1. Literature Review The extent of the criticism leveled at materialism in Henry James is best summed up in HG Wells's scathing review of 1915. Here we can note the roots of a continuing tradition of literary criticism regarding Jamesian materialism. Wells and other peers of James, including his friend Edith Wharton, pointed out the incomprehensibility of some of James's passages and the often maddening and painstaking attention to detail, which Wells believed had no effect. Wells cruelly compared James to a hippopotamus struggling to pick up a pea from a corner of its den; (Well, 3:108). In Wells's vision of Jamesian materialism, the object itself is intensified to the point that it becomes nothing, simply a refusal. Wells sees James as both too materialistic and not materialistic enough, which presents the reader with a significant textual problem. If we are to consider certain things to be intrinsically Jamesian; cabinets and chairs, collections, portraits, the bowl of gold in The Golden Bowl, which seems tenable, and therefore to hypothesize that such material things are invested with nuanced meaning, we are then obliged to answer certain questions . Is the destruction of such objects important? In almost all of James' novels, the object or objects at the center of the novel are destroyed, erased. From here other questions arise: can we really erase an image that has been so carefully integrated into the reader's consciousness? The negation of an image after all leaves something of itself, and often an impression that would not exist without the initial erasure. Such lingering images often serve only to highlight the intangible aspects of a novel. Materialism in James is highly ...... middle of paper ...... heticism in investigating the cultural changes in Britain which were later imported to America, more importantly regarding the evolution of interior design ideas, particularly as it relates to the growing culture of art acquisition and collecting in the United States. Although Freedman's historical points are very careful, his treatment of James is somewhat lacking in specificity – it becomes a rather vague critique of reification, and rather than paying due attention to different forms of property and means of possession , Freedman uses the dubious term "objectification", in effect depriving the object itself of the potential to be worthy of analysis itself. Mark Seltzer wrote about The American in Bodies and Machines (1992), detailing a power-centered form of critique conceptually dependent on Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. According to Seltzer,