The Henry James Review 31 (2010): 32–38. © 2010, The Johns Hopkins University Press Ornamental Pleasure: James and the British Soldier By Daniel Hannah, Lakehead University This paper addresses James’s investment in an image of the soldier-in-the- home, specifically the British soldier as a representative of empire, outside of battle, returned to homely (or now unhomely) spaces. Throughout his career, in essays such as “The British Soldier” and “The Long Wards” and stories like “Owen Wingrave,” James returned to the figure of the non-combatant British soldier as a key site for interrogating the narratability of national and imperial identities and for imagining the relation of the impressionable, feminized observer to a military masculinity that always allured and perplexed him. To date, critics have tended to overplay the importance of James’s American frames for reading the British military. Peter Rawlings links James’s writings on soldiery to refractions, or “abuses,” of his Civil War history and to a return to the indeter- minacies of gender and identity underpinning the story of his infamously “obscure hurt.” Rawlings suggests that “the soldier overthrown and unmanned” becomes a focal point, for James, in his “registration of the extent to which war reveals just how mobile gender identity is in a world constituted by the mere superficies of discursive performance” (67). Eric Haralson also argues for a reading of James’s relation to the military as “largely indeterminate—as compulsively replayed dramatic-dialogic situ- ations that allowed him to re-view his extraordinary (non)participation in the Civil War” (43). While such biographical approaches are by no means redundant, James’s repeated readings of the British soldier stage more than a return to a repressed American past—in each of the texts discussed in this paper, James identifies a peculiar othered sense of Britishness (and, more pervasively, Englishness) as the source of imaginative and erotic capital in his analysis of the British soldier. In “The British Soldier,” first published in Lipincott’s Magazine in 1878, James speaks to the pleasure he takes in this “actually ornamental and potentially useful per- sonage” who, at a time of brooding Anglo-Russian hostilities, “has been picturesquely, agreeably conspicuous” (HJC 3). “Ornamental” pleasure is a key strand throughout