When Henry James writes of “the house of fiction” in his preface to the New York edition of The Portrait of a Lady, he teaches us to range analogically among domestic sites. He asks us to consider the relations, between, on one hand, the temporary home where he sits writing the novel - “I had rooms on Riva Schiavoni, at the top of a house near the passage leading off to San Zaccaria; the waterside life, the wondrous lagoon spread before me, and the ceaseless human chatter of Venice came in at my windows” - and, on the other hand, the conceit of the artist's process of building, his “edification.” Describing “the house of fiction,” he writes, “The spreading field, the human scene, is the 'choice of subject'; the pierced aperture, either broad or balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the 'literary form'; but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher - without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist” (James 1984, 1070, 1075).