Telegraphic realism: Henry James's 'In the Cage'

In setting his 1898 tale In the Cage in a telegraph office, Henry James was adapting and investigating a metaphor that earlier novelists had used for the workings of fiction. As invoked by writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell an d Charles Dickens, the idealized image of the electric telegraph hints at s ome of the formal and ideological properties of Victorian realism. With In the Cage James proves to be more alert than such predecessors not only to t he social and technological mechanics of telegraphy, but also to the signif icance of mediation-in telegraphy as well as in realist fiction. Analyzing the conjunction this essay calls "telegraphic realism" indicates the ways i n which a medium's imaginative possibilities may change over time and sugge sts the connections between the histories of media and of literature.