Urban Talk: Communication across Class and Gender in "Watch and Ward"

This paper examines both verbal and non-verbal communication in James’s first novel Watch and Ward, more specifically in the three final chapters, arguably the only section of the novel in which location plays a prominent role. In those chapters—James’s first extensive fictional use of New York—the novel highlights the heroine’s acute sense of displacement through her difficult, emotionally fraught interaction with her urban surroundings. Having fled from her guardian Roger Lawrence after he declared his intention of marrying her, the heroine, Nora Lambert, finds herself stranded in New York where everything and everyone appears to resent and ridicule her demeanor, as if she had trespassed into a socio-economic and cultural space where she doesn’t belong. By passing on to her his own fastidious tastes—the expression of a horror of social mixing—Roger has made Nora unfit for the type of urban reality which, in New York, is an inescapable part of the scene. New York may not “talk” in Watch and Ward, as it would do abundantly, many years later, in The American Scene, but it certainly finds ways to convey to Nora, in no uncertain terms, that she is not welcome. It does so in the visual language of shop windows, wherein cheap commodities seem to mock her limited spending power (because she brought very little money with her). It does so also, and more menacingly, through the sexually-tinged talk of men and women who make her feel that in a city dominated by market-based dynamics, even human beings are treated as commodities.