Abstract
This essay begins with a brief history of the cultural status of brocade in the nineteenth century and then offers a critical account of the ways in which brocade features in Henry James’s work. James’s association of brocade with the aristocracy and the metropole, and his treatment of it as both an embodied object and a metaphor, reveals the textile to be a significant index of a number of his abiding concerns. The essay concludes with a consideration of how brocade both supports and contradicts poststructuralist positions about the referentiality of things in James’s writing, as well as of how brocade provides a fitting analogy for his later style.