The Real Thing

Through an allusion, or indirect reference, to Mrs. Monarch’s experience as a photographer’s model, the narrator expresses a disdain for photography’s limited ability to reveal authentic truths. Photography in “The Real Thing” emphasizes the story’s deconstruction of what it means to look at art pieces and how our level of understanding can never be fully determined. At the time of Henry James, photography was making rapid advances and beginning to become widely accepted as art. This posed a legitimate threat to painterly art, which had long been diminished toward mere duplication and vulgarity. In response to this growing trend, many painters turned inward—developing an extreme form of withdrawal from reality—to preserve their craft.

“The Real Thing” exhibits irony in how people with a lack of self-awareness can be transformed into art, while those who remain authentic are too real to inspire creativity. As he moves from working with commercial models to aristocrats, the artist’s progress stalls, and he puts himself at risk of losing an important project. It is ironic how, much like the people being represented in his art pieces, the artist’s success is determined by a set of rules related to his own vanity and commercialization—the same rules that are ultimately revealed to be trivial.