Race, Rent, and the Grid: Structure and Culture in Henry James's "The Jolly Corner"

Abstract: This essay examines Henry James's story "The Jolly Corner" (1908) to address the obscurity of race and class in turn-of-the-century, late-realist literature. It seeks to identify signs of social difference in such a text, not simply in the occasions when it becomes distinct but in the genre's underlying tendency toward indistinctness. Above all, it links the structural impulses of James's craft to the grid-based topography of Manhattan, and it represents that link in diagrams that reveal, through his story, views on immigration, nativism, leisure, labor, and race that provide a new approach to understanding James and his historical moment.