Musing back on his early writings in the New York Edition prefaces, Henry James speaks with a certain nostalgia of his own early international scenarios, based on a polar opposition between two interdependent, allegorical entities, “ingenuous young America” and “dramatic” Europe:
It does thus in true come home to me that, combining and comparing in whatever proportions and by whatever lights, my ‘America’ and its products would doubtless, as a theme, have betrayed gaps and infirmities enough without such a kicking-up of the dramatic dust (mainly in the foreground) as I could set my ‘Europe’ in motion for; just as my Europe would probably have limped across our stage to no great effect of processional state without an ingenuous young America (constantly seen as ingenuous and young) to hold up its legendary train
(Preface to Vol. XIV vii).
Moreover, this scenario belongs to a ‘golden age’ where the two continents were kept in ideal isolation, making for a ‘romance’ of exploration and discovery:
“[the] classic years of the great Americano-European legend; the years of limited communication, of monstrous and unattenuated contrast, of prodigious and unrecorded adventure. The comparatively brief but is thus how to re-imagine intersubjective relations: “One could say that, for each, alterity emerges as the sign of intersubjective relations and the ethical subject of discourse as its necessary corollary” (Baker 3). Stressing that “ethical criticism implies a transactive theory of reading where texts shape reader, and reader shapes text” (Schwarz 6), and also addressing the ethical turn of criticism and philosophy, Schwarz boldly states that “we are in the midst of a humanistic revival or at least a neohumanist burst of energy” (Schwarz 3). Henry James himself has almost always been part of a compulsory corpus dealing with ethical approaches to literature and is often placed, for example, in an “Anglo-American humanistic tradition—
stretching from Matthew Arnold and Henry James to J. Hillis Miller and Raymond Williams” (Schwarz 4).
5 Put otherwise, in Cosmopolitanism, but also in Ethics of Identity, Appiah suggests an approach that departs from what Venn would characterize as Occidentalism.
infinitely rich ‘cycle’ of romance embedded in the earlier, the very early American reactions and returns (medieval in the sense of being, at most, of the mid-century), what does it resemble today but a gold-mine overgrown and smothered, dislocated, and no longer workable?
(Preface to vol. XI xvii).
This early imaginative construction permeating the novels and stories that consecrated James’s international theme in the early phase is perhaps most concisely illustrated in the allegorical piece “Benvolio” (1875).
“Benvolio,” in fact, could be read as a blueprint allegory of the early oppositional geography also developed in “Daisy Miller,” The American, or The Portrait of a Lady, suggesting a world view that pertains, it is argued, to the romance of discovery. The term ‘romance of discovery’ is thus used here to refer to neo-colonial patterns of appropriation in early novels of the international theme, based on the element of contrast between Europe and America, entities essentially unknowable to each other.
While Tintner has pointed out that “Benvolio” encodes James’s dilemma
“over whether to choose Europe or America as his permanent home” (Tintner Museum World 66-67), it can also be argued that the two feminine figures at the center of the story, the Countess and Scholastica, correspond to the two allegorical entities of James’s transatlantic imagination: the vibrant Countess is akin to young America, while the melancholy Scholastica is reminiscent of the Old World, a “Europe” of the “legendary train.”
In this sense, the Countess is an image of New World energy, “expressive,”
“fascinating,” and revealing a frontier of possibilities, as she represents “a dozen different women”:
Few faces were more expressive, more fascinating. Hers was never the same for two days altogether; it reflected her momentary circumstances with extraordinary vividness, and in knowing her you had the advantage of knowing a dozen different women
(“Benvolio” 88).
It is in this spirit that one might read the Watteau references associated with the Countess. While the relationship between James and Watteau is a complex one, as Tintner pointed out, it can be argued that, in “Benvolio,”
the reference to Watteau enhances the New World associations resonating in descriptions of the Countess, particularly with regard to Watteau’s visions of discovery and utopian bliss in paintings such as Pilgrimage to Cythera (see Figure 1). In this sense, the glimpse of the Countess’s “joyous Watteau groups” encodes Benvolio’s romance of discovery associated with the Countess’s New World spirit: “He saw them in envious fancy, studded
with joyous Watteau-groups, feasting and making music under the shade of ancestral beeches” (97).
Figure 1. Jean-Antoine Watteau, Pilgrimage to Cythera (1719).
Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin
By contrast with the expansive Countess, the nun-like Scholastica, the other object of Benvolio’s interest, is a melancholy representation of the contemptus mundi tradition, inhabiting a space marked by old age, meditation and introspection: her house is “an ancient grizzled, sad-faced structure, with grated windows on the ground floor; it looked like a convent or a prison” (“Benvolio” 96). In opposition with the atmosphere of the “joyous Watteau-groups,” space around Scholastica is imbued by dimness and reaches back towards the past of old books: “the light of the low western sun shining through the wet trees of the famous garden.
Everything else was ancient and brown; the walls were covered with tiers upon tiers of books” (99).
The ending of James’s allegory reconfirms the writer’s vision upon his own early international novels expressed in the above-cited Preface, that Europe and America make sense through the romance of discovery made possible by irresolvable opposition. After the Countess banishes her rival Scholastica to a New World space (the antipodes), hoping to win Benvolio’s undivided affection, the latter retreats to the world of meditation (the “poetic brow”), exclaiming to the Countess that (much
like Europe and America) the two women were significant only through their opposition:
‘Can’t you imagine that I cared for you only by contrast? You took the trouble to kill the contrast, and with it you killed everything else. For a constancy I prefer this!’ And he tapped his poetic brow
(“Benvolio” 125).
The polarised view of the world illustrated in “Benvolio” is played out more fully in the other novels of the early phase, also capitalising on the romance of discovery sustainable only in a world of oppositions.
Part of the international legend, Europe is, as James would put it later in The Wings of the Dove, the “great American sedative” (I 115), an answer to America’s problems, reversing the geography of colonisation; as Mrs.
Touchett explains in The Portrait of a Lady: “‘[the Americans] all regard Europe over there as a land of emigration, of rescue, a refuge from their superfluous population’” (Portait of a Lady [1995] 53-54). These oppositions entail a colonial scenario of appropriation in The American (1877), for example,6 where Europe is inscribed in a polarised view of the world and answers Christopher Newman’s conquistadorial impulse:
‘I feel something under my ribs here,’ he added in a moment, ‘that I can’t explain—a sort of a mighty hankering, a desire to stretch out and haul in’
(The American [1983] 545).
What is striking in The American is the overlap between Europe’s Old World attributes—melancholy, old age, spaces imbued by the past, echoing the figure of Scholastica—and the frontier attributes with which it is invested. In this sense, one can speak of a conquest of Europe by the American, or the “great Western Barbarian,” as Mrs. Tristram puts it to Christopher Newman, whose name is a transparent reference to Christopher Columbus (519):
‘You are the great Western Barbarian, stepping forth in his innocence and might, gazing a while at this poor effete Old World and then swooping down on it’ (546).
In fact, it could be argued that The American clearly captures the sense of New World romances ringing with Watteau-like utopias staged in Europe, a space of discovery. The romance dimension of the novel is a frequent subject of critical attention, and it has been argued for example that The American stages a cultural collision between two romances, that of the Old World and 6 For further discussion of this see my Spaces of Utopia.
that of the New (Lucking 94), the romance dimension also being inherent in the novel’s fascination for national typologies (Banta New Essays 9).
Interestingly, Newman’s love for Madame de Cintré begins to flourish under the sign of a fête champêtre. Before announcing the ball in Newman’s honour, Mme de Bellegarde looks at her fan (a model?) depicting a fête champêtre that quite explicitly recalls the “joyous” Watteau image associated with the Countess: the painting on the fan “represented a fête champêtre—a lady with a guitar, singing, and a group of dancers round a garlanded Hermes” (The American [1983] 701).
However, the New World romance that Newman was to have enacted in Europe, under the sign of a Watteau fête champêtre, is finally defeated by the ultimate incomprehensibility of Old and New World, which remain unreadable to each other, beyond the agonic colonial scripts of conquest and assimilation. In this sense, the fête champêtre is followed by another utopian space, only not of love but of lack of communication: the Carmelite monastery where Madame de Cintré retreats. Newman’s visit confirms the physical and figurative “blank wall” that ultimately separates the two poles of the world:
On Sunday morning, at the hour which Mrs. Tristram had indicated, he rang at the gate in the blank wall. It instantly opened and admitted him into a clean, cold-looking court, from beyond which a dull, plain edifice looked down upon him (832).
Attending the service, Newman becomes aware of the “unintelligible drawl” that has replaced any notion of transatlantic dialogue, and responds with “wrath” towards what he perceives to be the “aids and abettors of Madame de Cintré’s desertion” from the fête champêtre:
That was the convent, the real convent, the place where she was. But he could see nothing; no light came through the crevices. He got up and approached the partition very gently, trying to look through. But behind it there was darkness, with nothing stirring. He went back to his place, and after that a priest and two altar boys came in and began to say mass.
Newman watched their genuflections and gyrations with a grim, still enmity; they seemed aids and abettors of Madame de Cintré’s desertion;
they were mouthing and droning out their triumph. The priest’s long, dismal intonings acted upon his nerves and deepened his wrath; there was something defiant in his unintelligible drawl; it seemed meant for Newman himself (832).
Marked by the failure of the Americano-European legend, The American already adumbrates, in a sense, the melancholy of the waning world
of romance and discovery. Ultimately, Europe proves “defiant” in its unintelligibility, apparently directed at Newman himself, and the dream of communion results in a collapse of understanding, revealing the hostility of the other.