Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 1 Issue 1 | Page 17

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pig or a magpie”.38 Only on a few rare incidences is the reader given a glimpse as to
why the protagonist is caged within this prison of industry:
it was nothing to the old predicaments, those of the early times of their
great misery, her own, her mother’s and her elder sister’s – the last of
whom had succumbed to all but absolute want when, as conscious,
incredulous ladies, suddenly bereaved, betrayed, overwhelmed, they had
slipped faster and faster down the steep slope at the bottom of which she
alone had rebounded.39
We later learn that her sister most likely died of starvation, transforming the cage into
a cell within a debtor’s prison and the protagonist is engaged in order to support her
poverty stricken family. Foucault suggests that once physical punishment was
removed many prisoners had better lives than the majority of the poor.40
As the course of the piece goes on the gradual demise of the protagonist’s
soul becomes clear. At the start, even though she is subtly being killed “by the
poison of perpetual gas,”41 she still finds solace in her “imaginative life” and hope of
escape, “I’ve been thinking, then, of leaving for ever so long”.42 Yet, is she referring
to leaving the cage or leaving life altogether? If Foucault is to be believed, it is the
cage that gave this young girl her soul to begin with: “This is the historical reality of
this soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin
and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment,
supervision and constraint”.43 There is one final glimmer that she will take hold of her
life and control its demise at the canal: “she stopped close to it and stood a while
very intently”.44 While she might be considered a fallen woman if she did choose
suicide it is her one chance to break free from the prison of industry, take control and
finally choose her own fate. Nevertheless, the fumes of industry take her: “Our young
lady went into it also, in the opposed quarter, and presently, after a few sightless

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38

Henry James, In the Cage (London: Hesperus Press Limited, 2002), 3.
James, In the Cage, 5.
40
Foucault, Discipline and Punish – The Birth of the Prison, 16.
41
James, In the Cage, 3.
42
Ibid., 60.
43
Foucault, Discipline and Punish – The Birth of the Prison, 29.
44
James, In the Cage, 111.
39