James's Pictorialism -- Picture and Scene

Hugh Witemeyer, Professor of English, University of New Mexico

Note 37 to Chapter 4 of the author's George Eliot and the Visual Arts, which Yale University Press published in a 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

By "picture" James did not mean passages rich in descriptive visual detail; rather, he meant nondramatic narrative passages centered in the consciousness of a single character. See Winner, "Pictorialism in Henry James's Theory of the Novel," pp. 1415, and Peter K. Garrett, Scene and Symbol from George Eliot to James Joyce: Studies in Changing Fictional Modes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 11.

Last modified 20 September 2000