26 pages • 52 minutes read
Henry JamesThe Jolly Corner
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1908A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Jolly Corner
The jolly corner, Spencer Brydon’s childhood house, is in part a symbol of traditionalism, particularly in the face of industrialization and urbanization. The house is quite large, secluded from the rest of New York, and has the trappings of a bygone era, including marble floors and crystal silverware. The house seems out of place in turn-of-the-century New York in the same way that Brydon himself is an outsider, and Brydon’s insistence on keeping the house the same suggests his nostalgia for the past. This also links the house to The Fear of Missed Opportunity, as it reminds Brydon of a time when his whole life was before him. Tellingly, the house is full of doors that Brydon prefers to leave open: “The difficulty was that this exactly was what he never did; it was against his whole policy, as he might have said, the essence of which was to keep vistas clear” (Chapter 2, Paragraph 14). Ostensibly a means of facilitating his hunt for his alter ego, this “policy” of open vistas suggests Brydon’s fear of closing off any possibilities.
Given the house’s traditionalism, it is ironic that the jolly corner is home to Brydon’s alter ego: a figure at ease in modern New York because he, unlike Brydon, has spent his entire life there. This tension reflects the contradictions within Brydon himself—e.g., the implication that he is more similar to his alter ego than he supposes. Ultimately, the house symbolizes Brydon’s own mind, which he explores but also shies away from. The implication that Brydon will sell or rent the jolly corner illustrates both Brydon’s avoidance of self-reflection and that avoidance’s futility; in attempting to distance himself from his alter ego, he ironically risks becoming more like him than ever.
The Ghost
Like the jolly corner, the ghost is a complex and ambiguous symbol. At the most basic level, it represents Brydon’s self-perceived missed opportunity. It is Brydon as an American: someone who did not give in to what he at one point calls a “perverse” impulse to leave home and his family. In this reading of the story, the ghost symbolizes Brydon’s grief and guilt over fleeing his family, from whom he implies he was estranged (he references, for example, his father’s “curse”). In returning to the US, Brydon must confront the fact that he wasn’t there for his parents or siblings.
The ghost also represents the businessman Brydon might have become had he remained in the US. While Brydon insists that he does not expect this version of himself to have had any “charm, beyond that of the rank money-passion” (Chapter 1, Paragraph 18), he nevertheless regrets the notion that he might have developed in a different way that is now inaccessible to him. Lending weight to this interpretation is the fact that part of what upsets Brydon about the ghost is the force of its personality; he refers to the “the roused passion of a life larger than his own, a rage of personality before which his own collapsed” (Chapter 2, Paragraph 25). Assuming the ghost symbolizes Brydon’s alter ego, Brydon’s terror may reflect his sense of the “smallness” of his chosen life.
When the ghost reveals his face, Brydon perceives him as a stranger. This moment too is ambiguous. It most explicitly suggests that the person Brydon would have become if he had stayed in the US was monstrous, thus affirming Brydon’s decision to leave and assuaging his concerns about the course his life has taken. However, Brydon’s insistence that he could never have become his alter ego—that “[s]uch an identity fitted his at no point” (Chapter 2, Paragraph 25)—suggests that he is in denial about his own capacity for selfishness, greed, and cruelty. In this sense, the ghost represents not who Brydon could have been but who he is. Similarly, Brydon’s horrified response to the ghost’s apparent otherness can be interpreted as fear of his own unconscious and The Discontinuity of Identity.
Industrialization and Urbanization
The motif of New York City’s growing urbanization and industrialization supports the story’s exploration of identity, particularly as it relates to the differences between the US and Europe. The first half of the story heavily features Alice and Brydon’s attitudes toward Gilded Age America. Neither character particularly likes the changes that have taken place—mass migration to cities, towering buildings, the rise of so-called “robber barons,” etc.—but the transformation is especially jarring for Brydon, who has been abroad in Europe. While at home Alice adheres to the more “European” customs of America’s old money elite, she is tolerant of certain innovations—e.g., public transformation, which she uses. By contrast, Brydon sees the changes as merely crass, associating them with a culture that cares about nothing but material wealth. The numbered city streets and buildings, for example, remind him of an accounting sheet: “the dreadful multiplied numberings […] seemed to him to reduce the whole place to some vast ledger-page, overgrown, fantastic, of ruled and criss-crossed lines and figures” (Part 1, Paragraph 4). He clings to the jolly corner in part because it represents the last remnant of a bygone era.
Nevertheless, Brydon also finds himself unexpectedly at home in the new city in the sense that he discovers an aptitude for business. Alice even jokes that “[i]f he had but stayed at home he would have anticipated the inventor of the sky-scraper” (Chapter 1, Paragraph 5), linking Brydon to the kind of business sense he disdains. In rejecting his alter ego, Brydon ostensibly rejects this pathway, but in a strictly literal sense, Brydon is well on his way to becoming a businessman by the time the story ends: He was already developing one property for rental and now plans to repurpose the jolly corner as well. Brydon’s ambivalent stance toward the city’s changing landscape therefore reflects the inconsistencies within his own character.
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