Henry James :: American Scence Henry James Essays

Henry throng In August of 1904, after more than two decades abroad, the sixty-year-old Henry James returned to the united States for a year. While William James had famously remarked that his brother was a native of the James family (W James 517), with little else in the way of national affiliation, Henry considered himself as American as ever after his twenty years in Europe. The book he wrote about his American journey was titled The American characterization only because Jamess first choice had been taken he would have preferred to call it The Return of the Native.1 But Jamess sense of himself as a native, as matchless at home in the United States, was shaken by his alienating experience of the American public, both as readers and as fellow citizens. Today I want to consider ways in which James struggled to preserve a secure sense of himself, the private identity he called my me,2 in the midst of disorienting encounters with the American press and the American peop le -- encounters, I argue, that share a certain uncanny logic. The American press staged a lively public debate over the meaning of Henry James, in reviews of The Golden Bowl and of the early chapters of The American Scene, accounts of Jamess lecture appearances, cartoons of the elusive Master, and parodies of his ornate late style. The name Henry James came to serve as a kind of shorthand for a complex nexus of anxieties about ethics, art, and nationhood. Jamess writing and life gave rise to debates about morality (was he decadent or just sophisticated?), manliness (was he effeminate or just sensitive?), and modernity (was he an aristocratic anachronism or was he avant-garde?), all entangled with the question of Jamess supposed patriotism or lack of it. James himself experienced the press attention paid him as an assault, and matt-up a visceral sense of violation at the way that journalists used him to define their own positions in debates that often meant little to hi m. He felt like a freak, ogled for the benefit and entertainment of the American crowd only those can understand, he maintained, who have been terrified & paralyzed absentees restored hither after farsighted years & with every one wanting to see (or to deny) the strawberry marks on different parts of their persons.