The Unmentionable Subject in "The Pupil"

James's great short story, "The Pupil," is, among other things, about something considered nearly unmentionable by the genteel - money. By an extinct code of manners and taste that James examines and turns inside out, refined persons were still, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, not supposed to talk much about money, even though their liberty to avoid its mention depended on its sufficient supply. The monetary sufficiency that silenced mention varied - a moderate amount would do if it enabled the possessor to appear to have no worries about his material basis. But the decorum of reticence about money implied, clearly, upper class security. A genteel appearance of indifference to such crude facts as income and expenditure probably implied also that one had never needed to "make" money, had never been forced into a daily preoccupation with it. Ideally, a gentleman's money arrived of itself in the form of quiet, automatic increments to his bank account, which was never overdrawn.

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