james' Paste

James' Paste is one of those old timey bourgeois prose narratives that concerns itself with middle-class white people dealing with money and/or other valuable or sentimental objects. We encounter the same kind of story with D H Lawrence's Rocking Horse Winner, where the issue was luck and money and the young boy's Oedipal struggle to acquire wealth for his mother. In James' story, the object in question is the pearl necklace, and whether or not it is "paste" (fake pearls). This type of story would be familiar to anybody who has already read Nathaniel Hawthorne, especially how certain objects are given value not as things in themselves but as what they might mean or what they mean metaphysically. For example,

The pearls had quite taken their place as a revelation. She might have received them for nothing - admit that; but she couldn't have kept them so long and so unprofitably hidden, couldn't have enjoyed them only in secret, for nothing; and she had mixed them, in her reliquary, with false things... (96)

The pearls are almost an abstraction, and through Charlotte's relationship with the pearls, we can better see her realationship with other people (via pearls). This, of course, is the psychological aspect of James' writing so characteristically ascribed to him. The pearls don't mean anything, necessarily, as objects, but as something which effects characters psyches. The psychological states of the characters are shown not necessarily in the dialogue, but in the gaps in the dialogue, as if what is elliptical or parenthetical or even totally absent is more important than what really is said. Throughout the story, a character's speech is cut off, either by the other character or by themselves, but if one quickly glosses the story, one will find many lines ending with "-", with the rest of the line intuited or already understood by the receiver of the speech. In this way James is able to portray the complex psychological states of his characters under the superficial surface of apprehensive dialogue and questionable motives. And as it turns out, the pearls, which are of real value, end up going to the only person who actually knew what their worth was; Mrs Guy.