Reality, Artifice, and Art Theme Analysis

Henry James’s short story “The Real Thing” explores the nature of art. The story opens with the arrival of an elegant gentleman and a lady—Major Monarch and Mrs. Monarch—to an unnamed artist’s studio. He is surprised to learn that they have fallen on hard times and are hoping to support themselves by modeling for the artist’s commercial illustrations. The Monarchs reason that the artist must often depict people of the higher class, so won’t his illustrations of such types be improved if his models are an actual English gentleman and lady? After taking the Monarchs on as models, though, the artist realizes that the opposite is true: the Monarchs are so rigidly themselves—they are so “real”—that he can’t use them to inspire illustrations of any type; he can only ever paint them. Their inflexibility is made all the more apparent when compared to the artist’s other models, Miss Churm and Oronte. While these two are not genteel or noble, they are able through their natural instinct and adaptability to represent a feeling or idea that gives the artist the inspiration he needs to create powerful illustrations. The story, then, suggests that the artist’s role is to interpret and reshape reality rather than document it, and that to accomplish this feat the artist requires not reality, but artifice.

James quickly establishes that the refined Major and Mrs. Monarch are incompatible with art because they can only represent themselves, and therefore leave no room for artistic interpretation. The Major and Mrs. Monarch are first introduced in the story as “A gentleman – with a lady,” and this identification is the entire summation of who they are. The Monarchs are the embodiment of gentility. As they put it, they are “The real thing.” Yet for all their elegance and manners, they have little substance. As people, the artist finds them affable but boring. And, worse, as models, they are “too insurmountably stiff,” and “had no variety of expression.” When working with the Monarchs the artist finds himself thwarted. When painting Mrs. Monarch, no matter how hard he tries to transform her, “[she] was always the same lady. She was the real thing, but always the same thing.” The Major is just as bad. Each attempt “looked like a photograph or a copy of a photograph.” When using “the real thing” as his subject, the artist finds himself documenting it exactly as is. As a result, he has no space for interpretation, which is what allows art to communicate meaning. As the artist puts it, “A studio was a place to learn to see, and how could you see through a pair of feather beds?”

In contrast to the Monarchs are Miss Churm and Oronte, the artist’s other models who are ideal artistic subjects because they are able to suggest reality in a way that inspires the artist to extract and then illustrate meaning or feeling. The resulting works might be described as more real than real. Miss Churm and Oronte are foils to the Monarchs in both class and character. Both Miss Churm and Oronte are lower class; the former is uneducated and unattractive, and the latter is an immigrant Italian street-vendor. Their realities are very far from the “types”—lords, ladies, princesses—whom the artist asks them to represent. While not particularly respectable or attractive, Miss Churm and Oronte are clever and possess the flexibility required to suggest a variety of subjects. Miss Churm regularly impresses the artist with her ability to “represent everything.” Oronte, who does not speak English, is equally clever, as is illustrated by his ability to communicate solely through “graceful mimicry.” He is full of expression and “caught one’s idea in an instant.” With their ability to express an infinite range of situations and characters, Miss Churm and Oronte allow the artist to achieve the “variety and range” that he seeks. He does not wish to copy something exactly as it is, but to creatively illustrate reality in a way that gives it meaning.

Through the artist’s interactions with the Monarchs, James demonstrates that, in the realm of art, the literal is useless at best and damaging at worst. When the artist shows his Monarch-inspired work to his friend Jack Hawley, Jack immediately rejects it, declaring that working with these models was “execrable.” In addition, the artistic advisor for whom the arist is making the illustrations despises the work with the Monarchs and threatens to stop working with the artist. When the artist finally dismisses the Monarchs in favor of Miss Churm and Oronte, the Monarchs make a final effort to be useful by acting as servants. Yet the Monarchs don’t pretend to be servants; they actually go about cleaning the artist’s house, literally making themselves servants. This sort of transformation—not an artistic one but an actual, real one—makes everyone uncomfortable and causes the artist to momentarily lose his creative juices. Even after ceasing to work with the Monarchs, their effect on the artist lingers. Hawley declares that they “did [the artist] permanent harm,” implying that the artist’s dalliance with mimicking reality rather than using artifice to interpret and re-present reality has damaged his ability to create art.

The story is clear in its position that the purpose of art is to reinterpret reality through artifice. But the story also contains a final twist on this idea, embedded in the fact that the story is itself a work of art, and made through artifice. While portraying, through nothing more than words, an artist tripped up by the pitfall of the allure of reality over artifice in the pursuit of art, James the author falls into no such trap. While the artist’s tale is one of a limited kind of failure, the story itself—which is written in an extremely literary style, and yet still feels full of life—is an example of a triumph on precisely the terms that James argues are necessary for true art.