Assignment for 11/9 - James

“Paste” is a story about the things we want to believe set against the things that are shown to be true, but that we do not want to acknowledge. In this case, it is the life of a now-dead woman who was an actress when she was young, and had nothing left over but a box of costume jewelry, and one lone string of real and valuable pearls. Her stepson claims that they are only paste, imitations of the real thing. He wants to believe that his stepmother was likewise only a pale imitiation of an actress, that she never did anything to earn her those pearls, as a gift, or perhaps as something else. But the pearls, and she, were the real thing, or so we are led to believe.

The authorial voice of this piece comes out and brings the reader into direct collusion with the narration at one point in the first pages of the story. “Our young woman gave a start...” (85) Other than that, it is as straightforward as Henry James ever gets, in his heart of hearts. The first long paragraph of exposition is notoriously James. “...Arthur Prime had still in his face the intention, she was moved to call it rather than the expression, of feeling something or other.” (84) This half-sentence is rife with the dualities that make James so fun (or so plodding) to read. The “rather” alone is a rhetorical strategy that James often uses to make an observation about his characters without coming right out and saying what he wants his reader to come away with. In this case, through the mostly-limited third person perspective, Charlotte observes the world around her and reacts to it with a sensibility that seems to be an innocent and untrained version of the narrator.

Hypotactic sentences in the running style support the narrative device of having Charlotte be the main faucet of information for the first page and a half of the story. The high style of this point of view is justified by having her be a governess, but she is a naturally perceptive person. The narrator does not play this up, but allows her to speak for herself through her thoughts. The tone of her thoughts is intimate. Unlike the narrator, she does not know she is being read.