The Representation of Freedom in Henry James’s In The Cage – An Existential Phenomenological Critical Analysis

In the Cage is the tale of a London telegraphist surrendering “to a certain expansion of her

consciousness”,1 and given that, as Labrie has pointed out, Henry James vies consciousness

as “a highly active process of development, rather than a passive climate of awareness”,2 in

place of an interpretation of the telegraphist’s situation as one of entrapment, by technology,

or her own imaginative fantasies, I propose instead that the story is to be read as representing

the telegraphist’s freedom with her cage. James’s narrative relates the story through her

consciousness, and a suitable method for establishing my proposition, as I explore her

psychology by careful attention to the representation of her consciousness in the text, is

existential phenomenology. I will begin with an explication of the existential

phenomenological method and its applicability to James’s own views about consciousness,

and will follow with an existential phenomenological account of the telegraphist’s freedom

within her cage.

As Armstrong has said: “The vicissitudes of consciousness fascinate James: ‘To know and

how to know, that is the question for James the epistemological novelist’”.3 So I begin with

an epistemological problem, as addressed by Husserl, the founder of phenomenology,

concerning the problem of cognition, that is, the possibility of real knowledge of objective

reality: “… how can we be certain of the correspondence between cognition and the object

cognized? How can knowledge transcend itself and reach its object reliability?”4 A suitable

starting point in such an enquiry would be to confine myself to a description of phenomena,

that which is directly given to us, and to eschew arguing from what is directly given to

1 Henry James, In the Cage and Other Stories (London: Penquin, 1983), p. 13.2 Ross Labrie, ‘Henry James’s Idea of Consciousness’, American Literature, Vol. 39, No. 4 (1968), 517 – 529 (p. 519).3 Paul B. Armstrong, The Phenomenology of Henry James (London: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), p. 4.4 Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, translated by William P. Alston and George Nakhinan (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964), p.15.

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something that is not directly given. That is, by confining myself to phenomenological

description, and not offering any arguments, I avoid error.

Given the set-up of the cognitive problem, in which there is an act of cognition and an

object cognized, consciousness has a structure, it is necessarily directed onto an object. One

cannot imagine, wish, or dream without imagining, wishing, or dreaming something. As

Husserl puts it, consciousness is “intentional”.5 This is a rejection of theories of

consciousness whereby consciousness is a container of a particular kind, and that knowing

something is a process that takes place entirely within the mind. For example, if I wish to

know about a table, I can only know about my own thoughts about the table. Sartre suggests,

of this kind of theory, that to know something is for the mind to make it part of itself by

consuming it:

… we have all believed that the spidery mind trapped things in its web, covered them with a white spit and

slowly swallowed them, reducing them to its own substance. What is a table, a rock, a house? A certain

assemblage of “contents of consciousness”, a class of such contents. O digestive philosophy!6

In opposition to this doctrine, Sartre contrasts the theory of intentionality, whereby an object

cannot “enter into your consciousness, for it is not of the same nature as consciousness”.7

However, the rejection of the mind as a container and of the metaphor of the spider-web as a

description of consciousness would seem to put this view of consciousness directly at odds

with James’s own view. A metaphor that James often used in connection with consciousness

was that of a container, with some of his literary creations having deeper containers of

consciousness than others. In The Art of Fiction he associated consciousness with both a

“chamber” and a “spider-web”:

5 Ibid., pp. 58 – 59.6 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology’, in The Phenomenology Reader, edited by Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney (London: Routledge 2002), pp. 382 – 384 (p. 382).7 Ibid.

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Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web

of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every airborne particle

in its tissue.8

But these are only metaphors, and in describing consciousness, this “mystery in broad

daylight”,9 As Sartre calls it, metaphorical language is unavoidable.10 However, James’s

representation of the mystery and complexity of consciousness in In the Cage does accord

with Sartre’s existential theory of consciousness, as I can show through my existential

phenomenological method. That is, I regard the real existence of things as among the

phenomena, those things that are directly given to us, as opposed to Husserl, who “never

passed beyond the pure description of the appearance as such”.11 As Sartre said, “… to be

conscious of something is to be before some concrete, full presence that is not that

consciousness… Consciousness is consciousness of something: this means that transcendence

is a constitutive structure of consciousness”.12 Consciousness is a being that implies a being

other than itself, hence it transcends the given.13

For every act of intending there is thereby an intentional object, and, as Jeanson has said:

8 Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, in The Nineteenth-century Novel: A Critical Reader, edited by Stephen Regan (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 68 – 79 (p. 75).9 J – P Sartre, Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel Barnes (London Barnes (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 537.10 But our descriptive method puts us in control of our metaphors, unlike Cunningham, for instance, who argues that the cage of the telegraphist can be taken as a metaphor for the interpretive cage of modernist writers such as James, (Cunningham 1994: 283 – 285). Such free over-interpretation is rendered illegitimate by our own methodical approach.11 Ibid., pp. xxxvi – xxxvii.12 Ibid.13 Eagleton has described the phenomenological project as an “idealist… type of criticism, exemplifying the prejudices and limitations of modern literary theory as a whole”, (Eagleton 1993: 60). Husserlian phenomenology may be idealist, but existential phenomenology is not.

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An intention is such only through the irreducible distance separating it from its object. Transform the object

into a meaning, retract its opacity, its strangeness, its being-there, and you render it directly accessible to

consciousness. But the latter becomes no more than this meaning.14

This strangeness of the object renders it ambiguous, for such is the basic “mark of authentic

ambiguity”:

…whatever simply is could not be ambiguous. The ambiguous can only be a relation that is active, a

situation actively surpassed, a freedom-in situation.15

An ambiguous mode of existence of the telegraphist, and the manner of her surpassing, or

transcending, her situation is described by James in her interaction with Captain Everard, one

of the patrons of the post-and-telegraph-office where she works. On one occasion, as she

says to him that she has not seen him for ages, James tells us that:

‘Ages’ was the word she consciously and carefully, though a trifle tremulously, used; ‘ages’ was exactly

what she meant. To this he replied in terms doubtless less anxiously selected, but perhaps on that account

not the less remarkable. ‘Oh yes, hasn’t it been awfully wet?’ That was a specimen of their give and take; it

fed her fancy that no form of intercourse so transcendent and distilled have ever been established on earth.

Everything, so far as they chose to consider it so, might mean almost anything.16

That is to say, their relationship is one of transcendence and ambiguity, and the description of

intentionality, specifically as it applies to imaginative intentionality, thereby provides me

with the groundwork on which to base my descriptions of the representations of the freedom

of the telegraphist,17 as the telegraphist’s consciousness manifests its faculty for detachment, 14 Francis Jeanson, Sartre and the Problem of Morality, translate by Robert V. Stone, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 87.15 Ibid., p. 91.16 Ibid., p. 39.17 Armstrong (1983) grounds his phenomenological analysis of James’s representation of consciousness upon ‘intentional foundations’, and ‘… because of their importance to the shape and structure of [James’s] world as a

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as she controverts the world with that which is imaginary, to the extent that she is situated

within the world:

She was perfectly aware that her imaginative life was the life in which she spent most of her time; and she

would have been ready, had it been at all worthwhile, to contend that, since her outward occupation didn’t

kill it, it must be strong indeed.18

The telegraphist feeds her imagination with books she “borrows at a ha’penny a day”,19 and

we are told that: “The amusements of captives are full of a desperate contrivance, and one of

our young friend’s ha’pennyworths had been the charming tale of ‘Picciola’”.20 This latter is

the tale of a political prisoner who maintains his reason through cultivating almost venerative

practices with regard to a tiny flower growing between the paving stones of his prison yard.

The telegraphist achieves a similar imaginative transformation of her situation in the cage, the

concept of her veneration being Everard. On one occasion she delays her departure from the

cage, subsequent to Everard’s reappearance after having being absent for some time:

She did last things or pretended to do them: to be in the cage had suddenly become her safety, and she was

literally afraid of the alternate self who might be waiting outside. He might be waiting; it was he who was

her alternate self, and of him she was afraid.21

James is here describing an emotional response of the telegraphist in which, in the words of

Sartre, “she is transforming the present structure of the world, replacing it with a totally

undifferentiated structure…[she] make[s] the world into an affectively neutral reality, a

novelist”, (p. ix), the five intentional foundations of James’s authorial consciousness he identifies are “consciousness, the imagination, freedom, personal relations, and our relation to social history”, (p. 31). But these intentional foundations can all be reduced to one, freedom, for the problem of freedom is prior to all other theory, literary or philosophical, arising as it does from our taking a particular view of what we are. 18 Ibid., p. 12.19 Ibid., p. 11.20 Ibid., pp. 13 – 14.21 Ibid., p. 76.

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system which is, affectively, in complete equilibrium”.22 That is, drawing back into herself,

she effaces herself, and “the [intentional] counterpart of that is the Refuge”.23

Such a transformation of the world in this manner has elements of the spontaneous, that is,

of the free, of consciousness.24 But it is the world as a passive thing that presents itself

phenomenologically to the telegraphist, that is, her world has to be changed by her working

on it. What James is describing here is “an irrational synthesis of spontaneity and passivity”,

that is, “a consciousness rendered passive”.25 But this is not entrapment within her cage.

Like the political prisoner, she maintains an ambiguous mode of existence, that which

surrounds her has a sense for her, a sense that is the outcome of her aims and projects, and

her aims and projects implicate that which is imaginary. The meaning of her situation is

thereby defined in transcending. The representation of the consciousness of the telegraphist

is not of something that is ensnared by physically existent things, by her cage, for instance.

This is clear in James’s account of the telegraphist’s consciousness of the presence in their

absence of Everard and lady Bradee, with whom Everard is having an affair: “They remained

all day; their presence continued and abode with her, was in everything she did till

nightfall”.26 Given that that which is imaginary cannot be just anything at all, the telegraphist

can give to herself an image of a certain kind only in accordance with the actual and distinct

motivation within her situation, a motivation which thereby precludes the imaginary in

question from all attainable actuality. As the telegraphist and Everard part company she can

22 J – P Sartre, A Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, translated by Philip Mairet (London: Methuen, 1961), pp. 68 – 69. 23 Ibid., p. 69.24 Lawall is therefore not quite ciorrect in her assertion that “there is, of course, no one ‘existential theory’, (Lawall 1968: 268), and that all we need to ask of an existential critic is: “Do they make a convincing case for the application of an existential perspective in literary analysis?” (Ibid.). Rather, it is a basic tenet of any existential perspective that: “For a consciousness to be able to imagine, it must escape the world by its very nature, it must be able to draw from itself a position of retreat in relation to the world. In a word, it must be free”. (J – P Sartre, Psychology of Imagination, quoted in Jeanson (1980: 57).25 Ibid., p. 85.26 Ibid., p. 18.

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imagine Everard absent only insofar as he cannot be actually present for her. Her freedom

thus described exemplifies that which Sartre refers to as the paradox of freedom:

…there is freedom only in a situation, and there is a situation only through freedom. Human reality

everywhere encounters resistance and obstacles which it has not created, but these resistances and obstacles

have meaning only in and through the free choice which human reality is.27

Obstacles and resistances are encountered by the telegraphist, not self-given, but given

meaning through her freedom. But her freedom can only operate in relation to the facts of

her situatedness.28 The telegraphist is limited by the facts of her sex and economic position in

society, but such facts are the condition of the possibility of her freedom. Her reality is an

outcome of her chosen ends, such ends apprehended by her as transcendences that are posited

by her and sustained in their being by her.

This accords with James’s description of the telegraphist as she enacts various roles, most

of which are enacted briefly and only in response to a given situation. For instance, she is

well-adapted to her role as a telegraphist: “Her function was to sit there… to mind the

“sounder”,… to dole out stamps and postal-orders, weigh letters, answer stupid questions,

give difficult change and, more than anything else, count words as numberless as the sands of

the sea…”.29 She fits into the role of a telegraphist exactly, but being a telegraphist provides

the context within which she transcends being a telegraphist.

James fully explores this transcending of her situation through his narrative, as he describes

the whole range of emotions that the telegraphist experiences as her life becomes involved

with that of Everard. Different moments with Everard call for a different character, and she

manages to become a multiplicity of women while still remaining a telegraphist. For

27 J- P Sartre (1983), p. 489.28 “Even the most beautiful girl in the world can offer only what she has”. (Sartre 1983; p. 434).29 Ibid., p. 9.

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instance, when Everard first attracts her attention, she is the fascinated, venerating clerk, and

as such her heart “literally beat faster at the approach of the gentleman”:

He had been there but five minutes,… and, busy with his telegrams,… she had had no wandering glances nor

roundabout arts to spare. Yet she had taken him in; she knew everything; she had made up her mind.30

In describing a physiological phenomenon of her emotion, the heart beating faster, James is

also describing a phenomenon of her belief, that is, her venerating emotion is not a passive

thing that overwhelms her from the outside. She conjures up a transformed world through

her act of veneration, a world that is made by her and in which she lives, and in which she

believes, the belief manifested by the rapidly beating heart.

Shortly thereafter, once she has recognized Everard’s importance to her and to her

imagination, she becomes the captivated young maiden. During their evening meeting at the

park she tells Everard:

“I’ve known perfectly that you knew I took trouble for you; and that knowledge has been for me, and I

seemed to see it was for you, as if there were something – I don’t know what to call it! – between us. I mean

something unusual and good and awfully nice – something not a bit horrid or vulgar”.31

And again, from time to time, while waiting on him, she sees herself as the abstracted,

impassioned inamorata:

The gentlemen who came in with him were nothing, at any rate, when he was there… He himself, absent as

well as present, was all. He was very tall, very fair, and had …good-humour that was exquisite… he was so

extraordinarily kind…32

30 Ibid., p. 17.31 Ibid., p. 57.32 Ibid., p. 19.

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Everard, of course, is so absorbed with himself and his continuous affairs, that he is

conscious only of her presence as an obliging clerk at Cocker’s, her place of work. But she

can assume the role of an impassive menial in response to her concerns that her admiration

for Everard may be noticeable. For instance, after their meeting in the park:

... nothing passed between them but the fullness of their silence. The look she took from him was his

greeting, and the other one a simple sign of the eyes sent her before going out. The only token they

exchanged, therefore, was his tacit assent to her wishes that, since they couldn’t attempt a certain frankness,

they should attempt nothing at all. This was her intense preference; she could be as still and cold as anyone

when that was the sole solution.33

As she dawdles by Park Chambers, Everard’s place of residence, she is the covetous lover,

eager for even a brief glimpse of her inamorato. Once, when she ventures to enter, she sees

his name on the lettered board in the hall:

It was as if, in the immense intimacy of this, they were, for the first time, face to face outside the cage. Alas!

They were face to face but a second or two: she was whirled out on the wings of a panic fear that he might

just then be entering or issuing.34

And yet, in their last meeting, as Everard anxiously asks her to recall a telegram sent by Lady

Bradeen some months earlier, she presents a fresh aspect to Everard, a complacent yet

knowing countenance. She is aware that she may effortlessly quote the telegram from

memory, but in a provocative manner she refrains from doing so until she judges it to be the

correct moment. Everard is not aware that his telegraphist is a self-possessed actress, while

he is condemned to the role of adulterous philanderer. As she toys with him, this was:

33 Ibid., p. 71.34 Ibid., p. 44.

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…the deepest thrill she had ever felt. It came to her there, with her eyes on his face, that she held the whole

thing in her hand, held it as she held her pencil… This made her feel like the very fountain of fate, but the

emotion was such a flood that she had to press it back again with all her force.35

Again, a phenomenon of emotion and its concomitant phenomenon of belief are here being

described. This is the world that she believes in, and lives in, where she is in control of the

destiny of another, while that other “looked splendidly helpless”.36 Though we do not know

what was in the message, we are told that it may be all right if there is something in it that is

incorrect, and we are also told, of the telegraphist, that:

… she already saw with what brilliancy she could add, to carry the thing off, a little false knowledge to all

her real. ‘I quite understand’, she said with benevolent, with almost patronizing quickness. ‘The lady has

forgotten what she did put!’37

The situation allows for the telegraphist to be almost patronizing, and even as Everard’s

predicament is eventually resolved he leaves without a word of farewell or gratitude, never to

be seen again by her. But, as Meissner has said: “The point of experience for James is that it

is transformative, not affirmative”,38 and this is shown through James’s description of the

consciousness, which is to say, of the freedom, of the telegraphist, and of her imaginatively

transformed world.

It may be objected that what we have so far described is merely an abstract freedom that

takes no account of the telegraphist’s social or historical context. For instance, our primary

existentialist tenet is that for every subject there is an ambiguous object, and sometimes this

35 Ibid., p. 83.36 Ibid.37 Ibid., p. 85.38 Collin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), ibid., p. 22.

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latter will be another subject. When this occurs, de Beauvoir has argued that an opposition

between the two has resulted in a male monopoly on subjectivity, and that “… humanity is

male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him, she is not regarded as an

autonomous being”.39 There is a passage in In the Cage that would seem to suggest that the

telegraphist does indeed surrender her autonomy:

… the thing in all this that she would have liked most unspeakably to put to the test was the possibility of her

having for him a personal identity that might in a particular way appeal. There were moments when he

actually struck her as on her side, arranging to help, to support, to spare her.40

The telegraphist is apparently submitting to a role whereby she concedes all claims to

freedom as she drowns her selfhood in an external object, though as he is not her lover she in

effect condemns herself to her own interiority. However, from James’s description of the

world from her particular point of view we can see that this is not so, because, as we have

seen, the object of an intention is not contained in consciousness, and it thereby retains its

opacity, which is to say, the telegraphist’s point of view implicates other points of view, other

interiorities that are opaque to her, as she is opaque to them. There is a resulting conflict,

with each side wanting contradictory things,41 but it is the telegraphist that is ultimately in

control of her perspectives in the world, having assumed an attitude of indifference to

alternative perspectives. After she is accused by her friend Mrs. Jordan of having no

imagination we are told that: “It was… one of her … most secret supports that people didn’t

understand her, and it was accordingly a matter of indifference to her that Mrs. Jordan

shouldn’t”.42 And though she tells Everard: “I’d do anything for you”,43 she also adds: “As

39 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, translated by H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1989), Introduction, p. xxii.40 Ibid., p. 20.41 For instance, Mr. Mudge, to whom the telegraphist is betrothed, wants her to transfer from Mayfair to another office in Chalk Farm, to be with him.42 Ibid., p. 12.43 Ibid., p. 58.

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we shall never talk this way but to-night… here it all is. I’ll say it; I don’t care what you

think; it doesn’t matter; I only want to help you”.44

Armstrong has pointed out that “James portrays the opacity of the other as a challenge and

a threat”.45 It is 2a challenge because to attain Knowledge of the other’s inwardness is to gain

power over the other”,46 but it is the telegraphist that attains knowledge of Everard’s

imwardness, whereas for him she maintains her opacity. And it is a threat “because the

interpretive capacities hidden within another’s depths may be plotting to penetrate and

appropriate one’s own secrets”,47 but it is the telegraphist, who may be seen as a

representative of that phenomenon so prevalent in the modern world, the worker esteemed for

his or her ability to act and communicate with knowledge within his or her field of work, that

has developed “interpretive capacities” that are a threat to Everard.

And as for her desire to have for Everard a personal identity, as Donadio has said, “personal

identity, which is usually defined through an overt clash of wills”, is defined in James

“through more complex acts of awareness”.48 The telegraphist, in fact, exemplifies

Donadio’s notion of the “free spirit”, whereby she “… attempts to maintain [her] own ideas

and ideal expectations, [her] own view of the world … in defiance of the cynical and ignorant

debasement of values which … is indicated by complicity in the brutal way of the world”.49

This may seem, however, to be contradicted by the way the story ends, as Mrs. Jordan tells

the telegraphist that Everard and Lady Bradeen will be marrying soon, and that he is not

wealthy, he is a philanderer and a fortune hunter, and we are told that ‘what our heroine saw

and felt for in the whole business was the vivid reflection of her own dreams and delusions

44 Ibid., p. 57.45 Paul B. Armstrong, The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford (New York: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 150.46 Ibid.47 Ibid.48 Stephen Donadio, Nietzsche, Henry James, and the Artistic Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 127. We are told after their first meeting: “she had taken him in; she knew everything2, (James 1983: 17).49 Ibid., p. 129.

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and her own return to reality. Reality, for the poor thing [she was], could only be ugliness

and obscurity, could never be the escape, the rise”.50

But this is merely to assume yet another role, that of a dejected pessimist, for my

description of the representation of the telegraphist’s freedom has shown that her situation

involves an interconnection of the objective and the subjective, which is to say, of the real

and of the imaginary, and through her imagination the meaning of that which is real is

constantly implied. She does not end up disillusioned, for she has no illusions. She had told

Everard directly that she knew about 2[his] extravagance, [his] immorality, [his] crimes”,51

and she confesses: “I like them… I revel in them”.52 Indeed, through our telegraphist we

have seen that, in the words of Armstrong: “The wonders and dangers of the imagination…

exhibit the existential paradigm of freedom and necessity”.53

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