Inventing The Real: The Old Maid and The Real Thing

An Edith Wharton and Henry James pairing explores ‘reality’ in two classic tales. Using shades of irony to capture moments of surprise and sadness, Edith Wharton and Henry James play with reality - in the work of a portrait artist and in the secret love of a ‘fallen’ woman for her daughter. Two cousins, one a well-to-do adoptive mother and the other a poor woman whose child knows her only as ‘Aunt Chatty’, vie for the girl’s affection in Wharton’s surprisingly explicit novella. James explores reality and illusion when an artist hires an aristocratic couple, who have fallen on hard times, to model and finds that their images do not work for his upper-class paintings. Together, ‘The Old Maid’ and ‘The Real Thing’ examine class and gender expectation versus actual experience.