“Opening Some Cages: Sounding and Policing the Novel in In the Cage”

In this essay, I propose to consider Henry Jamesʼs 1898 novella In the Cage for a study of the many textual strategies James adopts in order to undermine the primacy of vision as the privileged epistemological dimension in the realist novel. I argue that in In the Cage sound, literalized by the sounder machine, along with the many references to sensorial domains alternative to vision, contribute to undermine the master narrative of the realist novel and foreground the subversive potential that, according to Peter Brooks, grounds its epistemology. In the second part of the essay, I focus on the policing structures of the novel, in D.A. Miller’s sense, and address the protagonist’s position within a highly disciplinarian context as simultaneously akin to that of the police and the disciplined subject. Finally, I suggest that James’s representation (and possibly subversion) of the ideological power of the novel could be productively read through the lens of Foucault’s concept of security.