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"Wired Love:  Pleasure at a Distance in Henry James and Others"
Mark Goble, Assistant Professor of English, UC-Irvine
May 4, 2006

This essay looks at the iconography of the telegraph in James's "major phase," and seeks to understand The Ambassadors in particular as exemplary of his fascination with "the idea of connectibility." At the same time, the essay inquires more broadly into the means by which technologies of communication become objects of emotional attachment, affective intensity, and even sensuous engagement.  I take seriously the late nineteenth century's attempt to imagine something perhaps best described as "telegraph sex":  bodies being gratified and pleasured by way of wire, code, and message across a range of long-distance romances, from Ella Cheever's 1879 novel Wired Love, to stories in popular compilations like Lightning Flashes and Electric Dashes, and also, I suggest, the late fiction of Henry James.   I am finally interested in how his stylistic prodigality--his "magnificent and masterly indirectness," as James himself calls it--travesties a telegraphic economy of expression, even as his narratives fixate on the inscrutable pleasures of mediated communication.