Henry James's Europe
Henry James's Europe: Heritage and Transfer
Dennis Tredy
Annick Duperray
Adrian Harding
Copyright Date: 2011
Published by: Open Book Publishers
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g
Pages: 316
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vjt2g
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Henry James's Europe
Book Description:

As an American author who chose to live in Europe, Henry James frequently wrote about cultural differences between the Old and New World. The plight of bewildered Americans adrift on a sea of European sophistication became a regular theme in his fiction. This collection of twenty-four papers from some of the world’s leading James scholars offers a comprehensive picture of the author’s cross-cultural aesthetics. It provides detailed analyses of James’s perception of Europe—of its people and places, its history and culture, its artists and thinkers, its aesthetics and its ethics—which ultimately lead to a profound reevaluation of his writing.

eISBN: 978-1-906924-38-6
Subjects: Language & Literature, History
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.1
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. v-vii)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.2
  3. Contributors
    Contributors (pp. viii-12)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.3
  4. Preface
    Preface (pp. xiii-xxi)
    Dennis Tredy
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.4
  5. On ‘The European Society of Jamesian Studies’
    On ‘The European Society of Jamesian Studies’ (pp. xxii-xxiv)
    Adrian Harding
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.5
  6. I: Ethics and Aesthetics
    • 1. Henry James on Opening the Door to the Devil
      1. Henry James on Opening the Door to the Devil (pp. 3-16)
      Jean Gooder
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.6

      This Devil is a long way from the figure James had watched and reduced to bathos, in Henry Irving’sFaust(1887)—a production about whose “little mechanical artifices” and “spurting flames” he was scathing. “That blue vapours should attend on the steps of Mephistopheles is a very poor substitute for his giving us a moral shudder” (“The Acting in Mr. Irving’s ‘Faust’” 222). The kind of “moral shudder,” perhaps, that is palpable at the end of “The Turn of the Screw,” as the governess sees, pressed against the window, “the hideous author of our woe.” Looking (as she believes) on...

    • 2. From Romance to Redemption: James and the Ethics of Globalisation
      2. From Romance to Redemption: James and the Ethics of Globalisation (pp. 17-38)
      Roxana Oltean
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.7

      James’s novels abound in memorable dictums about home and belonging, with both Europe and America re-appropriated as essential ways of being and of relating to the world. As Ralph puts it inThe Portrait of a Lady: “One doesn’t give up one’s country any more than one gives up one’s grandmother” (99).¹ Christopher Newman’s American origin makes him, in the words of Mrs. Tristram, “the great Western barbarian” (The American546), while Strether’s Woolett makes an indelible mark on his identity: “‘It sticks out of me, and you knew surely for yourself as soon as you looked at me’ […]...

    • 3. James’s Sociology of Taste: The Ambassadors, Commodity Consumption, and Cultural Critique
      3. James’s Sociology of Taste: The Ambassadors, Commodity Consumption, and Cultural Critique (pp. 39-50)
      Esther Sánchez-Pardo
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.8

      This paper aims at elucidating James’s complex position at the crossroads of impression—in his late “impressionist novels”—versus possession, examining how he weaves together a systematic focus on the workings of perception and desire and an analytical representation of plots that involve possession—of art or aesthetic objects, or of money in most cases. The oscillation between both is enhanced in the confrontation of America and Europe in the midst of major social and economic changes in the West. The early twentieth century witnessed fundamental transformations, such as the shift from industries filled with manual labourers, producing tangible commodities,...

    • 4. Bad Investments
      4. Bad Investments (pp. 51-58)
      Eric Savoy
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.9

      Everybody knows that Henry James, like Balzac, was keenly interested in money, particularly in the nefarious entanglements that arise between those who have it and those who want it. Money is nevermerelymoney in James’s fiction: as the pre-requisite for any experience of self-realisation, it has both a pragmatic function in the matrix of emplotment and a sort of spiritual office. In order to be buoyant, a character needs a certain, emphatically non-metaphorical liquidity. As Ralph Touchett observes inThe Portrait of a Lady, “‘I call people rich when they’re able to meet the requirements of their imagination.’” His...

  7. II: French and Italian Hours
    • 5. ‘The Crash of Civilisation’: James and the Idea of France, 1914-15
      5. ‘The Crash of Civilisation’: James and the Idea of France, 1914-15 (pp. 61-70)
      Hazel Hutchison
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.10

      In the opening days of the First World War in August 1914, one word echoes through the many letters which Henry James wrote to his friends in an attempt to order his feelings about events: civilisation. To Howard Sturgis he expressed his horror at “the plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness,” and to Edith Wharton he wrote that he felt “unbearably overdarkened by this crash of our civilization” (Lubbock 28). To Rhoda Broughton he wrote on 10thAugust:

      Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers, and I’m sick beyond cure to have lived...

    • 6. The Citizens of Babylon and the Imperial Imperative: Henry James’s Modern Parisian Women
      6. The Citizens of Babylon and the Imperial Imperative: Henry James’s Modern Parisian Women (pp. 71-80)
      Claire Garcia
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.11

      “‘Be for me,’” implores Lambert Strether to Madame de Vionnet in his head as he ventures into the countryside in search of the original model for the painting he couldn’t afford to buy, “‘please, with all your admirable tact and trust, just whatever I may show you it’s a present pleasure to me to think you’” (The Ambassadors[1994] 307). This sentiment echoes other Jamesian male characters’ demands upon the women they love. Peter Sherringham, in trying to save Miriam Rooth from becoming the actress that her own genius determines shemustbe, demands of her, “‘Be anything you like,...

    • 7. French as the Fantasmal Idiom of Truth in What Maisie Knew
      7. French as the Fantasmal Idiom of Truth in What Maisie Knew (pp. 81-92)
      Agnès Derail-Imbert
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.12

      Simultaneously published in England and in the United States,What Maisie Knewis set in end-of-the-century London and winds up in Boulogne, making France the place ‘abroad’ where she achieves an ultimate form of knowledge which the preface calls “the full ironic truth” of the novel. While the novel’s Victorian backdrop has received much critical attention, the choice of France as the location of the spectaculardénouementhas not been thoroughly interrogated.

      Maisie’s cognitive predicament can be traced back to a deficiency in linguistic command, preventing her from making sense of the punning and cunning use of language practised among...

    • 8. Figures of Fulfillment: James and “a Sense of Italy”
      8. Figures of Fulfillment: James and “a Sense of Italy” (pp. 93-102)
      Jacek Guthorow
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.13

      In hisImages of Italy, one of the most beautiful books on ItalianWanderjahre, Pavel Muratov writes:

      The wordstraveling to Italyare tale-telling, as they grasp our experience and our life in the Italian element, the liberation of new spiritual forces, the birth of new faculties, as well as a lengthening of the scale of our desires. Occurring in time and space, this is also a journey through the depths of our being and a firing of a resplendent circle at the bottom of our soul (370).¹

      Such words would be sympathetic to Henry James, who discovered in Italy...

    • 9. The Aspern Papers: From Florence to an Intertextual City, Venice
      9. The Aspern Papers: From Florence to an Intertextual City, Venice (pp. 103-112)
      Rosella Mamoli Zorzi
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.14

      It is a well-known fact that James heard the ‘germ’ of the story developed inThe Aspern Papersin Florence:

      Hamilton (V.L.’s brother) told me a curious thing of a Capt. [Edward] Silsbee—the Boston art critic and Shelley-worshipper; that is of a curious adventure if his. Miss Claremont, Byron’sci-devantmistress (the mother of Allegra) was living, until lately, here in Florence, at a great age, 80 or thereabouts, and with her lived her niece, a younger Miss Claremont—of about 50. Silsbee knew that they had interesting papers—letters of Shelley’s and Byron’s—he had known it for...

    • 10. The Wavering Ruins of The American
      10. The Wavering Ruins of The American (pp. 113-120)
      Enrico Botta
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.15

      This essay focuses on the motif of ruins in Henry James’sThe Americanin the light of Italian scholar Francesco Orlando’s theory of non-functional objects in literature. I would like to explore how this topic traces a cause-effect relationship between the idea of an appropriation of the European artistic and cultural heritage—metaphorically outlined by Newman’s initial attitude towards the ruins of the Old World—and the belief that this assimilation should be purified of its corrupt traits before being transported to the United States—symbolically suggested by the burning of the tell-tale letter at the end of the novel....

  8. III: Appropriating European Thematics
    • 11. Balzacian Intertextuality and Jamesian Autobiography in The Ambassadors
      11. Balzacian Intertextuality and Jamesian Autobiography in The Ambassadors (pp. 123-136)
      Kathleen Lawrence
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.16

      With recent renewed interest in Henry James’s late style, and in particular the impress of autobiography on his late novels and non-fiction, it is perhaps worth revisiting the question of the meaning of Lambert Strether’s Christian name, with its larger implications for the intertextual relation between Balzac’sLouis Lambert(1835) andThe Ambassadors(1903).² Adeline Tintner ominously warns critics away from the topic, maintaining that,

      Scholars have been trying for years to make some sort of identification between Lewis Lambert Strether ofThe Ambassadorsand his namesake Louis Lambert, but the effort is wasted, since the hero of the late...

    • 12. A Discordance Between the Self and the World: The Collector in Balzac’s Cousin Pons and James’s ‘Adina’
      12. A Discordance Between the Self and the World: The Collector in Balzac’s Cousin Pons and James’s ‘Adina’ (pp. 137-146)
      Simone Francescato
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.17

      In a lengthy essay published inThe Galaxyin 1875, Henry James praised Honoré de Balzac as an unsurpassed master of characterisation, underlining how much of the French master’s extraordinary achievement sprang from his “mighty passion for things” (Criticism52). For James, Balzac’s characters were so vivid because he knew how to ‘paint’ with amazing precision the concrete details of their environment,¹ achieving so strong an effect that “it [was] hard to imagine how the power of physical evocation [could] go farther […]”(53). Being himself “a profound connoisseur” (50) in matters of house decoration and bric-à-brac, Balzac also managed to...

    • 13. The ‘déjà vu’ in ‘The Turn of the Screw’
      13. The ‘déjà vu’ in ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (pp. 147-154)
      Max Duperray
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.18

      Considering hypothetical sources for ‘The Turn of the Screw’ in terms of generic intertext might show James apparently toying with the great tradition of the English novel and with its undercurrents of society and sex, as exemplified in fantasy (the gothic) or in manners (the realistic novel). Edel’s contention is that James’s attempt was to enshrine that tradition in his story: “The Brontë’s rather than the modern psychological movement nascent in Vienna” (EdelStories of the Supernatural433, quoted by Perry 62). James would then rank among the practitioners of the tropes familiar among his forerunners in the novel of...

  9. IV: Allusion
    • 14. Some Allusions in the Early Stories
      14. Some Allusions in the Early Stories (pp. 157-168)
      Angus Wrenn
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.19

      The earliest of James’s stories which he was willing to reprint in the New York Edition, “A Passionate Pilgrim,” begins not with James’s own words but with an allusion to William Shakespeare. By the strict definition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED),¹ where the term is defined as “a covert, implied, or indirect reference,” James’s title only just qualifies as an allusion rather than a straight quotation, since Shakespeare’sThe Passionate Pilgrimbecomes James’s “A Passionate Pilgrim.” By the standards of the OED many of the examples which will be adduced in this paper constitute direct, overt references and quotations...

    • 15. C’est strictement confidentiel: Buried Allusions in Confidence (1879)
      15. C’est strictement confidentiel: Buried Allusions in Confidence (1879) (pp. 169-178)
      Rebekah Scott
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.20

      Falling between ‘Daisy Miller’ (1878) andThe Europeans(1878), on one side, andWashington Square(1880) andThe Portrait of a Lady(1880-81), on the other,Confidence(1879) belongs to the early, Austenian phase of James; coruscating, ironic, compact—it goes about its business transparently and unswervingly. Or does it? Already in James, even in 1879, there are the stirrings of his inveterate tendency towards “merciful indirection” (The Art of the Novel306), the kind of indirection that manifests itself in style more than in syntax: in innuendo, euphemism, allusiveness, and the irony that reveals even as it pretends to...

    • 16. James and the Habit of Allusion
      16. James and the Habit of Allusion (pp. 179-190)
      Oliver Herford
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.21

      In this paper I shall trace a single literary allusion through the last dozen years of James’s life, and on this basis make some suggestions about the habitual dimension of his allusive practice. Allusion becomes one of James’s stylistic habits, I shall be suggesting, not least because it offers him a way of analysing the role of habit in his own life and in others’—a major concern of his late biographical and autobiographical writings. The allusion I shall attend to has a Shakespearean source: Hamlet’s line to Gertrude about the Ghost, “My father, in his habit as he lived!”...

  10. V: Performance
    • 17. The Absent Writer in The Tragic Muse
      17. The Absent Writer in The Tragic Muse (pp. 193-202)
      Nelly Valtat-Comet
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.22

      The reading I would like to propose here will focus on one particular element ofThe Tragic Musethat is not foregrounded but implied, and yet informs much of the novel’s development—an aspect that belongs more to the fantastic than the realistic vein in James’s inspiration, by which I mean the overriding absence of a genius of letters and of an ideal text.

      A large proportion of Book I inThe Tragic Museis devoted to long and rather sophisticated Oxbridge conversations between, mostly, Nick Dormer, Peter Sherringham, and Gabriel Nash, in various combinations. These conversations offer readers a...

    • 18. James and the “Paradox of the Comedian”
      18. James and the “Paradox of the Comedian” (pp. 203-214)
      Richard Anker
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.23

      In order to set the stage, so to speak, for the comedian who will be the principle object of this paper, I would like to quote a sentence fromThe Tragic Muse, in which several important distinctions are made between Miriam Rooth, the comedian in question, and her mother. The sentence is the following:

      The figurative impulse in the mother had become conscious, and therefore higher, through finding an aim, which was beauty, in the daughter

      (The Tragic Muse144).

      It is by the mediation of Peter Sherringham’s consciousness that James’s narrator offers this series of distinctions between Mrs. Rooth...

    • 19. Benjamin Britten’s Appropriation of James in Owen Wingrave
      19. Benjamin Britten’s Appropriation of James in Owen Wingrave (pp. 215-226)
      Hubert Teyssandier
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.24

      Henry James wroteOwen Wingravein 1892, and published it the same year. He later revised it for the New York Edition, where it is included in volume XVII. Benjamin Britten appropriated, and transformed, Henry James’s tale in his fifteenth opera,Owen Wingrave, which was commissioned by the BBC, and shown in May 1971 as a “television opera,” now available on DVD. The first stage performance ofOwen Wingravewas given at Covent Garden in May 1973. Myfanwy Piper had written the libretto, as she had for Britten’s earlier Jamesian opera,The Turn of the Screw(1954). Britten’sOwen Wingrave...

  11. VI: Authorship and Self-Representation
    • 20. Narrative Heterogeneity as an Adjustable Fictional Lens in The American Scene
      20. Narrative Heterogeneity as an Adjustable Fictional Lens in The American Scene (pp. 229-236)
      Eleftheria Arapoglou
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.25

      Henry James returned from England to the United States in late August 1904, after nearly a quarter of a century’s absence from his native land. As Leon Edel records in the last volume of James’s biographyThe Master: 1901-1916, James’s reasons for returning to the U.S. and for writing about his homeland were not uniform. His motives included personal nostalgia and artistic interest, as well as practical and financial considerations. In the period between 1902 and 1904, while James still resided in England, he contacted several people—among them his brother William, as well as his friends Grace Norton and...

    • 21. James’s Faces: Appearance, Absorption and the Aesthetic Significance of the Face
      21. James’s Faces: Appearance, Absorption and the Aesthetic Significance of the Face (pp. 237-246)
      Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.26

      On 27 June 1906, James wrote to his literary agent, James B. Pinker, that he had found the right image for illustrating the first volume of his New York Edition: the “very good & right (beautifully done) photographic portrait” by Coburn (HorneA Life in Letters435). Coburn shot three profile portraits from which James selected the smallest as the one best suited for his purpose.¹ James also offered directions to Coburn on how to crop the chosen photograph for the desired effect, suggesting that it should be “reduced downto abovethe resting hand—that is to about the middle...

    • 22. From Copying to Revision: The American to The Ambassadors
      22. From Copying to Revision: The American to The Ambassadors (pp. 247-254)
      Paula Marantz Cohen
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.27

      More than thirty years ago, Leo Bersani challenged the conventional psychological approach to Henry James’s work. He argued that in James’s writing “human relations implied what we call human feelings into existence” but that these feelings were “the elaborations of surfaces—they have no depth” (BersaniA Future… 148). In my own 1991 book,The Daughter’s Dilemma: Family Process and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel, I supported this view by applying a family systems-theory approach toThe Awkward Age: tracing patterns of interactionamongcharacters rather than digging for psychic depthsincharacters. Since then, critics like Christopher Lane and Eric...

    • 23. Friction with the Publishers, or How James Manipulated his Editors in the Early 1870’s
      23. Friction with the Publishers, or How James Manipulated his Editors in the Early 1870’s (pp. 255-262)
      Pierre A. Walker
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.28

      This volume appears to take its theme from the prominence today in American literary studies of what is variously called trans-Atlantic or transnational studies. As Paul Giles wrote in the 2003PMLA: “American literature should be seen as no longer bound to the inner workings of any particular country or imagined organic community but instead as interwoven systematically with traversals between national territory and intercontinental space” (63).

      As a James scholar, and in fact as one who carries two passports, I completely endorse what Lawrence Buell has called this “recent Americanist push to think ‘beyond’ or ‘outside’ the confines of...

    • 24. Losing Oneself: Autobiography, Memory, Vision
      24. Losing Oneself: Autobiography, Memory, Vision (pp. 263-272)
      John Holland
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.29

      Henry James beginsA Small Boy and Othersby explaining why he found it difficult to respond to a request. Having been asked, shortly after William’s death, to write a memoir of his brother, he is forced to explain that he cannot do so in a direct and simple way, for he is not the master of his own thoughts. The very attempt to recall his experiences with his older brother has immersed him in a flood of associations. Since “it was to memory in the first place that my main appeal for particulars had to be made,” the request...

  12. Bibliography of Works Cited
    Bibliography of Works Cited (pp. 273-286)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.30
  13. Index
    Index (pp. 287-292)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.31
  14. Back Matter
    Back Matter (pp. 293-295)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt2g.32