from our pre-reading questions on Moodle: 

  • James wrote this short story in the late Victorian era. Some things that are associated with this era: increased consumer culture, the mass reproduction of images/art, the rise of advertising, and the decline of aristocracy. As you read, you might think about what the short story expresses about the artist in capitalism, the representation of character/personality in art, class (the Monarchs come from aristocratic ways of life, the narrator-artist is middle class-ish, his other models are working class), labor, notions of exteriority and interiority, and anything else that strikes you as interesting. 
  • "The Real Thing" is told from a first-person ("I") perspective. How/why does this matter? 

and more questions to ponder, now that you've read the story: 

  • Who is the narrator? What do we know about him? What anxieties and concerns can we trace? 
  • How is artistic vision conceptualized in the story?
  • What does the narrator mean by "the real thing"? (You might locate various places where this phrase appears in the story and close read these moments.) 
  • How might we think about Major Monarch's claim that "We've got to do something" (241)? And repeated later on the same page: "It's very awkward, but we absolutely must do something" (241).