The Sweet-Shop Window, the House of Fiction and the Jamesian Artist

Commentators generally agree that for Henry James, the figure of the artist standing at the window of the house of fiction, described in the 1907 preface to The Portrait of a Lady, represents the supreme Jamesian artist. Within the protective boundaries of the structure that houses the artistic process, the artist stands assured, masterful, and self-sufficient, imaginatively controlling all that is before him. It has not been recognized, however, that this famous image has a precursor in James' writings, one that depicts not the accomplished artist, but the young figure of artistic sensibility and undeveloped potential who, lacking a confident mastery, feels both helpless and envious. This related image is of the watcher standing outside the sweet-shop window, nose pressed to the glass, entranced by but separated from the wonders within which appears in The Princess Casamassima, in the autobiographical A Small Boy and Others, and in What Maisie Knew. These visions of the artist figure though quite different in conception are, nonetheless, I contend, connected in James' imagination. Together these images and the ideas James associates with them set forth a psychic dilemma that is endemic to the artist in James' world.

To James, the dilemma for the artist centers in the need to establish a metaphorical safe space which allows the freedom necessary for artistic expression. The artist can secure such freedom through his ability to imagine a satisfactory psychological distance between the artist-self and all that is other, one that does not threaten through too little separation between self and other to intrude on the province of the self, or through too great a distance create a