A Summer Gaze - Issue 14 : Mutation
▻http://nautil.us/issue/14/mutation/a-summer-gaze
When Mr. and Mrs. Monarch stride into a painter’s office in the Henry James short story, “The Real Thing,” it is to try to earn a pittance. Recently separated from their substantial wealth—“it’s an awful bore,” says Mrs. Monarch—they would like to pose as models for illustrations of the well-heeled. The painter, seeing in their faces “the blankness, the deep intellectual repose of the twenty years of country-house visiting,” decides that they should serve well, and agrees. But he is soon frustrated. For whatever reason, his drawings of the real but recently impoverished aristocrats appear fake. His work becomes convincing only when he begins, instead, to use the poor Cockney model, Miss Churm—who is assuredly not the real thing. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek interprets the story in terms of (...)