lady Bobby suggests carnivalesque travesty – and this links up with the homoerotic themes of ‘The Turn of the Screw’ and The Sacred Fount (as analyzed in Tintner 1995), Tintner says that Mrs Guy is ‘suspiciously like’ Maupassant (1987:231), and one could construe Maupassant’s visage in some photographs as a baby face. Mrs Guy takes ‘the discreet, the exceptional young governess into the confidence of her designs’ – it is from her point of view that Charlotte is seen as discreet and exceptional, a vessel for Mrs Guy’s overflow. (It is perhaps an indication of her powerful personality that James thus allows her point of view to take over at some points.) Some of the dialectic explored in The Sacred Fount can be traced in the relationship of the two women: Charlotte is depleted as Mrs Guy thrives and triumphs. The pearls glow unashamedly for Mrs Guy, languish in darkness for Charlotte.
There is another Mrs Guy in James’s oeuvre, Mrs Guy Brissenden in The Sacred Fount, though she is never so named, but always Grace Brissenden, as if to underline her distance from her husband, who is ‘put by himself, for some reason, in the bachelor wing’ (James 2006:14). Grace is ‘intelligent, forceful, and somewhat suspect’ (Isle, 247). In the narrator’s supposition She is thriving as her husband wanes, while another guest at Newmarch, May Server, ‘the charming, beautiful, red-haired, ingénue, with some unaccountable tragic quality about her,’ is depleted by her secret passion for Gilbert Long, ‘a hearty, robust gentleman’ (Isle, 247). Tintner shows that the correct solution, which eludes the baffled detective-narrator, is that Guy is waning because of his attachment to Gilbert, while May is the sacred fount from which Guy’s wife is drawing her new life. Mrs Brissenden leads the narrator by the nose throughout the comic novel, in scintillating conversations recalling Mrs Guy’s colloquies with Charlotte in our story. She appears ‘lighted, jewelled’ and ‘fabulous… for the figure that, by candle-light and in cloth-of-silver and diamonds, she is still able to make’ (2006:15, 17). The narrator at one point refers to saving ‘my priceless pearl of an inquiry’ (179), which echoes Charlotte’s loss of the precious pearls in our story. The narrator acts as a detective, as does Charlotte in regard to the pearls and at the end in regard to the dealings between Mrs Guy and Arthur, and as does the ‘suppositious’ governess in ‘The Turn of the Screw.’ Strether, too, in The Ambassadors becomes a kind of detective as he unwittingly discovers the nature of the relationship between Chad and Madame de Vionnet. The huge popularity of detective fiction at this time, the age of Sherlock Holmes (since 1887), clearly influences James’s writing in these years.
‘To-morrow and Thursday are all right,’ she said (324) frankly to Charlotte on the second day, ‘but I’m not half-satisfied [half satisfied] with Friday.’
‘What improvement then do you suggest?’
‘Well, my strong point, you know, is tableaux vivants.’
‘Charming. And what is your favourite character?’
‘Boss!’ said Mrs. Guy with decision; and it was very markedly under that ensign that she had, within a few hours, completely planned her campaign and recruited her troop. Every word she uttered was to the point, but none more so than, after a general survey of their equipment, her final enquiry [inquiry] of Charlotte. She had been looking about, but half-appeased [half appeased], at the muster of decoration and drapery. ‘We shall be dull. We shall want more colour. You’ve nothing else?’
Charlotte had a thought. ‘No – I’ve some things.’
‘Then why don’t you bring them?’
The girl weighed it [hesitated]. ‘Would you come to my room?’
‘No,’ said Mrs. Guy – ‘bring them to-night to mine.’
These are the first two of seven conversations with Mrs Guy at Bleet. Charlotte appears to fear leaving the jewels out of her room, but she ends up bringing them to Mrs Guy, allowing her to keep them, and allowing her to wear the necklace, though with some unspoken reluctance. Mrs Guy progressively established a moral ownership of the pearls, to which her material acquisition of them becomes the necessary complement. Each conversation with Mrs Guy initiates Charlotte into a further depth of the mystery of the pearls and the knowing sexuality of the other woman (who is presumably a widow). The tableaux vivants recall the atmosphere of Goethe’s Elective Affinities (which would influence The Golden Bowl a few years later). It is another aspect of the theatrical fakery that runs through the story.
So Charlotte, at the evening’s end, after candlesticks had flickered through brown old passages bedward, arrived at her friend’s door with the burden of her aunt’s relics. But she promptly expressed a fear. ‘Are they too garish?’
When she had poured them out on the sofa Mrs. Guy was but a minute, before the glass, in clapping on the diadem. ‘Awfully jolly – we can do Ivanhoe!’
‘But they’re only glass and tin.’
‘Larger than life they are, rather! – which is (325) exactly what’s wanted for tableaux [what, for tableaux, is wanted]. Our jewels, for historic scenes, don’t tell – the real thing falls short. Rowena must have rubies as big as eggs. Leave them with me,’ Mrs. Guy continued – ‘they’ll inspire me. Good-night.’
The romance of a big house is a vein into which James’ pen often dips, notably in the two longer works flanking ‘Paste’: ‘The Turn of the Screw’ and The Sacred Fount. Here Charlotte’s visit to Mrs Guy’s room takes on a romantic aura, while the dim light gives the jewels a ghostly significance..The third exchange between the two women is in the key of jolliness, for the grave matter of the genuine pearls has not yet surfaced.
The next morning she was in fact – yet very strangely – inspired. ‘Yes, I’ll do Rowena. But I don’t, my dear, understand.’
‘Understand what?’
Mrs. Guy gave a very lighted stare. ‘How you come to have such things.’
Poor Charlotte smiled. ‘By inheritance.’
‘Family jewels?’
‘They belonged to my aunt, who died some months ago. She was on the stage a few years in early life, and these are a part of her trappings.’
‘She left them to you?’
‘No; my cousin, her stepson, who naturally has no use for them, gave them to me for remembrance of her. She was a dear kind thing, always so nice to me, and I was fond of her.’
Mrs. Guy had listened with frank [visible] interest. ‘But it’s he who must be a dear kind thing!’
Charlotte wondered. ‘You think so?’
‘Is he,’ her friend went on, ‘also “always so nice” to you?’
The girl, at this, face to face there with the brilliant visitor in the deserted breakfast-room, took a deeper sounding. ‘What is it?’
‘Don’t you know?’
Something came over her. ‘The pearls – ?’ But the question fainted on her lips.
The question does not ‘die’ on her lips, as in the common idiom, but ‘faints’ – matching the feeling of faintness suggested by ‘Something came over her.’ Charlotte is prone to such weakness.,, and is overwhelmed again and again. Mrs Guy is here described as the ‘brilliant visitor,’ but it will be seen that the pearls lend her a more dazzling presence.
Gale’s plot summary is inaccurate here: ‘At a party there, she is helping dress guests for a tableau vivant when vulgar Mrs Guy judges the “paste” pearls to be genuine’ (503).
(326) ‘Doesn’t he know?’
Charlotte found herself flushing. ‘They’re not paste?’
‘Haven’t you looked at them?’
She was conscious of two kinds of embarrassment. ‘You have?’
‘Very carefully.’
‘And they’re real?’
Mrs. Guy became slightly mystifying and returned for all answer: ‘Come again, when you’ve done with the children, to my room.’
This fourth conversation is located in the breakfast-room, where the two women have chatted so long that all the other guests have left. It ends in suspense: as so often in James, the blunt question receives no direct answer.
Our young woman found she had done with the children[,] that morning[,] so promptly as to reveal to them a new joy [with a promptitude that was a new joy to them], and when she reappeared before Mrs. Guy this lady had already encircled a plump white throat with the only ornament, surely, in all the late Mrs. Prime’s – the effaced Miss Bradshaw’s – collection, in the least qualified to raise a question. If Charlotte had never yet once, before the glass, tied the string of pearls about her own neck, this was because she had been capable of no such stoop [condescension] to approved ‘imitation’; but she had now only to look at Mrs. Guy to see that, so disposed, the ambiguous objects might have passed for frank originals.
Charlotte is too honest to wear imitation pearls, even if they are approved. She dislikes ambiguity. But the ambiguity of the necklace is also that of a fetish – a vulgar idol, which the pure Charlotte refuses to touch – but perhaps a truly sacred object. ‘The effaced Miss Bradshaw’ is a phrase used three times in the story; she has a posthumous revenge thanks to her pearls.
There follows the fifth conversation with Mrs Guy, the longest exchange in the story
‘What in the world have you done to them?’
‘Only handled them, understood them, admired them and put them on. That’s what pearls want; they want to be worn – it wakes them up. They’re alive, don’t you see? How have these been treated? They must have been buried, ignored, despised. They were half-dead. Don’t you know about pearls?’ Mrs. Guy threw off as she fondly fingered the necklace.
(327) ‘How should I? Do you?’
‘Everything. These were simply asleep, and from the moment I really touched them – well,’ said their wearer lovingly, ‘it only took one’s eye!’
‘Knowing’ here clearly carries the connotations of sexual knowingness. Arthur’s mistaken claim to be one who knows corresponds to his sexual obtuseness. ‘I really touched them’ – overcoming the scruples and fear with which Arthur and Charlotte hold them at a distance. Charlotte lacks an ‘eye’ for the pearls, though she has ‘bent her eyes’ on them earlier, and on may say that she lacks a heart for them. Mrs Guy speaks of them ‘lovingly,’ and later calls them ‘darlings.’
Knowing about pearls is not, of course, an esoteric matter; even the stolid Arthur has some of that knowledge, and women often talk about how their pearls need to be worn to come alive; as organic matter they flourish on the warmth of human skin. James, an expert on ‘the art of dress’ (Hughes 2001), would be conversant with such lore. But as the story proceeds the discourse on pearls becomes more intensely erotic and sacral, and knowing about pearls takes on the status of a mystic initiation.
‘It took more than mine – though I did just wonder; and than Arthur’s,’ Charlotte brooded. She found herself almost panting. ‘Then their value – ?’
‘Oh their value’s excellent.’
The girl, for a deep contemplative moment [a deep moment], took another plunge into the wonder, the beauty and the mystery [and mystery]. ‘Are you sure?’
The sacral aura surrounding the pearls is deepened, with the vocabulary of contemplation, wonder, mystery.
Her companion wheeled round for impatience. ‘Sure? For what kind of an idiot, my dear, do you take me?’
Charlotte’s laboured literalness, her stumbling over epistemology instead of following intuition, makes her an ‘idiot,’ who annoys Mrs Guy by her obtuseness. The movements of the characters are marked dramatically: Arthur’s characteristic movement is to turn away and sometimes to swoop back. Mrs Guy shows a comparable liveliness of movement, swooping down eagerly on Charlotte on three occasions when they meet. Here she ‘wheels’ about like some predatory bird.
It was beyond Charlotte Prime to say. ‘For the same kind as Arthur – and as myself,’ she could only suggest. ‘But my cousin didn’t know. He thinks they’re worthless.’
‘Because of the rest of the lot? Then your cousin’s an ass. But what – if, as I understood you, he gave them to you – has he to do with it?’
‘Why[,] if he gave them to me as worthless and they turn out precious – !’
‘You must give them back? I don’t see that – if he was such a noodle [fool]. He took the risk.’
Arthur is now treated as an ‘ass’ and a ‘noodle’ by the confident, rude, and impatient Mrs Guy. Her rather unscrupulous moral reasoning proclaims the privileges of those who know over idiots – with the undertone of those who know sexually, who are competent in the game of seduction. As to Charlotte’s moral scruples, which play a great role in the rest of the story, we are invited not to take them at face value. What Lacan says of the moral scruples preventing Hamlet from avenging his father applies here: ‘A scruple of conscience can only be considered as a symptomatic elaboration’ (2013:284); ‘it is the conscious representation of something that is articulated in the unconscious’ (291). Hamletian inhibition prevails in all of James’s sensitive characters, given to endless deconstructive deferrals and second thoughts and quite unable to enfoncer le clou. The Master’s style perfectly espouses this; it was his very element, as shown in his compulsively periphrastic communication in ordinary life (see Nowell-Smith, 10-21), and it explains why he could dictate such complex prose without difficulty.
Moralistic critics cannot imagine that the story could win some admiration for the intrepid Mrs Guy (whose name, after all, is a tribute to the admired Maupassant, even if James was troubled by his vulgarity and amoralism). An early reviewer saw the story as a study in ‘the hidden depths of human meanness’ (cited, Taylor, 288). Tintner refers to the stepmother as ‘the guilty woman.’ Many critics make much of Charlotte’s ethical uprightness, commending her return of the necklace as ‘evidence of moral perspicacity, not excessive scrupulousness’ (Kirkham, 469). But James is not primarily an ethical writer, at least in this story; rather he is concerned with ‘something much more radical and more concrete’ (304) that brings him close to psychoanalysis. True, What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age give a moral critique of a vulgar and promiscuous London society. But this does not carry over into ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ ‘Paste,’ The Sacred Fount (which is not much concerned with showing the sexual affairs to be ‘squalid,’ pace Isle, 259), and especially The Ambassadors, where the moral irony is turned on puritanism and its obtuseness. In a very broad sense, to be sure, James’s concerns culminate in an ethical vision, or at least a brooding on the problem of finding ethical direction in the modern world where traditional references are devalued (see Pippin).
Charlotte’s scruple is of a piece with the inhibited nature of her love for her cousin. The cousin acts very much as an elder brother, and perhaps an incest taboo hovers over their relationship. Charlotte herself seems to have no immediate family other than the cousin, and she looks to him with the dependency of an orphaned soul rather than the passion of a lover. Hamlet’s inhibition is described by Freud as follows: ‘He cannot take revenge on a man who has removed his father and taken the latter’s place beside his mother, a man who has realized the desires of his childhood’ (cited, Lacan 2013:283). Charlotte’s moral scruples, which exasperate Mrs Guy, express an unconscious barrier on her side in her relation to Arthur, which is matched on his by a rude gruffness, as if he, too, unconsciously knows that a barrier must be set up.
Charlotte fed, in fancy, on the pearls, which[,] decidedly[,] were exquisite, but which at the present moment somehow presented themselves much more as Mrs. Guy’s than either as Arthur’s or as her own. ‘Yes – he did take it; even after I had distinctly hinted to him that they looked to me different from the other pieces.’
The anorexic Charlotte feeds on the pearls, but only in fancy. She perhaps feels jealousy of Mrs Guy who has made the pearls so much her own. Tintner supposes that James is saying ‘that the story belongs to Maupassant more than to himself, a bit of ingenious internalized wit’ (1987:231).
(328) ‘Well then!’ said Mrs. Guy with something more than triumph – with a positive odd relief.
But it had the effect of making our young woman think with more intensity. ‘Ah you see he thought they couldn’t be different, because – so peculiarly – they shouldn’t be.’
Mrs Guy’s relief only increases Charlotte’s scrupulous brooding. The play of verbal moods again shows how sexual reality is repressed as impossible, because morally unacceptable. Arthur’s earlier ‘They won’t say it! They shan’t!’ is echoed in Charlotte’s ‘They couldn’t… because they shouldn’t.’
‘Shouldn’t? I don’t understand.’
‘Why[,] how would she have got them?’ – so Charlotte candidly put it.
‘She? Who?’ There was a capacity in Mrs. Guy’s tone for a sinking of persons – !
‘Why[,] the person I told you of: his stepmother, my uncle’s wife – among whose poor old things, extraordinarily thrust away and out of sight, he happened to find them.’
Charlotte must feel as if she herself is ‘sinking,’ faced with Mrs Guy’s direct, invasive ‘tone,’ which she herself could never match. The narrator of The Sacred Fount is similarly defeated by Mrs Guy Brissenden’s tone, in the last sentence of the novel: ‘It wasn’t really that I hadn’t three times her method. What I so fatally lacked was her tone’ (James 2006:193). Isle thinks that this is ‘the tone of the society… a tone of harsh, insolent reality’ (261), and this would fit Mrs Guy too; but in both cases the tone is rather that of a woman at home with the sexual world. The interlocutors of the triumphant women in both cases are not morally flabbergasted but simply made to feel their sexual and affective inadequacy and their lack of understanding.
Charlotte could have fed on the pearls, but she is starved by her scruples, corresponding to her undernourished sexually. The hidden pearls represented the repressed sexuality of Arthur’s mother. One wonders how she mothered him. He seems to have internalized his father’s priggishness and to continue the father’s repression of the stepmother’s sexuality.
Mrs. Guy came a step nearer to the effaced Miss Bradshaw. ‘Do you mean she may have stolen them?’
‘No. But she had been an actress.’
‘Oh[,] well then,’ cried Mrs. Guy, ‘wouldn’t that be just how?’
‘Yes, except that she wasn’t at all a brilliant one, nor in receipt of large pay.’ The girl even threw off a nervous joke. ‘I’m afraid she couldn’t have been our Rowena.’
Mrs. Guy took it up. ‘Was she very ugly?’
‘No. She may very well, when young, have looked rather nice.’
‘Well[,] then!’ was Mrs. Guy’s sharp comment and fresh triumph.
‘You mean it was a present? That’s just what he so dislikes the idea of her having received – a (329) present from an admirer capable of going such lengths.’
‘Because she wouldn’t have taken it for nothing? Speriamo – that she wasn’t a brute. The “length” her admirer went was the length of a whole row. Let us hope she was just a little kind!’
Worldly permissiveness is Mrs Guy’s element – she has some of the cynicism that shocked James in Maupassant himself. The use of words in European languages – ‘Speriamo’ – is a useful cipher of sophistication. It is impossible to imagine Charlotte such an idiomatic expression in French or Italian. Note that Mrs Guy immediately leaps to the conclusions that Arthur feared the jewels might inspire.
‘Well,’ Charlotte went on, ‘that she was “kind” might seem to be shown by the fact that neither her husband, nor his son, nor I, his niece, knew or dreamed of her possessing anything so precious; by her having kept the gift all the rest of her life beyond discovery – out of sight and protected from suspicion.’
‘As if, you mean’ – Mrs. Guy was quick – ‘she had been wedded to it and yet was ashamed of it? Fancy,’ she laughed while she manipulated the rare beads, ‘being ashamed of these!’
The rhythmic break in this last sentence allows the pearls to put in another appearance, now as the object of Mrs Guy’s manipulations.
‘But you see she had married a clergyman.’
‘Yes, she must have been “rum.” But at any rate he had married her. What did he suppose?’
‘Why[,] that she had never been of the sort by whom such offerings are encouraged.’
‘Ah my dear, the sort by whom they’re [they are] not – !’ But Mrs. Guy caught herself up. ‘And her stepson thought the same?’
‘Overwhelmingly.’
Mrs Guy catches herself up not so much to conceal her worldly cynicism but because she realizes that Charlotte is precisely the sort not to encourage such amorous attentions, and because she does not wish to offend Charlotte, whom she actually likes.
‘Was he[,] then, if only her stepson – ’
‘So fond of her as that comes to? Yes; he had never known, consciously, his real mother, and, without children of her own, she was very patient and nice with him. And I liked her so,’ the girl pursued, ‘that at the end of ten years, in so strange a manner, to “give her away” – ’
(330) ‘Is impossible to you? Then don’t!’ said Mrs. Guy with decision.
The stepmother’s patience and niceness with Arthur suggests that he was a difficult, perhaps nasty charge.
‘Ah[,] but if they’re real I can’t keep them!’ Charlotte, with her eyes on them, moaned in her impatience. ‘It’s too difficult.’
‘Where’s the difficulty, if he has such sentiments that he’d rather sacrifice the necklace than admit it, with the presumption it carries with it, to be genuine? You’ve only to be silent.’
‘And keep it? How can I ever wear it?’
‘You’d have to hide it, like your aunt?’ Mrs. Guy was amused. ‘You can easily sell it.’
The italicized ‘I’ indicates not only a practical difficulty but a sense that the necklace is not made for her. Mrs Guy’s amusement is not to Charlotte’s taste; she conspicuously lacks a sense of humour. Is Mrs Guy already thinking of buying the necklace from Charlotte?
Her companion walked round her for a look at the affair from behind. The clasp was certainly, doubtless intentionally, misleading, but everything else was indeed lovely. ‘Well, I must think. Why didn’t she sell them?’ Charlotte broke out in her trouble.
Mrs. Guy had an instant answer. ‘Doesn’t that prove what they secretly recalled to her? You’ve only to be silent!’ she ardently repeated.
‘I must think – I must think!’
Mrs. Guy stood with her hands attached but motionless. ‘Then you want them back?’
As if with the dread of touching them Charlotte retreated to the door.
Again the dread the pearls inspire is dramatized. Charlotte’s retreat even suggests she is walking backward, as if withdrawing from a sacred presence.
‘I’ll tell you to-night.’
‘But may I wear them?’
‘Meanwhile?’
‘This evening – at dinner.’
It was the sharp[,] selfish pressure of this that really, on the spot, determined the girl; but for the moment, before closing the door on the question, she only said: ‘As you like!’
Charlotte is indecisive, and is easily steamrolled by Mrs Guy, who knows what she wants. But in what way does Mrs Guy’ request ‘determine’ her? Does ‘closing the door on the question’ refer to a resolve she has made, or to her literally closing the door as she leaves the room? Her second visit to Mrs Guy’s room has been rich in revelations, but also is the promise of a great revelation that evening.
(331) They were busy much of the day with preparation and rehearsal, and at dinner[,] that evening[,] the concourse of guests was such that a place among them for Miss Prime failed to find itself marked.
Charlotte, under her formal name as governess, is also relegated to a very secondary place in the grammatical structure of this sentence. Unlike Mrs Guy, who always attracts to much attention, Charlotte’s fate is to be overlooked, a fate she suffers passively. The word ‘triumph’ occurs thrice in connection with Mrs Guy; inevitably, the word ‘failure’ hovers over Charlotte.
At the time the company rose she was therefore alone in the school-room [schoolroom] where, towards eleven o’clock, she received a visit from Mrs. Guy. This lady’s white shoulders heaved, under the pearls, with an emotion that the very red lips which formed, as if for the full effect, the happiest opposition of colour, were not slow to translate. ‘My dear, you should have seen the sensation – they’ve had a success!’
We know of the success only from Mrs Guy’s report in this sixth conversation. The story artfully confines itself to tête-à-têtes, forgoing the description of public events such as the funeral, the dinners, and the festivities. The essential action concerns only the three protagonists and the pearls. Mrs Guy now appears as something of a beauty, with the humourous account, in an elegantly constructed sentence, of the colour-contrast between her heaving naked shoulders and her painted lips.
Charlotte, dumb a moment, took it all in. ‘It is as if they knew it – they’re more and more alive. But so much the worse for both of us! I can’t,’ she brought out with an effort, ‘be silent.’
Characteristically of the tight dramatic linkage of the dialogue, her words take up Mrs Guy’s repeated ‘You’ve only to be silent.’ ‘It is as if they knew it’ refers back to Mrs Guy’s earlier animistic language: ‘they want to be worn – it wakes them up. They’re alive.’ The pearls are growing in presence in a quite magical way. Charlotte is coming to ‘know about pearls’ and to see the necklace now no longer as just a relic, mute testimony to the past, but as alive and even aware. She brings out ‘with an effort’ the words that express the resolve to which Mrs Guy’s pushy demand ‘determined’ her. Is she motivated in part by resentment of Mrs Guy’s success?
‘You mean to return them?’
‘If I don’t I’m a thief.’
Mrs. Guy gave her a long[,] hard look: what was decidedly not of the baby in Mrs. Guy’s face was a certain air of established habit in the eyes.
Charlotte’s sharply moralistic utterance is a criticism of her friend and a mark of friction between them, and Mrs Guy seems to be asking why Charlotte is being so awkward. The habit her eyes reveal must be one of selfish calculation. Having an eye is not only a mark of sensitivity to beauty, but also of a keen sense of where one’s advantage lies. Mrs Guy triumphs through both uses of her eyes.
Then, with a sharp little jerk of her head and a backward reach of her bare beautiful arms, she undid the clasp and, taking off the necklace, laid it on the table. ‘If you do[,] you’re a goose.’
‘Well, of the two – !’ said our young lady, gathering it up with a sigh. And as if to get it, for the pang it gave, out of sight as soon as possible, she shut it up, clicking the lock, in the drawer of her own little table; after which, when she turned again, her companion looked naked and plain without it [her companion, without it, looked naked and plain].
This is the only place in the story where Charlotte is visualized turning away and back; her action usually consists more in thought than in movement. Mrs Guy wants the pearls because she wants the beauty and attractiveness they give her. ‘Brilliant’ though she is, and ‘beautiful’ as her arms may be, without the pearls she looks naked and plain; it is not impossible that Charlotte notes this with satisfaction. Charlotte, too, could be transformed into a beautiful woman if she used properly the pearls and all that they symbolize. But she is too ‘plain’ to think of ornament, too straightforward to think of seduction. Charlotte chooses not to be a ‘thief,’ and her moral discrimination is genuine, there is no ‘paste’ in it. Nonetheless she must pay a price, which is to remain a real ‘goose.’ Her renunciation is metonymically a renunciation of sexuality, or a repression, vividly enacted in ‘she shut it up, clicking the lock, in the drawer of her own little table.’ Her aunt, too, had renounced and repressed her sexuality, by hiding the pearls in a box, though a more capacious one than Charlotte’s little drawer. ‘Clicking the lock’ adds an extra touch of decisiveness, and the sound must have been disheartening to Mrs Guy, who becomes angry. There may be a slight contradiction in the text her: ‘her own little table’ suggests that we are in Charlotte’s room, whereas the scene is set in the schoolroom, where she would surely not leave the pearls. Yet one recalls that the aunt also hid the tin box containing the jewellery in the vicarage schoolroom.
‘But what will you say?’ it then occurred to her to demand.
(332) ‘Downstairs – to explain?’ Mrs. Guy was[,] after all[,] trying at least to keep her temper. ‘Oh[,] I’ll put on something else and say the clasp’s broken [that clasp is broken]. And you won’t of course name me to him,’ she added.
‘As having undeceived me? No – I’ll say that, looking at the thing more carefully, it’s my own private idea.’
The sudden reference to Arthur indicated that Mrs Guy is busily scheming how she can get her hands on the pearls. She is perhaps calculating in advance that Arthur will not associate her seductive overtures to him with interest in the pearls, if he has no reason to suppose she knows their value.
‘And does he know how little you really know?’
‘As an expert – surely. And he has always much [has much, always,] the conceit of his own opinion.’
‘Then he won’t believe you – as he so hates to. He’ll stick to his judgement and maintain his gift, and we shall have the darlings back!’ With which reviving assurance Mrs. Guy kissed her young friend for good-night [kissed for good-night].
Mrs Guy’s optimism will, however, be checked by long delays, for which Charlotte is responsible.
She was not, however, to be gratified or justified by any prompt event, for, whether or no paste entered into the composition of the ornament in question, Charlotte shrank from the temerity of dispatching [despatching] it to town by post. Mrs. Guy was thus disappointed of the hope of seeing the business settled – ‘by return,’ she had seemed to expect – before the end of the revels. The revels, moreover, rising to a frantic pitch, pressed for all her attention, and it was at last only in the general confusion of leave-taking that she made, parenthetically, a dash at the person in the whole company with whom her contact had been most interesting [her young friend].
We shift to Mrs Guy’s point of view in these lines; the NYE text avoids repeating ‘her young friend’ by referring to ‘the person in the whole company with whom her contact had been most interesting.’ This adds a substantial reference to Mrs Guy’s feeling for Charlotte. The passage is the second point in the story at which Charlotte’s point of view is replaced by Mrs Guy’s, and the alteration increases this effect, instead of diminishing it in favour of ‘unity of point of view’ – supposing this to be an aesthetic principle implicitly adopted by the story, comparable to the Neo-Aristotelian ‘Three Unities’ (which James actually observes in The Sacred Fount, structured as a five-act drama; see Isle, 255).
‘Come, what will you take for them?’
‘The pearls? Ah, you’ll have to treat with my cousin.’
(333) Mrs. Guy, with quick intensity, lent herself. ‘Where then does he live?’
‘In chambers in the Temple. You can find him.’
‘But what’s the use, if you do neither one thing nor the other?’
‘Oh[,] I shall do the “other,”’ Charlotte said: ‘I’m only waiting till I go up. You want them so awfully?’ She curiously, solemnly again, sounded her.
‘I’m dying for them. There’s a special charm in them – I don’t know what it is: they tell so their history.’
‘But what do you know of that?’
‘Just what they themselves say. It’s all in them – and it comes out. They breathe a tenderness – they have the white glow of it. My dear,’ hissed Mrs. Guy in supreme confidence and as she buttoned her glove – ‘they’re things of love!’
‘Oh!’ our young person [woman] vaguely exclaimed.
‘They’re things of passion!’
‘Mercy!’ she gasped, turning short off.
Greed for the pearls is Mrs Guy’s dominant passion, which had made her positively angry at the barrier created by Charlotte’s scruples, and which has her now act decisively, directly offering money, and then quickly securing Arthur’s address. Though she is the most business-like and materialistic of the protagonists, without the scruples and postures of the cousins, Mrs Guy recognizes the superior values of love and passion and is willing to pay hard cash for them. Charlotte still has the pearls in her possession and since she is ‘penniless’ there is a rather heroic uprightness in her resolve to restore them to Arthur. It will be several months until she gets to London, months of agonized frustration, no doubt, for Mrs Guy.
The climax of Mrs Guy’s revelations, in this seventh conversation, makes the pearls consubstantial with passion. Charlotte is struck dumb as before a mystical hierophany. Her reaction of dismay, ‘Oh!’ and ‘Mercy!,’ is very funny, but the mild expletive ‘Mercy!’ could also carry a quasi-religious connotation of abasement before an overwhelming revelation. The word ‘things’ takes up the first references to the jewellery: ‘I’ve found a lot more things,’ ‘things of the theatre… things of the vicarage,’ but ‘things’ now resonates, in the last two of its eleven occurrences in reference to the jewels, with climactic sacral emphasis.
But these words remained, though indeed their help was scarce needed, Charlotte being in private face to face with a new light, as she by this time felt she must call it, on the dear dead[,] kind[,] colourless lady whose career had turned so sharp a corner in the middle. The pearls had quite taken their place as a revelation.
The pearls reveal how sharp the corner was that separated the actress from the vicar’s wife, and how painful the unspoken renunciation it entailed. But the reconstruction of the aunt’s past is not the only content of the light of revelation emanating from the pearls.
She might have received them for nothing – admit that; but she couldn’t have kept them so long and so unprofitably hidden, couldn’t have enjoyed them only in secret, for nothing; and she had mixed them[,] in her reliquary[,] with false things[,] in order to put curiosity and detection off the scent. Over this strange (334) fact poor Charlotte interminably mused: it became more touching, more attaching for her than she could now confide to any ear. How bad[,] or how happy – in the sophisticated sense of Mrs. Guy and the young man at the Temple – the effaced Miss Bradshaw must have been to have had to be so mute!
It is now supposed that Mrs Prime did not merely hide the pearls, but took them out of the hiding-place in order to enjoy them secretly. This confirms Mrs Guy’s image of her as ‘wedded’ to them, and it also fills out the image of a woman not fulfilled by her role of wife and mother in a vicarage and keeping up a quasi-adulterous hankering for a past love. The ‘false things’ surrounding the necklace are not real things at all in the charged sacral sense the word ‘things’ acquires in the story (conveyed here by the word ‘reliquary’).
Charlotte’s morality now wavers, as ‘bad’ and ‘happy’ blur; perhaps it is Mrs Guy who gives the sophisticated sense of ‘happy’ and Arthur who gives the sophisticated sense of ‘bad.’ Now we have the closest vision of the dead woman and her pearls. She enjoyed them in secret as the treasure of a past love (much as the wife’s fondling of her pearls in ‘Les Bijoux’ corresponds to her feeling for her lover). Her long silence testified to the depth of that remembered romance. Charlotte herself shares the dead woman’s muteness, for she cannot confide to any ear how the pearls touch her. She, like her aunt, succumbs to their seduction in secret.
The little governess at Bleet put on the necklace now in secret sessions; she wore it sometimes under her dress; she came to feel[,] verily[,] a haunting passion for it. Yet in her penniless state she would have parted with it for money; she gave herself also to dreams of what in this direction it would do for her.
As if corrupted by Mrs Guy’s passion, by her aunt’s example, or by the pearls themselves, she contemplates them and carries them in secret (she is not able to wear them openly). But distracted by a monetary line of thought, she misses what the pearls can ‘do for her,’ namely change her into a seductive woman. She does not follow the ‘haunting passion’ they inspire in her, but falls back on flat, dull, unimaginative thinking – for which she will be punished. These pearls demand single-minded devotion.
The sophistry of her so often saying to herself that Arthur had after all definitely pronounced her welcome to any gain from his gift that might accrue – this trick remained innocent, as she perfectly knew it for what it was. Then there was always the possibility of his – as she could only picture it – rising to the occasion. Mightn’t he have a grand magnanimous moment? – mightn’t he just say[:] ‘Oh[,] I couldn’t of course [of course I couldn’t] have afforded to let you have it if I had known; but since you have got it, and have made out the truth by your own wit, I really can’t screw myself down to the shabbiness of taking it back’?
Her hope that Arthur will magnanimously let her keep it we can guess to be vain, from his earlier stinginess. He will both keep the necklace and keep the moral satisfaction of regarding it as mere paste. Pathetically, she dreams of his undeserved praise; but even if he were to ascribe the discovery to her own wit, he would not thank her for the implied imputation on his mother’s honour.
III. Charlotte Returns the Pearls to Arthur
She had, as it proved, to wait a long time – to wait till, at the end of several months, the great house of Bleet had, with due deliberation, for the season, transferred itself to town; after which, however, she fairly snatched at her first freedom to knock, dressed in her best and armed with her disclosure, at the door of her doubting kinsman. It was still with doubt and not quite with the face she had hoped that (335) he listened to her story. He had turned pale, she thought, as she produced the necklace, and he appeared[,] above all[,] disagreeably affected. Well, perhaps there was reason, she more than ever remembered; but what on earth was one, in close touch with the fact, to do? She had laid the pearls on his table, where, without his having at first put so much as a finger to them, they met his hard[,] cold stare.
The change of scene ushers in the third part of the story, and Charlotte’s second conversation with Arthur. Charlotte’s eagerness to meet Arthur – ‘she fairly snatched at her first freedom to knock’ – is not due only to the need to restore the pearls; ‘dressed in her best and armed with her disclosure,’ she is out to seduce her cousin. But her method is hopelessly awkward; instead of wearing the pearls with her dress she ‘produces’ them and places them on the table. His face disappoints her – he is doubtful and ‘disagreeably affected’ – and the exposure of the pearls draws only ‘his hard cold stare.’ It is as if Charlotte has exposed herself and met only misogynous contempt. Even the phrase ‘without his having at first put so much as a finger to them’ indicates not only a sense that the pearls are polluting, but also how far he is from touching Charlotte, his painful distance from her.
‘I don’t believe in them,’ he simply said at last.
‘That’s exactly then,’ she returned with some spirit, ‘what I wanted to hear!’
She fancied that at this his colour changed; it was indeed vivid to her afterwards – for she was to have a long recall of the scene – that she had made him quite angrily flush. ‘It’s a beastly unpleasant imputation, you know!’ – and he walked away from her as he had always walked at the vicarage.
Charlotte may regret that she spoke so warmly in agreement with Arthur’s declaration of disbelief in the pearls (with the overtone also of religious belief and disbelief). Though he again speaks in the register of respectability and bullying denial, using language that sounds like that of a schoolboy: ‘It’s a beastly unpleasant imputation,’ she may have aroused his suspicion by her eagerness to have the pearls. Also his anger here may come from her reference to the suspicion the pearls arouse and perhaps also from his sense that she does not really reject that suspicion.
‘It’s none of my making, I’m sure,’ said Charlotte Prime. ‘If you’re afraid to believe they’re real –’
‘Well?’ – and he turned, across the room, sharp round at her.
‘Why[,] it’s not my fault.’
Charlotte has now landed in the most untoward position of arguing with Arthur about his stepmother’s virtue, for in rejecting the blame for what the pearls say she must transfer it to the dead woman. The exclamations ‘why’ and ‘well,’ sprinkled throughout the story, take on an aggressive overtone here.
He said nothing more, for a moment, on this; he only came back to the table. ‘They’re what I originally said they were. They’re rotten paste.’
‘Arthur still pretends that they are paste’ (Gale, 503). This suggests that he was already pretending in the first scene; but in that case he would not have given them to Charlotte.
‘Then I may keep them?’
‘No. I want a better opinion.’
‘Than your own?’
‘Than your own.’ He dropped on the pearls another queer stare; [,] then, after a moment, bringing himself to touch them, did exactly what she had herself done in the presence of Mrs. Guy at Bleet – (336) gathered them together, marched off with them to a drawer, put them in and clicked the key.
Arthur brings himself to touch the polluting, dangerous objects (as he might bring himself to touch a woman). Just as she did at Bleet, he impounds the pearls. James underlines the parallel. The pearls induce repetitive patterns of behaviour. In this case, the behaviour of both cousins is repressive, not only of the sexually ambiguous pearls but of the pleasure that someone else might have in them. Arthur treats Charlotte as she has treated Mrs Guy.
‘You say I’m afraid,’ he went on as he again met her; ‘but I shan’t be afraid to take them to Bond Street.’
‘And if the people say they’re real – ?’
He had a pause and then his strangest manner. [He hesitated – then had his strangest manner.] ‘They won’t say it! They shan’t!’
His dogmatic certitude – ‘They won’t!’ – is doubled by an imperative – ‘They shan’t!’ – which undermines it.
There was something in the way he brought it out that deprived poor Charlotte, as she was perfectly aware, of any manner at all. ‘Oh!’ she simply sounded, as she had sounded for her last word to Mrs. Guy; and within a minute, without more conversation, she had taken her departure.
Again the parallel is underlined between how Charlotte is left gasping here and with Mrs Guy at Bleet. In both cases she faces strong-willed people whose manner is decisive even when forced or deceptive. In her last exchange with Mrs Guy it was the ‘passion’ attributed to the jewels that floored her, now it is the denial and repression of that passion by Arthur.
IV. Charlotte and Mrs Guy at Eaton Square.
A fortnight later she received a communication from him, and toward [towards] the end of the season one of the entertainments in Eaton Square was graced by the presence of Mrs. Guy. Charlotte was not at dinner, but she came down afterwards, and this guest, on seeing her, abandoned a very beautiful young man on purpose to cross and speak to her. The guest displayed [had on] a lovely necklace and had apparently not lost her habit of overflowing with the pride of such ornaments.
Once again Charlotte is forgotten and misses the dinner, in line with her anorexic role, Just as she did at their last meeting at Bleet, she The reference to the ‘very beautiful young man’ suggests that the pearls have given Mrs Guy a sexual success unknown to her in her years as an entertainer. Like Mrs Guy Brissenden, who ‘looks about twenty’ and ‘has grown so very much less plain’ (2006: 15, 17), Mrs Guy has recovered youth, and may be further rejuvenated by drinking from the ‘sacred fount’ represented by the beautiful young man.
‘Do you see?’ She was in high joy.
They were indeed splendid pearls – so far as poor Charlotte could feel that she knew, after what had come and gone, about such mysteries. The poor girl [Charlotte] had a sickly smile. ‘They’re almost as fine as Arthur’s.’
‘Almost? Where, my dear, are your eyes? They are “Arthur’s”!’ After which, to meet the flood of crimson that accompanied her young friend’s start: (337) ‘I tracked them – after your folly, and, by miraculous luck, recognised them in the Bond Street window to which he had disposed of them.’
‘Disposed of them?’ Charlotte [the girl] gasped. ‘He wrote me that I had insulted his mother and that the people had shown him he was right – had pronounced them utter paste.’
Mrs. Guy gave a stare. ‘Ah[,] I told you he wouldn’t bear it! No. But I had, I assure you,’ she wound up, ‘to drive my bargain!’
Charlotte scarce heard or saw; she was full of her private wrong. ‘He wrote me,’ she panted, ‘that he had smashed them.’
‘The contrast between the two women here corresponds to that between the flourishing Madame Forestier and the depleted Mathilde in the final scene of Maupassant’s ‘La Parure.’
‘They are “Arthur’s”!’ The inverted commas show that they are no longer his, but hers. Since pearls are by essence costly, the question arises: What did she pay for them? Arthur’s ‘communication’ is first mentioned casually. Its wounding content is revealed in Charlotte’s outburst.
Mrs Guy challenges Charlotte to open her eyes: ‘Do you see?’ ‘Where, my dear, are your eyes?’ Charlotte is punished throughout the story for not having ‘eyes.’ Her imperceptiveness is double: failure to recognize the potent charm of the pearls, and naïve scrupulousness about returning them to their rightful owner. A friend of mind picked up a Matisse lithograph in a flea-market for 300 Euro; its value was later assessed at 80,000 Euro – a reward for having eyes. Indeed, for Henry James the supreme and all-comprehending virtue is to have eyes – for beauty, for moral distinctions and refinements, for psychological profundities.
Mrs. Guy could only wonder and pity. ‘He’s really morbid!’ But it wasn’t quite clear which of the pair she pitied; though the young person employed in Eaton Square [Charlotte] felt really morbid too after they had separated and she found herself full of thought. She even went the length of asking herself what sort of a bargain Mrs. Guy had driven and whether the marvel of the recognition in Bond Street had been a veracious account of the matter. Hadn’t she perhaps in truth dealt with Arthur directly? It came back to Charlotte almost luridly that she had had his address.
Charlotte almost faints again, as lurid suspicions crowd in on her. Mrs Guy displays ‘wonder and pity’ – but for Charlotte, not Arthur; for on the supposition that Arthur gave her the pearls himself she is well aware of Arthur’s true sentiments. Charlotte is again overwhelmed by revelations of sexual import. When she ‘goes the length’ of imagining a liaison between Mrs Guy and Arthur, this echoes the liaison between her aunt and the ‘admirer capable of going such lengths’ as discussed with Mrs Guy. Outwitted by two liars, the too honest Charlotte meets final defeat, registered in a painful introspection in which she wonders ‘what sort of a bargain Mrs. Guy had driven.’ This echoes Mrs Guy’s words, which now take on a new meaning: ‘I had, I assure you… to drive my bargain!’ We are free to suppose that Mrs Guy struck a sexual bargain with the respectable Arthur, another instance of the pearls’ magically corrupting influence. The gap between respectable appearance and sexual reality in the aunt, in Arthur, and in Mrs Guy, leaves the naïve Charlotte out-manoeuvred in every direction. One could suppose other situations, which the story does not exclude, for instance that Mrs Guy simply asked Arthur for the pearls as worthless trash and that he handed them over to her without making a fuss; but the hints in the tale do not point in that direction.
If the pearls embody a set of contrasts between appearance and reality, this ladders out to all the situations in the story, bringing sorrow to Charlotte, triumph to Mrs Guy, and also perhaps to the real Arthur concealed by his wooden façade—or is he merely a pawn in Mrs Guy’s predatory lust for the pearls? The collusion between Charlotte’s two interlocutors closes a loop, leaving Charlotte on the outside. Her position parallels that of the sensitive but baffled narrator of The Sacred Fount, or of Strether in regard to the Chad and Madame de Vionnet in The Ambassadors, or of Maggie Verver in the first half of The Golden Bowl and Charlotte Stant in the second. Her final insight can be linked to the disillusioning epiphanies that overwhelm Isabel Archer, Strether, Milly Theale, Maggie, all of which concern a concealed sexual connection. Thus in the facets of this bitter-sweet little comedy we catch reflections of the great themes that the major works so exhaustively explore. Gale’s summary takes no notice of the underlying theme of seduction or the final resonant ambiguities: ‘The woman rather sickens Charlotte by informing her that she bought the pearls from a dealer to whom Arthur sold them’ (504).
The periphrases designating Charlotte always portray her as confined by her sexless role: ‘the young person employed in Eaton Square’ (added in NYE). The sexual suspicion alighting on the present wearer of the pearls rather shockingly concerns the flinty Arthur also. ‘Mrs Guy could only wonder and pity’ is a description of her face and tone from Charlotte’s point of view as she utters the words, ‘He’s really morbid.’ Mrs Guy is supposed never to have met Arthur, but does she here speak of him as if she has? Why did Mrs Guy seduce Arthur? Not, probably, because of his own charms, but in order to have the precious pearls. Her passion is for them, and her love for them is the most intense relationship in the story.
The story ends with a rueful sense of loss, as does ‘The Aspern Papers.’ The destruction of the precious papers by the castratory act of Miss Tita leaves the narrator feeling deprived – of what? Not of the papers, nor of Miss Tita. Fundamentally, the loss is sexual; in Lacanian terms the papers were his ‘object a,’ the agalma that the beloved is imagined to conceal, and its disappearance leaves him unmanned, or forced to face the vacuity of his fetishistic desire. Something similar might be said of the treasures destroyed at the end of The Spoils of Poynton. What Mrs Guy has stolen from Charlotte is neither the pearls nor her cousin, but her sexuality; she has placed Charlotte entirely in the position of a sexual loser. Her double expertise in seducing the man and securing the pearls shows up Charlotte’s incompetence on both fronts.
Looking back on the tale we note its economy, its exclusive focus on the three protagonists, and also a schematic character to the little drama. The characters remain two-dimensional, each with his or her fixed role in the triangular equation. They are typical of James’s shorter tales in this. Contrast the similar triangle between Milly, Densher, and Kate in The Wings of the Dove. There the layers upon layers of complex and conflicted motivation made the theme inexhaustible; the vast novel was too short to exhaust the subject; and the three characters exert a fascination that makes their company welcome for the entire length of the work, whereas no one would wish to read a whole novel about Charlotte, Arthur, and Mrs Guy. Again, in The Golden Bowl, the triad of Maggie Verver, Prince Amerigo, and Charlotte Stant, this time exhaustively explored – too exhaustively, James himself felt – takes on a vast range of iridescent hues as it is turned about in the reflecting consciousness of the three and of the external observers, the Assinghams. The short story allowed James to portray narrow obessions, with characters defined by their ruling obsession. In ‘Paste’ we have three obsessions, Arthur’s chivalrous concern for his mother’s honour, Charlotte’s doglike devotion to Arthur, and Mrs Guy’s lust for the pearls; similarly in ‘The Aspern Papers’ we have Julia’s guardianship of Aspern’s memory, Tita’s doglike devotion to Julia and then to the narrator, and the narrator’s lust for the papers. In the major novels, no leading character is defined by an obsession, all are thoroughly self-questioning, and the range of their responses to one another is very wide. The novels can never become focussed parables like the short stories, with a clear psychological point. In the novels the initial donnée is a theme that is developed in many unpredictable directions, whereas in the stories the donnée is the sum and substance of the story, worked out quickly with perfect logic. None of the stories could develop to novel length; The Sacred Fount is only an apparent exception; the narrowness of the protagonist’s obsession makes it more a short story than a novel, and it was originally conceived as a short story. Conversely, none of the novels could be reduced to short story length; confined to short story length the plots of The Wings of the Dove or The Golden Bowl would be meaningless.
But the narrowness of focus of the short tales does not imply that they are superficial. Each of them probes a psychological situation, purified of accretions, and displays, ironically and dialectically, a pattern of motivation, behaviour, or relationships that could not be set out so economically and luminously on the broad canvas of a novel. The novels are surging oceans for strenuous swimmers; the tales are lucid pools in which on need only quietly gaze. Many of the tales are enigmatic, but not in the same way as the novels, where the final indeterminacy approximates to that of human life itself, rather than remaining merely an unsolved artificial puzzle. The characters in the tales are constructed in function of a thesis and remain circumscribed by the demands of its working out, whereas the novel protagonists are unpredictable from one chapter to the next and are allowed to grow and to have subtle reflections that undermine any simple account of what the novel is about.
Though I have followed up many hints and overtones in the story in my explication, the tale remains in the end remarkably free of divagation, for every part of it illustrates a central theme that I characterize as seduction. It is held together by the magnetism of the central Things, the jewels, or more precisely by that of the Thing among the things, the necklace. The two levels of seduction that emanate from these are filtered diversely in the reactions of the three characters. Arthur resists the seduction for reasons of respectability, found to be ‘paste’ in the end. Charlotte resists from moral uprightness. Mrs Guy surrenders to the seduction and becomes herself more seductive as a result. Her amorality might mean that she, too, is a fake, but since it is she who enables the pearls to have at last their due triumph, she seduces readers as the pearls themselves do. The story may lodge a small protest against the triumph of seduction, in the pang of sympathy it induces for Charlotte, but it seems basically to acknowledge the role of seduction in human affairs and to acquiesce with bemused admiration in the way of the world.
References
Allen, Grant (1894). Post-prandial Philosophy. London: Chatto & Windus. Online.
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Lacan, Jacques (1991). Le séminaire, livre VIII: Le transfert. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
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