Thorstein Veblen's Leisure Class in Daisy Miller
and "The Jolly Comer" 
 

One of Henry James's primary concerns was the social and psychological meaning of money.  Several critics have examined economic forces in James's fictions; Peggy McCormack, for example, asserts that "economic language acquires a privileged status among his linguistic codes" ("Semiotics" 540). Though this central theme has been quite thoroughly explored in connection with his novels, particularly The Golden Bowl and Washington Square, the same theme may be found in abundance in his shorter fiction as well (see Haviland 618). Moreover, the theme of wealth and value has been only rarely connected with the work of James's contemporary, Thorstein Veblen, and in particular Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class (see Dietrichson 89 and Bell 47 for examples) - which is unusual because, as one scholar has noted, "Veblen would have been the ideal conversation partner for James" (Haviland 619). This paper will examine the function of wealth and nature of the leisure class in just two samples of James's shorter fiction: Daisy Miller and "The Jolly Comer." In these stories and in his work as a whole, James provides an insightful Veblenian analysis of his society, despite the fact that his analysis is sometimes compromised by his own membership in the leisure class. 

I. Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class and the Project of James's Fiction 

Before launching into a study of James's fiction itself, a brief review of the relevant concepts from Veblen's work is in order. The book attempts to define the leisure class and give an account of its history, origin, and (largely detrimental) effect on modem industrial society. In doing so, it attempts to account for all kinds of human thought, behavior, institutions, and values in terms of natural selection driven by economic forces. In doing so he describes and analyzes the modem leisure class and the marks by which it distinguishes itself. The behavior and attitudes of the current leisure class are vestiges of those of similar classes from past "barbarian" societies. Ownership grew out of reward for and proof of predatory exploits; thus wealth became a sign of prowess, honor, and ultimately, reputability, worthiness, and virtue. Because of this, displays of wealth became necessary to assure good repute in one's community, and such proofs of economic strength took on two major forms: "conspicuous consumption" and "conspicuous leisure." As Veblen summarizes in chapter 4, "The basis on which good repute in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength, and so of gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods."[1] The leisure class develops various badges and shibboleths to protect its status, including all kinds of manners and decorum, fashions and literary tastes, classical learning, and even "proper" grammar and spelling. All of these achievements require a "waste" of time and thus all are quite suitable evidence of reputable leisure and wealth. 

It is unclear whether Henry James read Thorstein Veblen's work, but given the latter's popularity, particularly following the interdisciplinary success of The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899, it seems most likely that he did. It is at least highly unlikely that James missed William Dean Howells's positive review of the book, and analysis of its implications for American literature, in Literature (two parts; April 28 and May 5, 1899). Howells's piece provides a fascinating insight into how the art of fiction met and interacted with the social sciences at the turn of the century. He praises Veblen's work for "the clear method, the graphic and easy style, and the delightful accuracy of characterization" and laments the direction in which American wealth is taking American society - to Europe. 

[T]he extraordinary impulse among us toward the aristocraticisation of society can as yet fulfill itself only in monarchical conditions. A conspicuous proof of this is the frequent intermarriage of our moneyed bourgeoisie with the English aristocracy, and another proof, less conspicuous, is the frequent absenteeism of our rich people. 

The description seems to be at the same time an affirmation of James's choice of subject matter and a censure of James's own "absenteeism." Howells further asserts that the American­-European encounter is the top social issue of his time and the most promising subject for American fiction. His description reads like a roadmap of the majority of James's work: 

[The wealthy American thinks his] true home is in monarchical conditions [. . .]. The American life is the life of labor, and he is now of the life of leisure, or if he is not, his wife is, his daughters and his sons are. The logic of their existence [. . .] is intermarriage with the European aristocracies, and residence abroad. Short of this there is no rest, and can be none for the American leisure class. This may not be its ideal, but it is its destiny. It is far the most dramatic social fact of our time, and if some man of creative imagination were to seize upon it, he would find in it the material of that great American novel which after so much travail has not yet seen the light. 

This "dramatic social fact" was precisely James's forte, the central issue of his best-known works (including Daisy Miller). As an interesting aside, one cannot but think that Howells, aware as he was of James's body of work by 1899, is implying that James had essentially failed to write 4the "great American novel" that would capture this great issue of their time. 

In any case, the review certainly reveals that James and Veblen shared similar views of the American leisured class, and both analyzed and satirized it in their own ways, within their respective disciplines. Even James's early fiction and social satire anticipate many of Veblen’s views on the same subject. Both were reacting against the values of the Gilded Age and their attendant problems (see Dietrich son 238). The wealth consumed lavishly in external status­ symbols and the emergence of strict, bourgeois-derived codes of decorum cried out for both artistic and scientific treatments as a human, economic, and social phenomenon. 

II. Daisy Miller: Pecuniary Strength versus Pecuniary Reputability

Daisy Miller has been widely read and often dissected along the lines of class conflict, the difficulties of the nouveau riche, and the mores of the Old World versus the New World.  Though it predates Veblen's Leisure Class by twenty years, it certainly has all the Veblenian ingredients: class, wealth, and plenty of leisure to work with. Relevant themes from Veblen include the socioeconomic construction of manners, morals, taste, dress, and education, all of which are prominent in Daisy Miller. We can read the novella as confirmation of Veblen's later analysis; it is, after all, based on the same cultural observations. 

The two major classes in the novella are the expatriate Americans, who have assumed the European "tone," and the visiting, nouveau riche Americans. Winterbourne is one of the long­ Europeanized Americans, a member of the expatriate leisure class. We find him at the beginning sitting in the hotel garden, "looking about him, rather idly," at the various people (but particularly the well-dressed young girls) whom he regards as "graceful objects," aesthetic commodities for his consumption. His aunt is a member of the same class, even perhaps of a higher stratum than he; she initiates him into the complexities of the New York hierarchy and continually instructs him about proper exclusiveness. She herself is highly "exclusive," showing the typical leisure-class propensity to defend its boundaries through finer and finer discrimination against any behaviors and attitudes that even hint at industrial connections. 

The Millers have recently joined the leisure class (even their name betrays ancestral labor), but they have not yet had sufficient leisure to learn its codes and passwords. The story may be read as a discourse between those with knowledge of the leisure-class sign-system (the conspicuous proofs of leisure) and those without it. Randolph has not yet learned the proper ways to express pecuniary reputability and reverts to overt expression: "He's got a big business.  My father's rich, you bet!" Later in Rome he proclaims, "We've got a bigger place than this [. . . .] It's all gold on the walls." Randolph voices on the linguistic level what more cultured persons express using wordless, external signs of conspicuous consumption. Daisy and her mother are more advanced in this sign-system than Randolph, but their knowledge remains tragically inadequate. 

Mr. Miller is still in business in New York, as we learn from Randolph's comment early on, but he is striving in exactly the way Veblen described to increase his own and his household's pecuniary reputability through the vicarious consumption and leisure of his wife and children. They consume conspicuously for him, not only through their expensive tastes, but through their extended European tour. To take such a tour was a common badge or initiation of the newly-leisured American, a crucial step in the acquisition of "culture," a purgation of the stain of industry in their past. 

Even the "old" American wealth, as Howells pointed out, had such a lingering sense of the inferiority of its working past that European tours or permanent residence were similarly required. There is a smaller gulf, then, between the established expatriate society and the Millers than one would at first expect. Perhaps the ferocity of the former's rejection of the latter stems from the submerged consciousness of this delicate demarcation. In the Millers, the established class to which Winterbourne, Mrs. Costello, and Mrs. Walker belong sees the image of its inglorious industrial past and its home country's industrial present, and will do everything possible to separate itself vehemently from it. After Daisy's misbehavior, "They ceased to invite her; and they intimated that they desired to express to observant Europeans the great truth that, though Miss Daisy Miller was a young American lady, her behavior was not representative-was regarded by her compatriots as abnorma1." Their national identity puts the seasoned expatriates in a precarious social position, so they seek to shed that identity. America as a nation and culture had retained the awareness of its growth through democracy and the Puritan work ethic, yet kept the vestigial values and hierarchies of the "barbaric" (to use Veblen's term) feudal-aristocratic Europe. As Howells saw, the American leisure class inevitably realized that it had more affinity with "monarchial" Europe than its own American roots, and thus naturally pursued "aristocratisation.” 

Apart from mere tours or absenteeism, members of the American leisure class often went so far as to solidify their new connection by marriage, just as old European families sought to shore up their failing estates with new American wealth-thus the "regular Roman fortune hunters" described by Mrs. Walker. The Millers, though, as Winterbourne points out, are so newly "made" that they have not yet discovered, or desired, this outcome: "'It is very true,' Winterbourne pursued, 'that Daisy and her mamma have not yet risen to that stage of-what shall I call it?-of culture at which the idea of catching a count or a marchese begins. I believe that they are intellectually incapable of that conception.”’ 

The main concern of the Daisy Miller is the evaluations and counter-evaluations which the two major classes--or factions within one American leisure class-make against one another. The primary weapons in this conflict are the traditional badges of the leisure class: taste (particularly dress), education, manners, and morals. 

Veblen spends an entire chapter of TOTLC explaining the role of clothes in conspicuous consumption and leisure. He explains in his usual pithy manner: "Our dress, therefore, in order to serve its purpose effectually, should not only be expensive, but it should also make plain to all observers that the wearer is not engaged in any kind of productive labor." Clothes which are not only expensive but very impractical perform a dual function: display of wealth and proof that the wearer has leisure. Veblen goes on to argue that in modem urban societies, conspicuous consumption of external, immediately visible goods such as clothing, jewelry, and various accessories gain great importance as class markers because they are immediately visible and allow quick judgments. In rural societies, "everybody's affairs, especially everybody's pecuniary status, are known to everybody else," but in urban societies, people form few intimaterelationships but make the acquaintance of large numbers of people. Thus in the towns and cities it becomes increasingly imperative to offer immediate, clear proof of one's pecuniary reputability. Veblen summarizes, "In order to impress these transient observers, and to retain one's self-complacency under their observation, the signature of one's pecuniary strength should be written in characters which he who runs may read." 

This theme of dress permeates the text of Daisy Miller. The scene at Vevey is notable for "a flitting hither and thither of 'stylish' young girls, [and] a rustling of muslin flounces." The first details James records about Daisy are her clothes: "She was dressed in white muslin, with a hundred frills and flounces, and knots of pale-colored ribbon. She was bareheaded, but she balanced in her hand a large parasol, with a deep border of embroidery [. . .]." Winterbourne responds exactly as Veblen would predict by assigning her immediately to a class or type with the plural pronoun: "How pretty they are" (emphasis added). Throughout their first interview, Daisy is constantly arranging and adjusting her clothing as if she were aware of their semiotic function, and Winterbourne (the narration is focalized on him) is certainly aware of it: "[she]glanced over the front of her dress and smoothed out a knot or two of ribbon"; "inspected her flounces and smoothed her ribbons again"; "looking at the embroidered border"; "her extremely pretty hands, ornamented with very brilliant rings"; "she had had ever so many dresses and things from Paris"; "She put up her parasol" and "she moved away, drawing her muslin furbelows over the gravel."Her Paris dresses make Daisy feel as if she were in Europe; she openly desires to emulate the European leisure class. Under her and Winterbourne’s superficial verbal conversation, another exchange is occurring at a different semiotic level. In the costliness and "conspicuous waste" of ribbons, flounces, multiple rings, and embroidery, she proclaims her father's pecuniary strength, and Winterbourne reads every nuance. Even her "pretty hands" are signs of leisure, and her careless dragging of the bottom of her dress on the gravel reveals a complete assurance of its easy replacement. Later on, Winterbourne finds that her mother has acquired a similar competence in fashion: "like her daughter, [she] was dressed with extreme elegance." When Daisy meets Winterbourne to go to Chillon the following day, again the first thing he notices is again her attire: "She came tripping downstairs, buttoning her long gloves, squeezing her folded parasol against her pretty figure, dressed in the perfection of a soberly elegant traveling costume." All of this is not lost on Mrs. Costello: "She has that charming look that they all have [. . . .] I can't think where they pick it up; and she dresses in perfection-no, you don't know how well she dresses. I can't think where they get their taste."

           If the Millers' fashion sense is impeccable, their intellectual progress leaves much to be desired. In subtle and overt ways throughout the text, James highlights the intellectual culture gap which obtains between the new and old American leisure classes, and the manner in which signs of cultural acquisition are proffered and read in the communication between them. Veblen too believed that educational standards, like fashion, are the result of, and subsequently signifiers of, economic status. The attainment of cultured learning in the useless humanities ("esoteric knowledge" in Veblen) is very good proof of leisure and pecuniary reputability. He states in the final chapter of TOTLC that

It is noticeable that the humanities [. . .] are pretty uniformly adapted to shape the character of the student in accordance with a traditional self-centred scheme of consumption; a scheme of contemplation and enjoyment of the true, the beautiful, and the good, according to a conventional standard of propriety and excellence, the salient feature of which is leisure [. . .]. 

Winterbourne, of course, embodies most completely this "self-centred scheme of consumption." The whole pretext of his continued presence in Europe is that he is pursuing his studies (double entendre notwithstanding). Significantly, Veblen notes that while in America the study of the classics has begun to be rivaled by the sciences and industrial education, in turn-of-the-century Europe they still reigned over other disciplines. Winterbourne, true to his "aristocratised" class, has gone where he may most purely study the subjects proper to his class. He is able to discourse at length to Daisy about the castle of Chillon and later alludes to Hannibal. His speech, too, is cultivated in the extreme, making him sound stiff and formal to Daisy as well as the modem reader. In a moment of delightful irony, she even mistakes him for a German, as if his language gave him away as a non-native speaker of English. At the end of the novel he finds his solace in returning to the beginning, going back to his "studies." Winterbourne is not only a student of traditional subjects: "He had a great relish for feminine beauty; he was addicted to observing and analyzing it." Whether his studies are intellectual or sexual, their leisured character is the essential point.

Mrs. Walker provides another example of leisured education. She is "one of those American ladies who, while residing abroad, make a point, in their own phrase, of studying European society" and generally is "a very accomplished woman." As a woman, she is educated appropriately for her sex with, in Veblen's words, "such accomplishments and dexterity, quasi­ scholarly and quasi-artistic, as plainly come in under the head of a performance of vicarious leisure." The point of a woman's education in the leisure class is to prove her leisure, thus reflecting well on the head of the household whose wealth makes such leisure possible.

           Mrs. Walker is a foil for Daisy, who is too rich to need an education in the domestic arts and yet apparently also has not studied the proper curriculum of a leisured female. In this as in so many other ways, she and her family have fallen between classes. Very early in his acquaintance with them, Winterbourne seems interested in their attainments in this area by inquiring about the state of Randolph's learning, but if he is looking for signs of proper education, he is sorely disappointed. He learns that Randolph's education is a highly desultory affair, a patchwork of various tutors who fail to restrain or discipline him in any way. He is supposedly "going to college," but we have no idea whether he will succeed or what subjects he will study. The Millers know that they should, as leisured people, pursue a corresponding education, but they have not done so. Mrs. Miller's benign and astounding ignorance and apathy continually surprise Winterbourne, and Daisy's innocence is matched by a distinct lack of intellectual accomplishments. When Winterbourne asks if they are going over the Simplon into Italy, she replies, "I don't know [. . . .] I suppose it's some mountain." She responds flippantly to his discourse at Chillon: "Well, I hope you know enough! [. . . .] I never saw a man that knew so much!" The narrator, and apparently Winterbourne, are condescending: "The history of Bonivard had evidently, as they say, gone into one ear and out of the other." When they arrive at Rome, Daisy and her family fail to appreciate its cultural and artistic value: "Well, I must say I am disappointed," declares Daisy. "We had heard so much about it; I suppose we had heard too much. But we couldn't help that. We had been led to expect something different." And again, "I was sure we should be going round all the time with one of those dreadful old men that explain about the pictures and things." One can almost feel Winterbourne wince. The Millers have failed to attain a level of refinement which even the skillful imitator Giovanelli, who sings beautifully and speaks perfect English, has reached. 

Language is a key part of this educational gap and a metaphor for all the semiotic exchanges which occur between the Millers and the true leisure class. Veblen argues that standards in language are an example of leisure-class exclusiveness in the same way fashion and manners are. In his final chapter on higher education he writes specifically of correct spelling:  "English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection." Correctness and formality of diction are similar "canons." The Millers' speech is full of colloquialism and informality: "I guess," "I ain't," "he's real tiresome," "she's always blowing at me," "What are you doing, poking around here," and so on. Randolph's pronunciation is "peculiar" and he has "rough ends to his words." When Winterbourne apologizes rather wordily for having delayed coming to Rome, Daisy exclaims, "Just hear him say that! [. . . .] Did you ever hear anything so quaint?" Her and her family's language is not explicitly commented upon by other characters, but James has carefully made it clear enough that the Millers have not been initiated into the exclusive discourse of the true leisured class. The signs of their inglorious industrial roots remain on them, painfully obvious to all, whenever they open their mouths. 

If their intellectual education is lacking, their social education is in far worse condition.  As Mrs. Costello explains to her nephew, they lack the critical knowledge of manners and decorum which is essential proof of the true leisure class. Good taste extends beyond fashion and intellectual refinement to good manners, decorum, morals, and of course appropriate exclusiveness. McCormack puts it dryly: "despite their frequent lack of real jobs, James's characters do work, but the products of their labor are their social personae" ("Semiotics" 541).  Veblen describes the socioeconomic derivation of manners and decorum in chapter 3 of TOTLC:  "The origin, or better the derivation, of manners is no doubt, to be sought elsewhere than in a conscious effort on the part of the well-mannered to show that much time has been spent in acquiring them." Later in chapter 4 he argues that "manners and breeding, polite usage, decorum, and formal and ceremonial observances generally [. . . .] are [. . .] imperatively insisted on as required evidences of a reputable degree of leisure." The incongruity and tragedy of the Millers and others like them is that they have yet to transform their pecuniary strength into pecuniary reputability. Caught between the working class and the leisure class, they have no acceptable identity and will become "helpless victims of the exchange system" in which individuals profit by "market[ing] their valuable assets, such as beauty, intelligence, culture, nobility, or money itself' (McCormack Rule 9).   

Winterbourne immediately perceives that he and Daisy do not share the same behavioral sign-system and he struggles to understand the correct manner in which to regulate his relationship with her: "It seemed to Winterbourne that he had been in a manner presented"; "Poor Winterbourne was amused, perplexed, and decidedly charmed"; and "he wondered what were the regular conditions and limitations of one's intercourse with a pretty American flirt." His aunt, though, knows exactly what to make of the Millers: "They are very common." She cannot believe that they treat their courier like an equal, and derisively assumes from this that "very likely they have never seen a man with such good manners, such fine clothes, so like a gentleman. He probably corresponds to the young lady's idea of a count." Later she writes Winterbourne from Rome to inform him of Daisy's appalling lack of exclusiveness; she is "very intimate with some third-rate Italians." Finally Winterbourne himself comes to the conclusion that he cannot "regard her as a perfectly well-conducted young lady; she [is] wanting in a certain indispensable delicacy" and that he "need no longer be at pains to respect" her. 

Daisy, on the other hand, is at first completely unaware that her behavior is incongruous, and moreover aspires to all the social knowledge of her new class. She "like[s] a gentleman to be formal" and she is "dying to be exclusive" (in which the reader sees a darkly ironic pun).  When she arrives in Rome she confides in Winterbourne that "the society's extremely select," deluding herself that she is a full participant in it. Her mother, dim though she is, knows that she must acquire a conspicuous knowledge of protocol: "Mrs. Miller was humbly unconscious of any violation of the usual social forms. She appeared, indeed, to have felt an incongruous impulse to draw attention to her own striking observance of them." When Daisy does perceive the real state of affairs, she refuses to change. Even early in the story, she suspects the gap between herself and Winterbourne along with the European society he represents: "I suppose you don't think it's proper! [. . . .] Eugenio doesn't think anything's proper." More strikingly, she rebuffs Mrs. Walker, even while her laugh seems to reveal a nervous self-consciousness: "Daisy gave a violent laugh. 'I never heard anything so stiff!  If this is improper, Mrs. Walker,' she pursued, 'then 1 am all improper, and you must give me up. ", She rejects the badge of the true leisure class, and the leisure class rejects her. Her social transgression is tantamount to moral transgression. Mrs. Costello sees no useful distinction between the two: "Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being 'bad' is a question for the metaphysicians." 

Indeed, all of the various signs being read and interpreted in the story are but different denominations of the same economic coins. As Veblen argues, "the comparison made in these respects [moral, physical, intellectual, or aesthetic] is commonly so inextricably bound up with the pecuniary comparison as to be scarcely distinguishable from the latter." In the Veblenian perspective, the morals of the leisure class are yet another badge or shibboleth to mark their territory, to exclude. Furthermore, the inherent conservatism, moral and political, of that class is merely the result of their sheltered circumstances: they do not feel the pecuniary pressures which are optimizing the lower levels of the society for future survival. From this point of view, the true tragedy of Daisy Miller is that Daisy is sacrificed to standards which, when examined deeply, are utterly petty, superficial, and anachronistic. She is a victim of the "process that transforms hollow codes into the unassailable symbols of the merits of bourgeois society" (Graham 44).   

II. "The Jolly Comer": Haunted by the Instinct of Workmanship 

The leisured expatriates in Daisy Miller drove Daisy away because she offered a persistent reminder of their own industrial (i.e., disreputable) roots. Almost thirty years after writing that story, James returned to that theme with a vengeance with "The Jolly Comer." The inspiration for the story is doubtless autobiographical; James wrote it after returning to America in 1904 after a twenty-year residence abroad-a situation similar to that of the protagonist, Spencer Brydon. Brydon is aging and is struggling with regret for his misspent life abroad; he has "neglected everything," has lived with an "averted mind," and discovers that what he thought was a liberal outlook is actually quite provincial. The only thing of "value" he seems to have acquired is a delicate cultural sensibility. Brydon, like James in The American Scene,[2] is continually surprised and shocked at the ugliness and "monstrosity" of his rapidly-growing home country, which creates a story-worthy drama and tension. Lawrence Holland, in a commentary on The American Scene, writes that the modem cityscape "revealed [. . .] to James (as to Veblen) [. . . .] a social drama in preparation if not in progress: 'the great adventure of a society reaching out into the apparent void'" (Holland 64). The "differences, the newnesses, the queenesses, [and] above all the bignesses, for the better or the worse" of America as compared to Europe continually "assault" his refined sensibility. "Proportions and values [are] upside-down" for Brydon, which is not surprising considering the sheltered, aristocratic values he has absorbed overseas. Like an aged Winterbourne, he is even more "dishabituated to the American tone," alienated from the cultural values and aesthetics of a modem industrial nation. His only sanctuary is with his only friend Alice Staverton, whose house forms a sort of refuge against the busyness/business outside, "a small still scene" amid "the mere gross generalisation of wealth and force and success." 

Incidentally, James highlights this disconnect of values and meanings with the unusual, and at times obtrusive, narrative device of putting quote marks around words which signal the incongruity between American values and Brydon's leisure-class values. Brydon has returned from "Europe" to look at his "property"; one property is not as "good" as the other, more quaint/aristocratic one; he is shocked at the "swagger" of modem New York; his "work" is overseeing the renovation of his property; and so on in many more instances. The device reveals James's desire to distance himself from certain idiomatic usages, or to put an ironic ambiguity into otherwise innocuous terms. In this way he voices Brydon's inner awareness of finding himself, somewhat like an inverted Daisy Miller, between two identities and systems of value. 

Brydon has been living in Europe off of the rents of two properties in New York, both of an "original excellent type"-one his now-empty, beautiful, spacious childhood home, and the other a house which he is reconstructing as a tall apartment building. He discovers that he enjoys overseeing the project and that he has a knack for business and getting his hands dirty: 

[He found] himself able, [. . .] to participate with a certain intelligence, almost with a certain authority. He [. . .] scarce knew what to make of this lively stir, in a compartment of his mind never yet penetrated, of a capacity for business and a sense for construction.  These virtues, so common all round him now, had been dormant in his own organism [. . . and] he loafed about his "work" undeterred, secretly agitated; not in the least "minding" that the whole proposition, as they said, was vulgar and sordid [. . .]. 

Surprised by his own skill, he is strangely attracted to the active life of work and industry, and wonders how he might have turned out had he pursued it instead of the life of leisure. He finds he does not share the leisure-class opinion (the origins of which are explained in Veblen) that work is undignified or dishonorable; the narrator dubs his newfound skills "virtues." His resulting dilemma is the result of what Veblen called the "instinct of workmanship"-the lingering sense, even among members of the leisure class, that waste and futility are evils and that productivity is to be admired. Veblen argued that in modem times, conspicuous leisure has become less important while conspicuous consumption has become more so. Because of this, the instinct of workmanship asserts itself more strongly, and the leisure class finds ways in which to busy itself: "Ostensibly purposeless leisure has come to be deprecated, especially among that large portion of the leisure class whose plebeian origin acts to set them at variance with the tradition of the otium cum dignitate." Often this busyness takes the form of clubs, social duties, sports, and so on. Brydon "loaf[s] about his 'work"'-the paradox and ironic quote marks indicating that he is indulging to some extent in what Veblen calls "make-believe" industriousness. 

The essential point is that Brydon's taste of work precipitates an identity crisis which nearly costs him his sanity. He becomes obsessed with his other self-the self which he would have become had he chosen business over leisure-even to the point of personalizing it and calling it "he" as if it were an active agent in the real world. This psychological breakdown is James's powerful critique of the leisure class, and possibly self-critique as well, in this story.  Brydon's two conflicting identities come to be represented by the two houses. The old family house, the 'jolly comer," is spacious and aesthetically pleasing, and represents Brydon's leisure­ class identity. The house is unoccupied at the time of the story-a conspicuous waste of space­ and this emptiness seems to recall Brydon's sense that his life has been wasted in leisure. The other house is being rebuilt as new, raw, and modem; Brydon is involved in its construction; and its sole purpose is not aesthetics but a larger income. Alice puts her finger on the irony of his double values: "In short you're to make so good a thing of your sky-scraper that, living in luxury on those ill-gotten gains, you can afford for a while to be sentimental here!" The skyscraper­ builder and landlord of "ill-gotten gains" is his industrial self, a glimpse of what he might have been.  

When Alice confirms his sense of a wasted "gift," Brydon must discover how different a man he could have been without leisure: "I might have been, by staying here, something nearer to one of these types who have been hammered so hard and made so keen by their conditions. It isn't that 1 admire them [. . .] it's only a question of what fantastic, yet perfectly possible, development of my own nature 1 mayn't have missed." This echoes Veblen's point that the leisure class is sheltered from natural selection, while the working class is shaped by its conditions to be fit for survival. Brydon feels out of shape, out of touch with the real world, and perhaps is insecure about his own capacity for survival. He and Alice assert that his alternative development would have been splendid but monstrous, but he is not satisfied with that denial. 

His crisis builds to an extent that he feels he must go on a quest to find this other, ghostly self, this doppelganger, and he seeks it in the old, empty family house. Symbolically, he is going on a quest within the dark chambers of himself, trying to know whether within his own character there is room for an identity stained with business and industry. He makes this "quaint analogy" himself, elaborating it further with the metaphor of opening a door and finding himself confronted with a "presence." He begins walking the old house at night, and finally he seems to find what he is looking for-some kind of confrontation with his potential self, the representative of "the achieved, the enjoyed, the triumphant life." His vision is detailed: the figure is expensively dressed but "grizzled" and stands there with his hands over his face. Two fingers on one hand are missing. Finally, the apparition drops his hands, and what Brydon sees appalls him:  Horror, with the sight, had leaped into Brydon's throat [. . .] for the bared identity was too hideous as his, and his glare was the passion of his protest. The face, that face, Spencer Brydon's?-he searched it still, but look[ed] away from it in dismay and denial [. . .]." 

He feels "sold" in a double sense, shocked at his sell-out self and feeling cheated that this pitiful creature is the goal of his quest. In short, he remains true to his leisure class identity. He cannot fathom losing that identity for the ignoble one of business, so he creates "ghost" of the other possible identity and makes it so grotesque that he can finally convince himself that he has made the right choices all along, and that he can reasonably suppress and escape the instinct of workmanship which has tortured him. James, of course, cannot resist problematizing the true existence of the ghost by having Alice profess to have seen the same figure, identical in all its details, at the same moment in a dream; however, we may safely interpret the ghost as the neat, self-vindicating disposal of Brydon's identity crisis, his and Alice's affirmation of his leisure­ class values. The tale ends as Alice professes her love for the real Brydon, her pity for his double, and affirms his present self with all his faults: "And he isn't-no, he isn't-you!" 

III. Conclusion: James as Leisured Critic 

Naturally this study is incomplete in its depth and its breadth, but its premise is easily extensible to these stories and others by James. Veblen's categories provide profitable, contemporary avenues to approach James's work, and the two stories treated here are but two samples of an immense and complex fictional legacy. Daisy Miller and "The Jolly Comer," an early story and a late one, serve as representatives of the whole project of his fiction, which was to record and often criticize the effects of wealth and leisure-effects complicated by transatlantic cultural differences and exchanges. 

Veblen's theories illuminate not only James's world and work, but to some extent  James himself at work. As one critic has written,

           Veblen's text portrays with considerable accuracy the manners and mores of
           the world from which James wrote [. . .] the bulk of his fiction. James's make-
           believe of earning an income foreshadows Veblen's recognition of how what
           he calls 'the instinct of  workmanship' comes to replace the standard of
           'conspicuous leisure' as means of determining repute and value within the
           shifts of a consumer culture. (Bell 47) 

James himself came from a leisure-class family and his life and art were profoundly affected by it. Donald Mull, in a study of money in James's fiction, argues that the James family wealth "was the means whereby [the] children would be liberated from the need to make money and hence from the worldly sense of success, the business imagination; and whereby they would be free to cultivate that other imagination." And again, "the background which the family wealth provided him allowed the observational and imaginative powers of the young James to operate at maximal intensity and to register that sense of life which he would later convert into art" (11).

           The debt his art owed to leisure casts some measure of doubt on the objectivity and depth of James's criticisms. The two samples chosen for this study reveal that James's apparent critique of the leisure class may not be as vehement as is often supposed. Daisy Miller is noted as one of his most powerful critiques of leisure-class values and Daisy is often read as an independently-minded social rebel. For what it is worth, this was not exactly James's intent. He wrote in a letter to Eliza Linton in August 1880 that Daisy ''was a flirt, a perfectly superficial and unmalicious one," "she never really tried to take her revenge upon public opinion-to outrage and irritate it," and "she was not defiant" (Edel170; emphasis original). The tragedy seems to lie neither in her innocence nor in the social forms which censure her, but in the unfortunate accident of fate which brought the two into tragic proximity. Similarly, while the industrious life is described positively in "The Jolly Comer," its outcome is seen as grotesque and dehumanizing, and the story rather weakly concludes by affirming Brydon as he is rather than what he could have been. James's aesthetic sense stands ultimately as a product of his class, preventing him from attaining full realism, and thoroughgoing social commentary, in his fiction.

 
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Holland, Laurence Bedwell. The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry
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_____. "The Jolly Comer." Project Gutenberg e-text edition. Text of the Martin
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 _____."The Semiotics of Economic Language in James's Fiction." American
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