What Piketty Knew (But Dared Not Ask Henry James): Fin-de-Siècle American Capitalism and Queer Resistance in The Ambassadors

Abstract

Thomas Piketty has cited Henry James in his globally influential Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), arguing that he represents in his novels the social reality of nineteenth-century rentier capitalism. Drawing attention to this analysis, I raise in this paper two questions: 1) Is the historical reality of James’s America towards the turn of the twentieth century, as Piketty assumes, a variant on a similar reality in Austen and Balzac’s Europe? 2) Is realist fiction a source reservoir of economic reality per se in the given historical era? To defend fiction’s power to creatively represent social reality, and, specifically, James’s unique success in capturing the particular economic reality of fin-de-siècle America, I focus upon The Ambassadors (1903). Fredric Jameson has persistently denied James a true historical awareness, arguing that James’s falsely enlarged technique of point of view leads to an avoidance of the material reality of his time. Opposing Jameson, I argue that James’s choice to narrow the diegetic world of the novel to the limited experience of the novel’s hero, Lambert Strether, aptly represents the reality of American capitalism at the time—a system which was, if we correct Piketty’s undifferentiated idea of rentier capitalism by a rigorous distinction of its phases, at that moment transforming itself from industrial capitalism to financial capitalism. Strether, who in many particulars transgresses hegemonic masculinity, provides the perfect lens for examining the complexly gendered reality of this transformation. I introduce Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale as a model text through which we can understand how James imagined the conflict between the dominating logic of economic production and the resisting logic of cultural production in the Bourdieusian sense: though the middle-aged Strether is a loser in the practical sense, James makes him a true hero. I argue that James challenges the pervasive logic of turn-of-the-century American capitalism and its protean appropriation of established gender and social roles by proposing an alternative modernity based upon queer resistance.