A Portrait of the Artist
A theme that James began exploring with great seriousness in his early novel Roderick Hudson is the role of the artist in society and how that role complicates his relationships. That theme is explored most effectively and through two completely different approaches layered with utterly different tones in “The Real Thing” and “The Jolly Corner” in this collection of shorter fiction.
Homosexual Subtext
“The Beast in the Jungle” and “In the Cage” and “The Jolly Corner” can all be read as being about, on some one level, homosexuality and the need to suppress or deny or sublimate those desires deemed unacceptable to society. Likewise, each of those stories and others which contemplate this them can be read in their entirety without ever once noticing any indication that there might be something in them related to homosexuality. When it comes to what have been termed James’s “queer tales” the interpretation is all subjective. If you see it, then it is very like there. If you don’t see it, you lose nothing in the enjoyment.
Ambiguity
The existence of a homosexual subtext or not is far from the only ambiguous nature of the narrative in the short fiction of Henry James. The fortunes of Daisy Miller turn on the ambiguities of sophistication in the use of language. “The Figure in the Carpet” and “The Jolly Corner” are examples of the same type of perceptual ambiguity found in the author’s celebrated ghost story “The Turn of the Screw” and they are hardly alone in the collection in that respect. James may have been the most formally precise of American authors and his mastery of a single phrase, a pervasive point of view or a description of an event all reveal a mastery of the subtle magic of avoiding overexplanation.
Americans v. Europeans
“Daily Miller” is arguably the finest exploration of this most persistent of Jamesian themes; it is without question the finest exploration undertake in a piece that is a not a full-length novel. The real center of all the tales that James told of Americans abroad is the way it allowed him to explore the mythic properties of newer civilization versus the older. James engages the Americans v. Europeans theme so broadly that it really becomes more a tool for exploring a multitude of other themes by introducing Americans as the mythic figures they have established for themselves to Europeans who have constructed their own uniquely different mythic properties for the young upstarts across the Atlantic.
Identity
A number of stories consider themes related to identity and the questions of what one really knows about others or themselves. “The Birthplace” foreshadows the cult of celebrity and fandom in which people become so enamored of a famous person that they need to believe that person is good as well as talented. “The Jolly Corner” also touches on this them in the potential of the ghostly apparition representing that which might have been. “The Abasement of the Northmores” is almost the exact opposite of “The Birthplace” in covering the same thematic territory of fame and fandom.
