1. P. S. Atiyah, The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 6.

2. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 233. Future references to this text will be cited parenthetically in the text and designated as HC. Other works by Hannah Arendt that will be cited parenthetically are: The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2d ed. (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), designated as OT; Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1961), designated as PF; and Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press, 1963), designated as EJ. The one book by Kate Chopin is: The Awakening, ed. Margaret Culley (New York: Norton, 1976), designated as A. Works by William Dean Howells include: The Rise of Silas Lapham (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1971), designated as SL; and A Hazard of New Fortunes (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976), designated as HNF. Also included is: Henry James, The Golden Bowl, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vols. 23 and 24 (New York: Scribners, 1908), designated as GB.

3. See Alan Keenan, "PROMISES, PROMISES: The Abyss of Freedom and the Loss of the Political in the Work of Hannah Arendt," Political Theory 22 (1994): 297-322.

4. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975).

5. Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1957), p. 186 n.

6. Albion W. Tourgée, "The Claim of 'Realism,' " North American Review 148 (1889): 387, 386, 387.

7. Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Capitalism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), p. 201.

8. Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 26.

9. Mark Twain-Howells Letters, eds. Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), p. 630.

10. Responding to charges that realism lacks a moral purpose, Howells writes, "Then shall the novel have no purpose? Shall it not try to do good? ... No, and a thousand times, no! ... The novel can teach, and for shame's sake, it must teach, but only by painting life truly." "Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading," Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Ronald Gottesman, vol. 3 (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1993), p. 222.

11. The Love Letters of Mark Twain, ed. Dixon Wector (New York: Harper, 1942), p. 291.

12. Quoted in Leon Edel, The Life of Henry James, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962), pp. 165-66.

13. David McWhirter argues that "James's fatalistic vision of human experience" invites further study of James's "affinity with the naturalist currents of his era." Desire and Love in Henry James (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), p. 167. My brief reading of The Golden Bowl suggests a subtle, but crucial, distinction between James's sense of agency and that of the naturalists.

14. Deftly linking The Golden Bowl to turn-of-the century narratives of mechanical efficiency, Martha Banta offers a much more pessimistic reading of the novel, claiming that "James leaves Maggie and the prince with the terrible reality of where they are—the 'well hell' of the present moment." Taylorized Lives (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 79. But perhaps Banta expects too much. Criticizing narratives of efficient control, she still wants Maggie and the Prince to have sovereign control over their future together. James does not offer a final triumph, but in leaving his couple with the reality of the present moment, he gives it the chance not to turn back time and recover a lost innocence that never existed but to start anew. Maggie and the Prince now have the opportunity to create a better future through negotiating a new agreement about what their duties and responsibilities to one another will be. To be sure, that opportunity was achieved at great cost, but that cost should heighten their awareness of what is at stake in their negotiations—if they take place.

15. For instance, Jonathan Arac claims, "Huck Finn lives so as to feel right with no sanction beyond his own psyche, the imaginative construction of an autonomous self that is the cultural work of literary narrative." "Nationalism, Hypercanonization, and Huckleberry Finn, " in National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives, ed. Donald E. Pease (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1994), p. 33.

16. Helmuth Plessner, quoted by Wolfgang Iser, "Staging as an Anthropological Category," New Literary History 23 (1993): 879.

17. This structure of doubleness constituted by a space of emptiness is similar to what Ross Posnock "identifies" as nonidentity thinking in James. I play on Posnock's identification of nonidentity to emphasize a subtle difference in our work. Posnock derives his notion of Jamesian nonidentity mostly from Theodor Adorno, but also from George Herbert Mead. Mead speaks of the self as consisting of both a "me" and an "I." The "me" is linked to its normative social roles; the "I'' never quite fits into particular social situations. Thus for Mead the self is constituted by a structure of doubleness, in which, according to Posnock, ''We are never fully aware of what we are, since we exist in a kind of perpetual disequilibrium of internal division." For Posnock this disequilibrium is an example of nonidentity. But the fact that the elements making up the self are not identical does not necessarily create a condition of nonidentity, which is a negation of identity. Rather than negate identity, a structure of doubleness generates a performed or staged identity that, nonetheless, is not completely identical to the structure that allows it to be staged. Posnock implicitly acknowledges the staged aspect of Jamesian identity when he states that, "The Jamesian self is perpetually negotiating an identity out of its interaction with others" (my emphasis).

Posnock use of "nonidentity" grows out of his attempt to use James to link Mead's pragmatism with Adorno's negative dialectic. Adorno does work with

a dialectic of identity and nonidentity. But, as Jürgen Habermas argues, Mead and Adorno have an important difference. Habermas celebrates Mead for first challenging the notion of selfhood as a substance and seeing it as constituted by intersubjective role-playing. Adorno's nonidentity also challenges the notion of the self as substance, but it does not allow for intersubjectivity and thus it resists socialization.

Despite Posnock's efforts to wed Mead and Adorno, this difference is crucial. For me the Jamesian self is closer to Mead's than Adorno's. Nonetheless, it does have an affinity with Adorno's that keeps it from being identical with Mead's pragmatic self and helps to explain James's similarity with the literary modernists championed by Adorno. Habermas champions Mead because his sense of the self's intersubjectivity confirms a rationality inherent in everyday communication, a rationality assumed by pragmatists like Peirce, Mead, and Dewey. Thus, like Habermas, their account of experience remains subordinate to critical reason. Adorno's nonidentity is threatening to Habermas because it resists that subordination. The vacancy at the heart of the Jamesian self does not generate a dialectic of identity and nonidentity. Even so, it keeps a staged Jamesian identity from being accounted for completely in terms of intersubjectivity. Therein lies the unpredictability of the Jamesian self and its "aesthetic" aspect that cannot be subordinated to critical reason. The quotations from Posnock are from The Trial of Curiosity (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), p. 136.

18. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Strivings of the Negro People," Atlantic Monthly 80 (1897): 194.

19. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1989), P. 5.

20. Hans Blumenberg, "An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric," in After Philosophy, eds. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge: MIT Univ. Press, 1988), p. 456.

21. The novel's "plasticity, its elasticity," James wrote, "are infinite." Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 105.

22. Georges Poulet, "The Phenomenology of Reading," New Literary History 1 (1969): 54-72.

23. Yosal Rogat, "The Judge as Spectator," University of Chicago Law Review 31 (1964): 219, 220.

24. Mark DeWolfe Howe, Justice Holmes: The Proving Years (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963).

25. Lawrence Friedman, Contract Law in America (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1965), p. 20.

26. Holmes most likely believed in a subjective interior. As Rogat argues, he valued his own privacy to an extreme. It is even possible to argue, as Rogat does, that Holmes's legal rhetoric and judicial stance serve to hide the private man. What is at stake, however, is the sense of self that he constructs for the law.

27. Cynthia Griffin Wolff, "Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin's The Awakening," American Quarterly 25 (1973): 449-72.

28. Jules Chametsky, "Our Decentralized Literature: The Significance of Region, Ethnic, Racial, and Sexual Factors," in Our Decentralized Literature

(Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1986), pp. 43, 44. First delivered June 4, 1971, this essay influenced Wolff and Margot Culley, the editor of the Norton Critical Edition. Feminist readings include Sandra Gilbert, "The Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin's Fantasy of Desire," Kenyon Review 5 (1983): 42-56, and Elaine Showalter, "Tradition and the Individual Talent: The Awakening as a Solitary Book," in The Awakening, ed. Nancy A. Walker, (Boston: Bedford Books, 1993), pp. 169-89.

29. Margit Stange, "Personal Property: Exchange Value and the Female Self in The Awakening, " in The Awakening, ed. Nancy A. Walker, pp. 201-17. Quotation on p. 209. For another account of the self-defeating logic of Edna's possessive individualism, see Wai-chee Dimock, "Rightful Subjectivity," Yale Journal of Criticism 4 (1990): 25-51. Michele A. Birnbaum faults many feminists for neglecting the role of race and argues that "Possessive individualism, with its myth of the inalienable self, is precisely what makes it so difficult to see the investment in race upon which the white female subject capitalizes." She concludes, "The racial politics of womanhood in Chopin's novel must complicate, if not compromise, our celebration of a nineteenth-century white woman's sexual liberation." '' 'Alien Hands': Kate Chopin and the Colonization of Race,'' American Literature 66 (1994): 301-23, quotations at 316 and 317. Birnbaum still assumes that the novel is a celebration of Edna's sexual liberation.

30. Albion W. Tourgée, "The Reversal of Malthus," The American Journal of Sociology 2 (1896): 20, 22, 22.

31. Willa Cather disapprovingly noted the similarity between Edna and Madame Bovary in "Books and Magazines," Leader (8 July 1899): 6. This similarity is also stressed by the French translator, Cyrille Arnavon, "Les Débuts du Roman Réaliste Américain et l'Influence Française," in Romanciers Américains Contemporains, ed. Henri Kerst ( Cahiers des Langues Modernes 1 (1946): 9-35, and Susan J. Rosowski, "The Novel of Awakening," Genre 12 (1979): 313-32.

32. Chametzky, "Decentralized Literature," p. 43.

33. On rights in the novel, see Dimock, "Rightful Subjectivity."

34. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 49, 182, 183.

35. Contracts made with surrogate mothers might seem to present an exception, but in terms of sexual difference they do not. No children to date have been born to surrogate mothers who are male.

36. Peter H. Schuck and Rogers M. Smith, Citizensbip without Consent, (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), p. 39.

37. Michael T. Gilmore, "Revolt against Nature: The Problematic Modernism of The Awakening, " in New Essays on "The Awakening", ed. Wendy Martin (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 59-87.

38. Hannah Arendt, "Reflections on Little Rock," Dissent 6 (1959): 45-56.

39. For discussions of Arendt's essay, see Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt. For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982), 308-18; Marie A. Failinger, "Equality versus the Right to Choose Associates: A Critique of Hannah Arendt's View of the Supreme Court's Dilemma," University of Pittsburgh Law Review 49 (1987): 143-88; and Werner Sollors, "Of Mules and

Mares in a Land of Difference; or Quadrupeds All?" American Quarterly 42 (1990): 167-90. Though refusing to take back most of her argument, Arendt did modify her sense of the children's role in the struggle for black rights, in response to an explanation offered by Ralph Ellison in 1964. See Ellison's contribution to Who Speaks for the Negro?, ed. Robert Penn Warren (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 342-44.

40. See Dimock, "Rightful Subjectivity," and Birnbaum, " 'Alien Hands.' "

41. See Joseph Allen Boone's claim that James's texts bring readers "face-to-face with the issues implicit in their concluding uncertainty." Tradition and Counter Tradition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 188. But open-endedness is not, as Boone claims, inherently subversive of existing social orders. Nor is it, as Thomas Galt Peyser argues about The Golden Bowl, inevitably a "strategy to appropriate the structures of power Boone suggests James wants to subvert." ''James, Race, and the Imperial Museum,'' American Literary History 6 (1994): 68 n. 6. Instead, it allows readers to imagine alternatives, whose political consequences are themselves uncertain. What needs to be considered is the specific context in which open-endedness occurs. Peyser's nuanced reading pays attention to that context at the moment of production, but in creating a homology between it and James's form he does not do justice to the novel's relationship with its readers, which depends on a structure of doubleness created by the novel's lack of identity with the representations that it bears. By establishing a seamless connection between the text and its historical context, Peyser, like so many others, either traps readers within the text's network of controls or allows privileged ones, like himself, to adopt the imperial position of the present to stand outside it to judge it. In either case, such "historical" readings confine texts to a museum past rather than allow them to participate in a contract that grants both them and readers a future orientation. The realists' "contract" also challenges Posnock's embrace of a presentism that acknowledges the value of "letting the present interrogate the past," but does not stress the equal importance of having texts from the past judge our present condition. The Trials of Curiosity, p. ix.