The Real Thing — Henry James and the Limits of a Perfect Model

Philosophers have long asked what it means to call something real. Plato approached the question through forms or ideas. Aristotle arrived at a different account.

Henry James’s short story gives the question to someone who has to make a living from appearances. What counts as the real thing when you have to make a picture?

James lived from 1843 to 1916. The story appeared in 1892, but the problem it puts before its narrator is still easy to recognise.

Looking the Part Too Well

The narrator is an artist. A commission to illustrate scenes from fashionable life gives him a reason to look for models.

Major and Mrs Monarch arrive at his studio looking exactly as he imagines his aristocratic subjects should look. They offer themselves as models. He thinks they are the real thing and tries them in a few drawings. The more he works, the harder it becomes to picture them as anything other than themselves.

Miss Churm and Oronte can become the people he needs to draw. The Monarchs, increasingly short of money, offer to do the small jobs around the studio that they might once have expected somebody else to do. He gives them some money and sends them away.

What Makes Something Real?

The Monarchs have the bearing and social background the artist was looking for. Miss Churm and Oronte have experience of giving an artist something he can use. Their suitability comes from a different source.

The story makes the reader choose what to mean by real. The couple belong to the class he needs to represent. The other models make it possible for the representation to live on the page.

The Story’s Ironies

Mrs Monarch initially looks down on Miss Churm and Oronte. Once the couple’s usefulness as models declines, they are willing to do household work to keep a place in the studio.

There is also the irony of the title. It names a quality the artist thought would help him, and he finds that it can prevent him from seeing possibilities in a scene.

One further irony is that the Monarchs make excellent material for a short story about the very quality that makes them unsatisfactory for the artist’s pictures.

What a Class Position Looks Like

The story can be read as a criticism of an English society that puts great weight on an appearance and the class position it seems to promise. The Monarchs can still look like their former lives after much of the money that sustained those lives has gone.

Psychological Realism

The story is often read as psychological realism. James pays attention to what people want to believe about what they see and how their conclusions change in the presence of someone else.

The city and its social distinctions remain visible. They reach the reader through a narrator whose sense of value is affected by what he needs for his work. That perspective is one reason James can feel close to some later modernist writers.

To follow a choice in this kind of story is also to follow the motives a person has difficulty naming to himself.

The question survives the studio. When someone says a picture or performance feels real, it is worth asking what they have recognised in it.

The Real Thing

• Author — Henry James
• First published — 16 April 1892