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The Figure in the Carpet

plot, characters, critical comment, further reading

The Figure in the Carpet (1896) is one of a number of stories James wrote in his later years which deal with issues of authorship, writing, and literary reputation. The tale has baffled critics ever since it first appeared. Some commentators claim that it’s a satire of literary criticism, others that it’s no more than a literary joke, and just a few readers claim that it is a profound exploration of literary hermeneutics – which is ‘the study of the interpretation of written texts’.

Plot summary

An un-named literary critic feels he has successfully reviewed the latest work of Hugh Vereker, a distinguished novelist. But when he meets the author in person at a social event, Vereker tells him that whilst the review is intelligent, he has missed the hidden underlying issue which informs all of his writing. The narrator presses him to reveal the nature of this mystery, but Vereker refuses, claiming that it will be self-evident in any close reading of his work.

The narrator enlists the support of his friend, the writer George Corvick, in the search for this hidden key. The hunt also entails novelist Gwendolen Erme, to whom Corvick is engaged but whose mother is opposed to the match. None of them succeeds in uncovering the secret pattern, but when Corvick goes to India with a commission for journalistic work, he writes back to announce that he has discovered the secret.

When pressed for information, he says he will only reveal the secret after he has married Gwendolen. He then visits Vereker in Italy on his way back to London, and we are given every reason to believe that Vereker confirms Corvick’s solution to the mystery. Corvick then begins to write the definitive interpretation of Vereker’s works.

Gwendolen’s mother dies, and Corvick’s wedding takes place, but he is killed in an accident on his honeymoon. When the narrator appeals to his widow for the key to the mystery, she refuses to divulge anything. It transpires that Corvick’s study of Vereker’s work is no more than a few introductory pages which reveal nothing.

The narrator is so sure that Corvick will have revealed the secret to Gwendolen that he contemplates marrying her to get at the information, but she meanwhile publishes another book and marries fellow novelist Drayton Deane, who the narrator perceives as a literary and social rival. But Gwendolen then dies in childbirth, leaving the narrator to appeal to Drayton Deane, asking if she has passed on to him the key to the mystery. She has not, and they are both left to contemplate the fact that they will never find it.

Principal characters

Study resources

The Figure in the Carpet – Oxford World Classics edition

The Figure in the Carpet – Penguin Classics edition

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle eBook edition

The Figure in the Carpet – free audio book

The Figure in the Carpet – free eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Commentary and notes

The question of interpretation

It is generally agreed that The Figure in the Carpet is one of James’s more baffling stories. We naturally would like to know exactly what ‘secrets’ Vereker has embedded in his work, just as the narrator would. But he is thwarted in that hope, and so are we.

It’s possible to see the tale as a critique of literary criticism – since that is the narrator’s occupation. He sees Vereker’s work as a means of advancing his own reputation as a critic, and he views his friend Corvick and the latecomer Drayton Deane as threatening rivals.

In this approach to reading the story, James is taking revenge on lazy literary critics who are not prepared to study an author’s work in sufficient depth, but are only interested in advancing their own celebrity and careers. The narrator spends most of his efforts trying to extract the ‘secret’ from other people, instead of doing the work himself. At the end of the story he is no wiser, and the implication of this reading is that the literary joke is on him. This view can be supported by the initial ideas James recorded for the tale in his notebooks:

the lively impulse, at the root of it, to reinstate analytic appreciation, by some ironic or fantastic stroke, so far as possible, in its virtually forfeited rights and dignities.

In fact the ‘literary hoax’ interpretation could be taken even further if we posit the notion that Vereker, as an intelligent novelist, actually invents the idea of a hidden meaning in his work in order to tease the narrator.

The literary joke

Vereker makes an eloquent claim for the hidden meaning in his work, but he refuses to say what it is. The remainder of the story is focused on the narrator’s fruitless search for an answer to the mystery. This reading of the story sees the narrator as a gullible dupe.

First we might observe that Vereker’s claim is itself a fictional construct. There is no way a reader can know if it is true or not – because we have no examples of Vereker’s work with which to form a judgement. Covington’s subsequent claim to have discovered the secret is also part of the fiction. His word too is something whose veracity cannot be checked – even though the events of the text include Vereker’s apparent endorsement of Covington’s claim. The fact that two fictional characters might agree on the existence of a ‘secret meaning’ does not mean that such a meaning exists.

Those who wish to see the story as a literary joke might also observe that having apparently established the discovery of the hidden secret, the narrator is then tantalised, to an almost ridiculous extent, by his failure to drag the secret from the hands of those claiming to have grasped it.

In fact the very three people who claim to know the answer to the mystery (Vereker, Covington, and Gwendolen) all die in rapid succession, just as the narrator thinks he might learn the secret from them. He is left at the end of the story staring into the void, having also infected the hapless Drayton Deane with his belief in the mystery..

The face value interpretation

It is also possible to take the fictional claims made in the story at face value. Vereker claims his work has an ‘exquisite scheme’, but refuses to reveal it; and Covington claims to have discovered the secret, but dies before explaining what it is.

If we take this to be true, the story becomes a psychological study in the Narrator’s self-regard and egotism, which blinds him to the nature of events and the people with whom he is concerned.

Vereker warns him not to go off in pursuit of the ‘buried treasure’ in his work – “Give it up, give it up!” – to which the narrator responds by accusing him of being ‘a man of unstable moods’. If we follow the narrator’s comments closely, he reveals himself as a dubious judge who is also full of self-congratulation.

When Covington at first fails to uncover the ‘figure in the carpet’ the narrator observes ‘I considered I showed magnanimity in not reproaching him’. And when Covington goes to visit Vereker, he comments ‘We pictured the whole scene at Rapollo, where he would have written , mentioning my name, for permission to call’.

After spending more time with Gwendolen both before and after Covington’s death, he finds her much improved, ‘showing, I thought the better company she had kept’ (which can only be a reference to himself). Finally, he quite cynically contemplates the idea of marrying her just in the hope of gaining access to the mystery, which he thinks might be transmitted naturally enough from husband to wife. But he is so far detached from the emotional sphere of human relations, he speculates on Covington revealing the literary mystery to Gwendolen, and wonders ‘For what else but that ceremony had the nuptials taken place?’.

The narrator is left at the end of the story with no resolution to the mystery, and more importantly no further insight into himself and the limitations of his sensibility. This is a satirical version of the outcome of stories such as The Beast in the Jungle in which a narrator blinded by egoism realises that his life has been futile.

Story or tale?

Very few of James’s stories are short by modern standards, and the fact is that he called them tales, not stories. But as short fictions, they are usually judged by the same criteria as most stories – from Edgar Allen Poe to Maupassant, Checkhov, Joyce, and Woolf.

Poe suggested that a short story is something that can be read at one sitting, and that all its interest is focused onto a single issue. To these unities there have since been added unity of theme, time, imagery, place, character. In other words, short stories are at their best when they are as concentrated and unified as possible.

It could be argued that The Figure in the Carpet certainly focuses attention on one issue – the pursuit of a mystery – and has one principal character – the narrator. But these features are overwhelmed by something of a superfluity of incident. The story contains two marriages and no less than four deaths, on all of which the narrative depends – which is too much for even a short tale to bear.

It also has a singular lack of geographic unity. The story moves from London to Bombay, then on to Munich, Rapallo, and Meran before returning to London. It is certainly something of a mystery, but not a carefully unified whole.

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

F.W. Dupee, Henry James: Autobiography, Princeton University Press, 1983.

Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, HarperCollins, 1985.

Philip Horne (ed), Henry James: A Life in Letters, Viking/Allen Lane, 1999.

Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

F.O. Matthieson (ed), The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Critical commentary

Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James London: Macmillan Press, 1983.

Ian F.A. Bell, Henry James and the Past, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993.

Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1993.

Harold Bloom (ed), Modern Critical Views: Henry James, Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, Macmillan, 2010.

J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks (eds), The Wings of the Dove, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978.

Victoria Coulson, Henry James, Women and Realism, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Daniel Mark Fogel, A Companion to Henry James Studies, Greenwood Press, 1993.

Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James’s American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas, Madison (Wis): University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Jonathan Freedman, The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Judith Fryer, The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976

Roger Gard (ed), Henry James: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1968.

Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Barbara Hardy, Henry James: The Later Writing (Writers & Their Work), Northcote House Publishers, 1996.

Richard A. Hocks, Henry James: A study of the short fiction, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Donatella Izzo, Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James, University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Colin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2009

John Pearson (ed), The Prefaces of Henry James, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Richard Poirer, The Comic Sense of Henry James, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Merle A. Williams, Henry James and the Philosophical Novel, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Judith Woolf, Henry James: The Major Novels, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Ruth Yeazell (ed), Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, Longmans, 1994.

a Henry James manuscript

This is an example of what’s called ‘criss cross’ writing. To save paper, and because the postal service once charged by the sheet, many people wrote their letters in two directions on the page, perpendicularly to each other. It was not unusual to use both sides of the page, and thus get four pages of writing onto one sheet of paper.

The writing is not so difficult to read as you might imagine. We are accustomed to reading English language from left to right and from top to bottom on the page. Writing going in another direction becomes like ‘wallpaper’ in the background.

Other work by Henry James

Washington Square (1880) is a superb early short novel – the tale of a young girl whose future happiness is being controlled by her strict authoritarian father. She has a handsome young suitor – but the father disapproves of him. There is a battle of wills – all conducted within the confines of their elegant town house. Who wins out in the end? You will be surprised by the outcome. This is a masterpiece of social commentary, with a sensitive picture of a woman’s life.

The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.

The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. She develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go exactly according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against selfless high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.

Roderick Hudson (1876) was the first of James’s novels to be published in book form. It’s the story of a young man transplanted from a lawyer’s office in Massachusetts to a sculptor’s studio in Rome. Unable to make the adjustment between the new world and the old, he fails in both art and love, and meets a tragic end in Switzerland. This is one of many of James’s works which deals with tensions and differences between Europe and America.

Daisy Miller (1879) is a key story from James’s early phase in which a spirited young American woman travels to Europe with her wealthy but commonplace mother. Her innocence and her audacity offend social conventions and she seems to compromise her reputation. But when she later dies in Rome the reader is invited to see the outcome as a powerful sense of a great lost potential. A great study in understatement and symbolic power.

The Bostonians (1886) is a novel about the early feminist movement. The heroine Verena Tarrant is an ‘inspirational speaker’ who is taken under the wing of Olive Chancellor, a man-hating suffragette. Pulling her in the opposite direction is Basil Ransom, to whom she becomes attracted. The dramatic contest to possess her is played out with some witty and often rather sardonic touches, and as usual James keeps the reader guessing about the outcome until the very last page.

What Masie Knew (1897) A young girl is caught between parents who are in the middle of conflict, adultery, and divorce. Can she survive without becoming corrupted? It’s touch and go – and not made easier for the reader by the attentions of an older man who decides to ‘look after’ her. This comes from the beginning of James’s ‘Late Phase’, so be prepared for longer and longer sentences. In fact it’s said that whilst composing this novel, James switched from writing longhand to using dictation – and it shows if you look carefully enough – part way through the book.

The Ambassadors (1903) Lambert Strether is sent from the US to Paris to recall Chadwick Newsome, a young man who is reported to be compromising himself by an entanglement with a wicked woman. However, Strether’s mission fails when he is seduced by the social pleasures of the European capital, and he takes Newsome’s side. So a second ambassador is dispatched in the form of the more determined Sarah Pocock. She delivers an ultimatum which is resisted by the two young men, but then an accident reveals unpleasant truths to Strether, who is faced by a test of loyalty between old Europe and the new USA. This edition presents the latest scholarship on James and includes an introduction, notes, selected criticism, a text summary and a chronology of James’s life and times.

The Golden Bowl (1904) is the climax of James’ late period. The writing is mannered, baroque, complex, and focused intently on the psychological relationships between his characters. There is very little ‘plot’ here in the conventional sense. The bowl in the title is a gift from one couple to another – but there’s a lot more to it than that of course. It will not be giving away too much of the story to say that it concerns an American heiress as she becomes aware of the secret affair between her new husband and her father’s young wife.

Henry James links

Henry James short stories

Studies in the short story

Essential short stories

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