The Real Thing

Are you “the real thing”? Of course not; there is no single thing because we all act a little differently in different situations, as Erving Goffman famously demonstrated in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. It’s affected by mood, health, and intoxication, and often it’s not entirely conscious and deliberate. Sometimes it’s kind (not mentioning job insecurity to a grandparent who worries), sometimes it’s to gain advantage (bigging oneself up on a date or job interview) and other times it’s outright dishonest.

Authenticity has a different aspect for an artist and their models.

Image: A half-eaten apple can look untouched in a mirror (Source)

In this short story from 1892, a London artist remembers the unfortunately show more named Major and Mrs Monarch. They arrived at his studio, looking “distinguished” but with “an indefinable air of prosperous thrift”.

Rather than wanting to pay him to paint their portrait, it eventually emerges through their embarrassment that they are offering themselves as models for the illustrations he describes as his “pot-boilers”.
“We thought that if you ever had to do people like us we might be something like it.”
As the Major says, they are “the real thing”, or more accurately, used to be before they lost all their money.

The artist amuses himself with inferences and observations:
“She was singularly like a bad illustration.”
He thinks they’d be better suited to adverts for waistcoats, hotels, or soap - but doesn’t say so, as they are so earnest and ashamed. The Major makes it clear they would do it “for the figure” (the body and pose, without recognisable faces). Oh, the insecurity of the middle class; an impoverished duke would brazen it out. Class and money do not correlate here in the UK.

Nevertheless, the artist agrees to use them.

Image: Meta: a black and white illustration of the artist working on a black and white illustration of the Monarchs. It was published with the story in the magazine “Black & White” in 1892 and is by Rudolph Blind. (Source)

He finds them amusing, interesting, pathetic, though he develops a degree of fondness for them. Most problematically, they are not very useful. Unlike his regular working-class models, they are too real, too much and always themselves.
“When I drew the Monarchs I couldn’t anyhow get away from them - get into the character I wanted to represent.”
And thus the tables end up being turned and roles cleverly reversed. Gently sharp observations on class and money are juxtaposed with deeper thoughts about art, identity, and reality.

Quotes

• “A dim smile that had the effect of a moist sponge passed over a ‘sunk’ piece of painting, as well as of a vague allusion to vanished beauty.”

• “She looked as sad as a woman could look whose face was not charged with expression... The hand of time had played over her freely, but to an effect of elimination.”

• “I placed her in every conceivable position and she managed to obliterate the differences.”

• “She was the real thing, but always the same thing”

• “They had both accepted their failure, but they couldn’t accept their fate”

See also

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Short story club

I read this as one of the stories in The Art of the Short Story, by Dana Gioia, from which I'm aiming to read one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 2 May 2022.

You can read this story here.

You can join the group here. show less

I’m not familiar with the work of Henry James, though of course I know of him.

This story is about an artist who draws sketches for books, magazines and so on and thus requires models.

A middle-aged couple, the Monarchs, turn up looking for work.

Mr Monarch is a “perfect gentleman” while Mrs Monarch is “smart” with an “irreproachably ‘good’” figure; they are both good-looking.

But their was a “blankness”” in their faces, and to me they seem to have no substance. Who are they really?

They are willing to do anything - “I’d be anything”.

We’re told of another model the artist has - Miss Churm. She was no gentlewoman, was “a trifle blowsy” and couldn’t spell. But she was excellent as a model because she show more could “represent” everything,

The story is partly about the artist – though he liked the Monarchs at first – “they looked so well everywhere”, “they were not superficial”” “they kept themselves up”, he gets bored with them.

They’re so keen to be employed by him, and they are in such acute need of money, apparently. So they keep coming, pressing him for work.

The problem with Mrs Monarch was that she “had no sense of variety”, She was always a lady but always the same lady.

The value of Mis Churm was that she had “no positive stamp”. She was always in demand, never in want of employment.

He tried to find other employment for the Monarchs but ”they didn’t take”,so that made them even more desperate to get work from him.

I confess I found the story boring because James goes into excessive detail about the Monarchs, their qualities and drawbacks, and about everything else.

A friend returns from abroad, and tells him that he doesn’t like his types – they won’t do.

“Ce sont des gens qu’il faut mettre à la porte” - they re people you need to get rid of.

The artist had really tried to find all sorts of, any sort of, work for them, Eventually, he got rid of them, but it was difficult.

I didn’t care for this story. show less

"The Real Thing" is a short story by Henry James. This story, often read as a parable, plays with the reality-illusion dichotomy that fascinated James, especially in the later stages of his career. For the illustrator who narrates the story, the genuine article proves all too useless for his commercial purposes. The story portrays the unfortunate victims of a society in which reality and representation are closely intertwined in ways that make art a difficult project to untangle the two.