‘The Hard Worldly Basis’: History and Infrastructure in Henry James's ‘Julia Bride’

Abstract

“Julia Bride” is a narrative haunted by the “disgusting humiliating thing” implied in the disreputable lives the protagonist and her mother have led. Their shared scandalous history is described as a “superstructure raised on the other group of facts”. Julia aims at social absolution—the overcoming of all the infrastructural determinants that map out the nether regions of the humiliating, humble and abased—what the narrator calls “the hard worldly basis.” The story is thus told from the perspective of a keen consciousness—shared by author and protagonist—of the basis-superstructure polarity, a central dialectical motif in Marxian thought. “Julia Bride” emerges as an illustration of James’s dialectical attempt to depict high-class consciousness as a superstructural phenomenological dynamic beholden to the apprehensive elimination (sublation) of factual life. But repressed History always returns, with a (ghostly) vengeance: the image of Dickens’ Nancy in Central Park epitomizes the shocks of dialectical survival.