1 INTRODUCTION
2 MARK TWAIN AND AMERICAN HUMOURISM
2.1 Historical background and literary context
2.2 American humour and the rise of the West
A Local Colourists
B Midwestern realism
2.3 Mark Twain´s life and works
3 HENRY JAMES AND THE COSMOPOLITISM
3.1 The Cosmopolitans
3.2 Henry James´s life and works
4 STUDY GUIDE
5 BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 INTRODUCTION
The U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) between the industrial North and the agricultural, slave-owning South was a watershed in American history. The innocent optimism of the young democratic nation gave way, after the war, to a period of exhaustion. American idealism remained but was different. Before the war, idealists championed human rights, especially the abolition of slavery; after the war, Americans increasingly idealized progress and the self-made man. This was the era of the millionaire manufacturer and the speculator, when Darwinian evolution and the “survival of the fittest” seemed to sanction the sometimes unethical methods of the successful business tycoon.
Business boomed after the war. War production had boosted industry in the North and given it prestige and political clout. It also gave industrial leaders valuable experience in the management of men and machines. The enormous natural resources – iron, coal, oil, gold, and silver -of the American land benefited business. The new intercontinental rail system, inaugurated in 1869, and the transcontinental telegraph, which began operating in 1861, gave industry access to materials, markets, and communications. The constant influx of immigrants provided a seemingly endless supply of inexpensive labour as well. Over 23 million foreigners – German, Scandinavian, and Irish in the early years, and increasingly Central and Southern Europeans thereafter – flowed into the United States between 1860 and 1910. Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino contract labourers were imported by Hawaiian plantation owners, railroad companies, and other American business interests on the West Coast.
In 1860, most Americans lived on farms or in small villages, but by 1919 half of the population was concentrated in about 12 cities. Problems of urbanization and industrialization appeared: poor and overcrowded housing, unsanitary conditions, low pay (called “wage slavery”), difficult working conditions, and inadequate restraints on business. Labour unions grew, and strikes brought the plight of working people to national awareness. Farmers, too, saw themselves struggling against the “money interests” of the East, the so-called robber barons like J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. Their eastern banks tightly controlled mortgages and credit so vital to western development and agriculture, while railroad companies charged high prices to transport farm products to the cities. The farmer gradually became an object of ridicule, lampooned as an unsophisticated “hick” or “rube.” The ideal American of the post-Civil War period became the millionaire. In 1860, there were fewer than 100 millionaires; by 1875, there were more than 1,000.
Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, grew up in the Mississippi River frontier town of Hannibal, Missouri. Ernest Hemingway’s famous statement that all of American literature comes from one great book, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, indicates this author’s towering place in the tradition. Early 19th-century American writers tended to be too flowery, sentimental, or ostentatious — partially because they were still trying to prove that they could write as elegantly as the English. Twain’s style, based on vigorous, realistic, colloquial American speech, gave American writers a new appreciation of their national voice. Twain was the first major author to come from the interior of the country, and he captured its distinctive, humorous slang and iconoclasm.
On the other hand, Henry James is noted for his “international theme” — that is, the complex relationships between naïve Americans and cosmopolitan Europeans. What his biographer Leon Edel calls James’s first, or “international,” phase encompassed such works as Transatlantic Sketches (travel pieces, 1875), The American (1877), Daisy Miller (1879), and a masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady (1881). In The American, for example, Christopher Newman, a naïve but intelligent and idealistic self-made millionaire industrialist, goes to Europe seeking a bride. When her family rejects him because he lacks an aristocratic background, he has a chance to revenge himself; in deciding not to, he demonstrates his moral superiority.
In the first part of this topic we shall deal with the concept of American humorism and the literature that this concept of art inspired, studying one of the best representatives of the so-called regionalist literature, that is to say, Mark Twain. In the second part of the topic we will analyze the works and the literary figure of Henry James.
2 MARK TWAIN AND AMERICAN HUMORISM
2.1 Historical background and literary context
Before analysing the lives and works of these key literary figures of the late 19th century in America, we are going to provide a brief summary of the historical panorama of the United States at this time.
In the middle of the 19th century, white Americans of the North and South were unable to reconcile fundamental differences in their approach to government, economics, society and African American slavery. Abraham Lincoln was elected President, the South seceded to form the Confederate States of America, and the Civil War followed, with the ultimate defeat of the South.
After the Civil War, America experienced an accelerated rate of industrialization, mainly in the northern states. However, Reconstruction and its failure left the Southern whites in a position of firm control over its black population, denying them their Civil Rights and keeping them in a state of economic, social and political servitude. The Reconstruction era was followed by the Gilded Age which included influential figures such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. Monopolies plagued the United States and corruption within the oil, steel, and railroad businesses was vast. Many new inventions led to increased productivity but also produced a fall in wages which in turn caused riots in many parts of America.
U.S. Federal government policy, since the James Monroe Administration, had been to move the indigenous population beyond the reach of the white frontier into a series of Indian reservations. Tribes were generally forced onto small reservations as Caucasian farmers and ranchers took over their lands. In 1876, the last major Sioux war erupted when the Black Hills Gold Rush penetrated their territory.
An unprecedented wave of immigration to the United States served both to provide the labor for American industry and to create diverse communities in previously undeveloped areas. Abusive industrial practices led to the often violent rise of the labor movement in the United States.
The United States began its rise to international power in this period with substantial population and industrial growth domestically and numerous military ventures abroad, including the Spanish-American War, which began when the United States blamed the sinking of the USS Maine (ACR-1) on Spain without any real evidence.
With regards to literature, the War of 1812 and an increasing desire to produce uniquely American work, a number of key new literary figures appeared, perhaps most prominently Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe. Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales about Natty Bumppo were popular both in the new country and abroad.
Humorous writers were also popular and included Seba Smith and Benjamin P. Shillaber in New England and Davy Crockett, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson J. Hooper, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, Joseph G. Baldwin, and George Washington Harris writing about the American frontier.
In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson, an ex-minister, published a startling nonfiction work called Nature, in which he claimed it was possible to dispense with organized religion and reach a lofty spiritual state by studying and responding to the natural world. His work influenced not only the writers who gathered around him, forming a movement known as Transcendentalism, but also the public, who heard him lecture.
The political conflict surrounding Abolitionism inspired the writings of William Lloyd Garrison and his paper The Liberator, along with poet John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe in her world-famous Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
In 1837, the young Nathaniel Hawthorne collected some of his stories as Twice-Told Tales, a volume rich in symbolism and occult incidents. Hawthorne went on to write full-length “romances,” quasi-allegorical novels that explore such themes as guilt, pride, and emotional repression in his native New England. His masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, is the stark drama of a woman cast out of her community for committing adultery.
Inspired by Hawthorne’s example, Melville went on to write novels rich in philosophical speculation. In Moby Dick, an adventurous whaling voyage becomes the vehicle for examining such themes as obsession, the nature of evil, and human struggle against the elements.
Anti-transcendental works from Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe all comprise the Dark Romanticism subgenre of literature popular during this time.
In such a context two of the major literary figures of the American literature developed their careers, Mark Twain and Henry James. Each of them was characterised by very different influences and styles, the humorism and the cosmopolitanism respectively, in which they became the major representatives. Twain is regarded as the first novelist to use the American language. Twain’s style – influenced by journalism, wedded to the vernacular, direct and unadorned but also highly evocative and irreverently funny- changed the way Americans write their language. His characters speak like real people and sound distinctively American, using local dialects, newly invented words, and regional accents. On the other hand, Henry James confronted the Old World-New World dilemma by writing directly about it. Although born in New York City, he spent most of his adult years in England. Many of his novels center on Americans who live in or travel to Europe. With its intricate, highly qualified sentences and dissection of emotional and psychological nuance, James’s fiction can be daunting; because of that, he is said to start the so-called psychological novel.
2.2 American humour and the rise of the West
Two major literary currents in 19th-century America merged in Mark Twain: popular frontier humour and local colour, or “regionalism.” These related literary approaches began in the 1830s – and had even earlier roots in local oral traditions. In ragged frontier villages, on riverboats, in mining camps, and around cowboy campfires far from city amusements, storytelling flourished. Exaggeration, tall tales, incredible boasts, and comic workingmen heroes enlivened frontier literature. These humorous forms were found in many frontier regions – in the “old Southwest” (the present-day inland South and the lower Midwest), the mining frontier, and the Pacific Coast. Each region had its colourful characters around whom stories collected: Mike Fink, the Mississippi riverboat brawler; Casey Jones, the brave railroad engineer; John Henry, the steel-driving African-American; Paul Bunyan, the giant logger whose fame was helped along by advertising; westerners Kit Carson, the Indian fighter, and Davy Crockett, the scout. Their exploits were exaggerated and enhanced in ballads, newspapers, and magazines. Sometimes, as with Kit Carson and Davy Crockett, these stories were strung together into book form.
Twain, Faulkner, and many other writers, particularly southerners, are indebted to frontier pre-Civil War humorists such as Johnson Hooper, George Washington Harris, Augustus Longstreet, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and Joseph Baldwin. From them and the American frontier folk came the wild proliferation of comical new American words: “absquatulate” (leave), “flabbergasted” (amazed), “rampagious” (unruly, rampaging). Local boasters, or “ring-tailed roarers,” who asserted they were half horse, half alligator, also underscored the boundless energy of the frontier. They drew strength from natural hazards that would terrify lesser men. “I’m a regular tornado,” one swelled, “tough as hickory and long-winded as a nor’wester. I can strike a blow like a falling tree, and every lick makes a gap in the crowd that lets in an acre of sunshine.”
British influence on America continued long after the Independence War. Nothing could change the basic fact that both were two independent nations sharing a single language and a single cultural tradition. American literature is only the continuation of the English genius into new conditions more or less propitious. But the 1830’s were the decade of America’s declaration of literary independence and it was the time when the Western frontier humourism became very popular. The works of Artemius Ward, John Phoenix, Bret Hartre and above all of Mark Twain came into the literary scene with an outstanding and explosive vitality.
The 19th century American West is a region of legend. The quest for a new land and a new hope to the West was after all the very origin of America. This part of the country was still in process of settlement. Much of it was wilderness, populated by Indians, white hunters and trappers and it is the combination of these characteristics what gave way to the rise of Western humour and to Western humour literature. Let’s see its main characteristics:
Western or frontier humour was not in fact confined to the West. Some of its characteristics were shared with the East. The habit of hyperbole had been acquired by Easterners before it spread West. Artemius Ward, John Phoenix and other humorists came from the East. Western humour relies mainly on exaggeration. It has the effect of singing comic words to a sad tune.
The element of fraud was also a recurrent element in American humour, but the ugliness of fraud was made into a joke.
Some of this humour was surrealistic in its polysyllabic, mock-solemn and inverted logic.
Apart from this Western humour was also used to poke fun at the sacred pieties of American life, mainly at the platitudes of patriotic democracy or to circumvent the taboos of the nation’s Victorian value system.
As a group these writers were portrayed as moral, cultivated persons, Whigs rather than Democrats in political affiliation.
Quite often they adopted an authorial pose as high-minded and literate narrators. Thus they set the quoted tale with its dialect, its deliberate misspellings (or cacography) within a very respectable frame.
A Local Colourists
Like frontier humour, local colour writing has old roots but produced its best works long after the Civil War. Obviously, many pre-war writers, from Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne to John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell, paint striking portraits of specific American regions. What sets the colourists apart is their self-conscious and exclusive interest in rendering a given location, and their scrupulously factual, realistic technique. Among these writers the most popular were:
August Baldwin Longstreet (1790-1870). He published a semi-autobiographical novel of his Georgia upbringing Master Willian Mittens. His most popular works by far was Gerogia Scenes, Characters and Incidents in the First Half Century of the Republic, a medley of humorous pieces originally printed in papers in 1827.
Charles Farrar Browne “Artemius Ward” (1832-1867). His comic sketches for Vanity Fair, collected as Artemius Ward. His Book (1862) became very famous. Ward’s writings and platform performances were a hit in London, and they were published posthumously as Artemius Ward’s Lectures.
George Horatio Derby “John Phoenix” (1823-1861). His facetious and burlesque sketches were published as the popular Phoenixiana (1856) and posthumously in The Squibob Papers (1865).
George Washington Harris (1814-1869). He contributed humorous sketches to the New York Spirit of the Times and to local papers. The best known of these were published as Sut Lovingood’s Yarns.
Bret Harte (1836-1902) is remembered as the author of adventurous stories such as “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” set along the western mining frontier. As the first great success in the local colourist school, Harte for a brief time was perhaps the best-known writer in America – such was the appeal of his romantic version of the gunslinging West. Outwardly realistic, he was one of the first to introduce low-life characters – cunning gamblers, gaudy prostitutes, and uncouth robbers -into serious literary works. He got away with this (as had Charles Dickens in England, who greatly admired Harte’s work) by showing in the end that these seeming derelicts really had hearts of gold.
Several women writers are remembered for their fine depictions of New England: Mary Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930), Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), and especially Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909). Jewett’s originality, exact observation of her Maine characters and setting, and sensitive style are best seen in her fine story “The White Heron” in Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). Harriet Beecher Stowe’s local colour works, especially The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862), depicting humble Maine fishing communities, greatly influenced Jewett. Nineteenth-century women writers formed their own networks of moral support and influence, as their letters show. Women made up the major audience for fiction, and many women wrote popular novels, poems, and humorous pieces.
All regions of the country celebrated themselves in writing influenced by local colour. Some of it included social protest, especially toward the end of the century, when social inequality and economic hardship were particularly pressing issues. Racial injustice and inequality between the sexes appear in the works of southern writers such as George Washington Cable (1844-1925) and Kate Chopin (1851-1904), whose powerful novels set in Cajun/French Louisiana transcend the local colour label. Cable’s The Grandissimes (1880) treats racial injustice with great artistry; like Kate Chopin’s daring novel The Awakening (1899), about a woman’s doomed attempt to find her own identity through passion, it was ahead of its time. In The Awakening, a young married woman with attractive children and an indulgent and successful husband gives up family, money, respectability, and eventually her life in search of self-realization. Poetic evocations of ocean, birds (caged and freed), and music endow this short novel with unusual intensity and complexity.
Often paired with The Awakening is the fine story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935). Both works were forgotten for a time, but rediscovered by feminist literary critics late in the 20th century. In Gilman’s story, a condescending doctor drives his wife mad by confining her in a room to “cure” her of nervous exhaustion. The imprisoned wife projects her entrapment onto the wallpaper, in the design of which she sees imprisoned women creeping behind bars.
B Midwestern realism
For many years, the editor of the important Atlantic Monthly magazine, William Dean Howells (1837-1920), published realistic local colour writing by Bret Harte, Mark Twain, George Washington Cable, and others. He was the champion of realism, and his novels, such as A Modern Instance (1882), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), carefully interweave social circumstances with the emotions of ordinary middle-class Americans.
Love, ambition, idealism, and temptation motivate his characters; Howells was acutely aware of the moral corruption of business tycoons during the Gilded Age of the 1870s. Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham uses an ironic title to make this point. Silas Lapham became rich by cheating an old business partner; and his immoral act deeply disturbed his family, though for years Lapham could not see that he had acted improperly. In the end, Lapham is morally redeemed, choosing bankruptcy rather than unethical success. Silas Lapham is, like Huckleberry Finn, an unsuccess story: Lapham’s business fall is his moral rise. Toward the end of his life, Howells, like Twain, became increasingly active in political causes, defending the rights of labour union organizers and deploring American colonialism in the Philippines.
2.3 Mark Twain´s life and works
But none of these writers enjoyed the popularity and esteem of Mark Twain.
He was a writer, journalist, and humorist, who won a worldwide audience for his stories of youthful adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Sensitive to the sound of language, Twain introduced colloquial speech into American fiction. In Green Hills of Africa, Ernest Hemingway wrote: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn…”
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) was born in Florida, Missouri, of a Virginian family. The family soon moved to Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain was brought up. After his father’s death in 1847, Twain was apprenticed to a printer. Her also started his career as a journalist by writing for the Hannibal Journal. Later Twain worked as a licensed Mississippi river-boat pilot (1857-61). His famous penname Twain adopted from the call (‘Mark twain!’ – meaning by the mark of two fathoms) used when sounding river shallows. In 1861 Twain served briefly as a confederate irregular. The Civil War put an end to the steamboat traffic, and during a period when Twain was out of work, he lived in a primitive cabin on Jackass Hill and tried his luck as a gold-miner. Twain moved to Virginia City, where he edited two years Territorial Enterprise. On February 3, 1863, ‘Mark Twain’ was born when he signed a humorous travel account with that pseudonym. In 1864 Twain left for California, where worked in San Francisco as a reporter. After hearing a story about a frog, Twain made an entry in the world of fiction writing the short-story of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County(1867). This work marked the beginning of Twain’s literary career.
His next book, Roughing It, followed a similar pattern as a series of pictures of people he met in his travels in the Far West. He presented many of the typical characters of the West such as cowboys, stage-coach drivers, criminals or lawmen in humorous episodes.
Then came his first novel, The Gilded Age, co-written with Charles Warner. This novel tried to show the new morality of post-Civil War America. It describes a group of young people destroyed by the dream of becoming rich. One of the new elements of this novel is that it creates a picture of the entire nation rather than of just one region.
In 1866 Twain visited Hawaii as a correspondent for The Sacramento Union, publishing letters on his trip. He then set out world tour, travelling in France and Italy. His experiences Twain recorded in The Innocents Abroad (1869). The work, which gained him wide popularity, poked fun at both American and European prejudices and manners. Throughout his life, Twain frequently returned to travel writing – many of his finest novels, such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), dealt with journeys and escapes into freedom.
The success of The Innocents Abroad gave Twain enough financial security to marry Olivia Langdon in 1870. Twain continued to lecture in the United States and England. Between 1876 and 1884 he published several masterpieces. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was originally intended for adults. Twain had abandoned the work in 1874, but returned to it in the following summer and even then was undecided if he were writing a book for adults or for young readers. Eventually he declared that it was “professedly and confessedly a boy’s and girl’s book”. That is a popular theme in American literature, but Tom and Huck are bad only because they fight against the stupidity of the adult world, and in the end they win. However, the two characters are quite different. Whereas Tom is very romantic and his view of life comes from the books he reads, Huck has had a harder life and he cannot see the world in the romantic way that Tom does. One of the great achievements in this novel is the creation of a highly realistic background and many colourful characters.
The Prince and the Pauper (1881) was about Edward VI of England and a little pauper who change places. Life on the Mississippi (1883) contained an attack on the influence of Sir Walter Scott, whose romanticism have caused according to Twain ‘measureless harm’ to progressive ideas. From the very beginning of his journalistic career, Twain made fun with the novel and its tradition. Although Twain enjoyed magnificent popularity as a novelist, he believed that he lacked the analytical sensibility necessary to the novelist’s art. Once again, the unstable relationship between reality and illusion is Twain’s characteristic theme, the basis of much of his humour. The magnificent yet deceptive, constantly changing river is also the main feature of his imaginative landscape.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), an American Odysseus, was first considered adult fiction. Huck, who could not possibly write a story, tells us the story. Both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn stand high on the list of eminent writers like Stevenson, Dickens, and Saroyan who honestly depicted young people. During their trip, in the various towns and villages along the way Huck learns about the evil of the world. He also has to face a big moral problem between the law, which requires that he must return the slave to his owner, and morality, that tells him that the slave is a man, not a thing. He decides to break the law, and after such a decision he cannot be considered a child any more. Huck’s debate whether or not he will turn in Jim, an escaped slave and a friend, probed the racial tensions of the national conscience. This has been called the great American novel of democracy, because it shows the basic goodness and wisdom of ordinary people. However, it was a failure at the time of publication and he was accused of presenting a bad example to the youth. That brought about Twain’s financial disaster. One of Twain’s major achievements is the way he narrates Huckleberry Finn, following the twists and turns of ordinary speech, his native Missouri dialect. The model for Huck Finn’s voice was a black child instead of a white one. The character of Huck was based on a boy named Tom Blankenship, Twain’s boyhood friend. The ending gives the reader the counter-version of the classic American success myth: the open road leading to the pristine wilderness, away from the morally corrupting influences of “civilization.” James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, Walt Whitman’s hymns to the open road, William Faulkner’s The Bear, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road are other literary examples.
Huckleberry Finn has inspired countless literary interpretations. Clearly, the novel is a story of death, rebirth, and initiation. The escaped slave, Jim, becomes a father figure for Huck; in deciding to save Jim, Huck grows morally beyond the bounds of his slave-owning society. It is Jim’s adventures that initiate Huck into the complexities of human nature and give him moral courage.
The novel also dramatizes Twain’s ideal of the harmonious community: “What you want, above all things, on a raft is for everybody to be satisfied and feel right and kind toward the others.” Like Melville’s ship the Pequod, the raft sinks, and with it that special community. The pure, simple world of the raft is ultimately overwhelmed by progress — the steamboat — but the mythic image of the river remains, as vast and changing as life itself.
In the 1880s Twain wrote also such books as The Tragedy of Pudd´head Wilson (1884), a murder mystery and a case of transposed identities, but also an implicit condemnation of a society that allows slavery, and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1885), published under the pseudonym of Sieur Louis de Conte. In the 1890s Twain lost most of his earnings in financial speculations and in the downhill of his own publishing firm. To recover from the bankrupt, he started a world lecture tour. By 1898 he had repaid all debts. From 1896 to 1900 he resided mainly in Europe.
Twain travelled to New Zealand, Australia, India, and South Africa, and returned to the U.S. in 1900. Twain’s travel book, Following the Equator , appeared in 1897. In 1902 Twain made a trip to Hannibal, his home town which had inspired several of his works. The death of his wife in 1904 in Florence and his second daughter darkened the author’s life, which is also seen in writings and his posthumously published autobiography (1924). Twain’s view of the human nature had never been very optimistic, but during final years, he become even more bitter and especially hostile Twain was towards Christianity. In his later novels he is less hopeful about democracy. In A Connecticut Yankee in the King Arthur’s Court the hero is the boss of a factory who wakes up in 6th century England after an accident. He modernises things and since he knows so much he becomes a kind of dictator called “the Boss”. He depicted the attitude of American society with its emphasis on technology and on the leadership of bosses who believed that they knew more than the ordinary people in society. Thus it can be read as a light-hearted burlesque, but also as a devastating satire on American society and the mechanical age.
Twain’s pessimism grew deeper and deeper. In The Man That Corrupted Hudleyburg he describes a town that had been famous for its honesty but where in the end everybody has lied in order to get a big bag of gold. He dealt with the same theme again in The $30,000 Request.
In 1916 appeared The Mysterious Stranger , set in the 16th-century Austria, in which Satan reveals the hypocrisies and stupidities of the village of Eseldorf. The work was composed between 1897 and 1908 in several, quite different versions, one of which was set in Hannibal, another in a print shop.
Mark Twain’s colourful life inspired the film The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944), directed by Irving Rapper and starring Fredric March.
During his long writing career, Twain produced a considerable number of essays, which appeared in various newspapers and in magazines, including the Galaxy, Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, and North American Review. In his ‘Sandwich Islands’ letters (1873) Twain described how the missionaries and American government have corrupted the Hawaiians, ‘Queen Victoria’s Jubilee’ (1897) presented the pomp and pageantry of an English royal procession, and ‘King Leopold’s Soliloquy’ (1905) revealed in a dramatic monologue the political evils caused by despotism. Twain’s finest satire of imperialism was perhaps ‘To the Person Sitting in Darkness’ (1901), in which the author wrote that the people in darkness are beginning to see “more light than… was profitable for us.”
Mark Twain’s contribution was decisive to liberate American prose from the formal and aesthetic preoccupations. He put American literature in contact with a truly national culture. Mark Twain is a special case among the writers that have gained critical acceptance since in the popular conception he is not seen as the typical man of letters. Twain presented himself as a voice that spoke for the common people, and he himself supported this theory by claiming to have no interest in the cultivated minority. Therefore, during his lifetime critics tended to dismiss him as a simple humorist. However, critical opinion began to change at the beginning of this century.
On one hand he was regarded as the American writer that has identified himself more with his country.
On the other hand, the conception about him as a mere funny man without a real literary background has been rejected. He read widely and made use of what he read, his style is a careful and conscious construction rather than a spontaneous and natural utterance. As a result, his influence on 20th century American literature has been great.
Twain was very reluctant to adopt the career of humorist, and all his life he was in revolt against that role that he felt that had been imposed on him. Actually, when he wrote a serious work on Joan of Arc he used his actual name. The origin of his humour is in his experience in the West, since it is related to what is known as Western Humour. This humour is associated to the hard conditions of the life in the West. Humour is used in this case as a form of relief from the strain of that society without law, women or any of the commodities of civilised society.
His early humour, written while he was living in the West is aggressive, obsessed with crime, death, with the popular figure of the undertaker. These assumptions contrast with the popular conception of Twain as a young barbarian rebelling in his circumstances.
His later humour acquired new characteristics when he moved to the East and after his travel to Europe. He remained a humorist because humour was what made him famous and what he was good at, but he started to deal with new themes and characters, such as the Americans abroad or the conflict between ideals and money.
3 HENRY JAMES AND THE COSMOPOLITISM
3.1 The Cosmopolitans
During the 19th century there was a flow of American artists removing to settle in Europe. Authors as well as artists crossed the Atlantic. There were different reasons for this.
On the one hand there were practical reasons to move to Europe. They could derive important benefits such as cheapness of living and more artistic opportunities. Some of them went abroad as journalists or editors. Concern over copyright was another factor. American authors could usually gain some protection against practical British publishers by arranging for first publication in the United Kingdom and sometimes by establishing residence there at the time of publication. As a result many American books were published in Britain before they appeared in the USA. American writers were inclined to consider living in Europe at least for some time in order to safeguard their works.
However, those who went to Europe were often cosmopolitan in their origin or in their attitude to life. Many of them looked for a real setting for their works suitable with their ideas and America would not do in this respect, too much was missing. It had no tradition and they looked for this tradition in Europe. Europe seemed to have more reality. America remained a convenient point of reference, a place to which characters may depart or from which they may arrive bringing with them America’s special ambience.
Among the so-called Cosmopolitan writers we find:
Edith Wharton (1862 – 1937). She was educated expensively at home and in Europe. Like James, Edith Wharton grew up partly in Europe and eventually made her home there. She was descended from a wealthy, established family in New York society and saw firsthand the decline of this cultivated group and, in her view, the rise of boorish, nouveau-riche business families. This social transformation is the background of many of her novels.
Like James, Wharton contrasts Americans and Europeans. The core of her concern is the gulf separating social reality and the inner self. Often a sensitive character feels trapped by unfeeling characters or social forces. Edith Wharton had personally experienced such entrapment as a young writer suffering a long nervous breakdown partly due to the conflict in roles between writer and wife.
After 1910 she lived chiefly in France. She travelled frequently and produced a steady flow of novels and short stories. During the First World War she devoted herself to relief work in France. She felt out of touch with America. Society was for her a collapsing affair. She deals with the tension between the individual and the social framework whose pressure, though real, is often crude and arbitrary. Her characters tend to be people with problems and handicaps that they cannot resolve. Her most important novels are The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, Hudson River Bracketed and the most outstanding The Age of Innocence.
Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946). She was born in Pennsylvania and educated in California where she studied the anatomy of the brain. Tired of scientific work, she went abroad where she lived until her death. She felt that each new generation must inevitably go to war with the old. The comparison with painting is important. She tried to break away from convention, to attain simplicity as painters tried to do. She set out to create a new literature that was to show the inside of things. For some young writers she was a person to believe in. She imparted the valuable assurance to be the ideal vehicle of the avant-garde. Her main works include Tender Buttons, The Making of Americans, Four Saints in Three Acts, Picasso, Paris France and Wars I Have Seen.
Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972). He went to Italy and there he published his first poetry A Lume Spento. His next books of poetry contrast Medieval Provence with modern time. He also lived in London and Paris and then he established his permanent residence in Italy. In 1925 he began the publication of his Cantos, starting with A Draft of XVI Cantos. He became a fascist. After World War II he was charged with treason and was confined to a hospital in Washington where he continued to add to his Cantos. He returned to Italy later and died there.
T.S. Eliot (1887 – 1965). He went to live in London where he combined the writing of poetry and critical essays. He wrote Prufrock and Other Observations, The Sacred Wood and Poems (which included “The Wasteland”). In 1927 he became a British citizen. He also wrote a number of well received plays: Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party and Four Quarters, which is considered his most outstanding play.
3.2 Henry James´s life and works
Let’s now turn our attention to Henry James.
American-born writer, gifted with talents in literature, psychology, and philosophy. James wrote 20 novels, 112 stories, 12 plays and a number of literary criticism. His models were Dickens, Balzac, and Hawthorne.
Henry James was born in New York City into a wealthy family. His father, Henry James Sr., was one of the best-known intellectuals in mid-nineteenth-century America, whose friends included Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorne.
In his youth James travelled back and forth between Europe and America. He studied with tutors in Geneva, London, Paris, Bologna and Bonn. At the age of nineteen he briefly attended Harvard Law School, but was more interested in literature than studying law. James published his first short story, ‘A Tragedy of Errors’ two years later, and then devoted himself to literature.
Critics have grouped his works of fiction into three periods. In his apprentice years, culminating with the masterwork The Portrait of a Lady, his style was simple and direct (by the standards of Victorian magazine writing) and he experimented widely with forms and methods, generally narrating from a conventionally omniscient point of view. Plots generally concern romance, except for the three big novels of social commentary that conclude this period.
In the mature period little by little dramatic action almost disappears. Thereafter, characters usually spend their time talking about the different aspects and possibilities of the situations they are in, and the drama comes when the character changes from one way of looking at the world to another way. In the second period, as noted above, he abandoned the serialized novel and from 1890 to about 1897, he wrote short stories and plays. In the 1880s James began to explore new areas of interest besides the Europe–America contrast and the “American girl”. In particular, he began writing on explicitly political themes.
Finally, in his third and last period he returned to the long, serialized novel. Beginning in the second period, but most noticeably in the third, he increasingly abandoned direct statement in favor of frequent double negatives, and complex descriptive imagery. Single paragraphs began to run for page after page, in which an initial noun would be succeeded by pronouns surrounded by clouds of adjectives and prepositional clauses, far from their original referents, and verbs would be deferred and then preceded by a series of adverbs. The overall effect could be a vivid evocation of a scene as perceived by a sensitive observer. In its intense focus on the consciousness of his major characters, James’s later work foreshadows extensive developments in 20th century fiction. Then and later many readers find the late style difficult and unnecessary.
The first period of James’s fiction, usually considered to have culminated in The Portrait of a Lady, concentrated on the contrast between Europe and America. The style of these novels is generally straightforward and, though personally characteristic, well within the norms of 19th century fiction.
From an early age James had read the classics of English, American, French and German literature, and Russian classics in translation. His first novel, Watch and Ward (1871), appeared first serially in the Atlantic. James wrote it while he was travelling through Venice and Paris. Watch and Ward tells a story of a bachelor who adopts a twelve-year-old girl and plans to marry her.
After living in Paris, where James was contributor to the New York Tribune, he moved to England, living first in London and then in Rye, Sussex. During his first years in Europe James wrote novels that portrayed Americans living abroad. James’s years in England were uneventful. In 1905 he visited America for the first time in twenty-five year, and wrote ‘Jolly Corner’. It was based on his observations of New York, but also a nightmare of a man, who is haunted by a doppelgänger.
His first major novel of this early period was Roderick Hudson, which tells of the failure of a young American artist in Italy. In spite of his genius, he fails because he lacks moral strength. Roderick Hudson (1875) is a Künstlerroman that traces the development of the title character, an extremely talented sculptor. Although the book shows some signs of immaturity—this was James’s first serious attempt at a full-length novel — it has attracted favorable comment due to the vivid realization of the three major characters: Roderick Hudson, superbly gifted but unstable and unreliable; Rowland Mallet, Roderick’s limited but much more mature friend and patron; and Christina Light, one of James’s most enchanting and maddening femmes fatales. The pair of Hudson and Mallet has been seen as representing the two sides of James’s own nature: the wildly imaginative artist and the brooding conscientious mentor.
Although Roderick Hudson featured mostly American characters in a European setting, James made the Europe–America contrast even more explicit in his next novel. In fact, the contrast could be considered the leading theme of The American (1877). This book is a combination of social comedy and melodrama concerning the adventures and misadventures of Christopher Newman, an essentially good-hearted but rather gauche American businessman on his first tour of Europe. Newman is looking for a world different from the simple, harsh realities of 19th century American business. He encounters both the beauty and the ugliness of Europe, and learns not to take either for granted. The protagonist is a rich and young man who goes to Europe in search of culture and a better life. There he meets a young woman from an aristocratic family and they fall in love, but her family will not allow their wedding because of aristocratic prejudices and a destructive sense of honour. They value more the family name than the happiness of their daughter. His failure, however, is a moral victory for the integrity of his national character. In The American he introduced the contrast between American innocence and European experience that is present throughout his work.
Characteristics for James novels are understanding and sensitively drawn lady portraits; James himself was a homosexual, but sensitive to basic sexual differences and the fact that he was a male. His main themes were the innocence of the New World in conflict with corruption and wisdom of the Old. Among his masterpieces is Daisy Miller (1879), where the young and innocent American Daisy finds her values in conflict with European sophistication. It is another novel about American innocence defeated by the stiff traditional values of Europe. Daisy brings her free American spirit to Europe and she looks at people as individuals rather than as members of a social class. Despite her goodness she is misunderstood by the Europeans and even by an American who has lived a long time in Europe. Finally she dies of malarial fever, so the drama depends on circumstantial rather than on psychological factors.
James did not set all of his novels in Europe or focus exclusively on the contrast between the New World and the Old. Set in New York City, Washington Square (1880) is a deceptively simple tragicomedy that recounts the conflict between a dull but sweet daughter and her brilliant, domineering father. The book is often compared to Jane Austen‘s work for the clarity and grace of its prose and its intense focus on family relationships. James was not particularly enthusiastic about Jane Austen, so he might not have regarded the comparison as flattering. In fact, James was not enthusiastic about Washington Square itself. He tried to read it over for inclusion in the New York Edition of his fiction (1907–09) but found that he could not. So he excluded the novel from the edition. But other readers have enjoyed the book enough to make it one of the more popular works in the entire Jamesian canon.
In The Portrait of a Lady (1881) again a young American woman is fooled during her travels in Europe. James started to write the work in Florence in 1879 and continued with it in Venice. The protagonist is Isabel Archer, a penniless orphan. She goes to England to stay with her aunt and uncle, and their tubercular son, Ralph. Isabel inherits money and goes to Continent with Mrs Touchett and Madame Merle. She turns down proposals of marriage from Casper Goodwood, and marries Gilbert Osmond, a middle-aged snobbish widower with a young daughter, Pansy. Isabel discovers that Pansy is Madame Merle’s daughter, it was Madame Merle’s plot to marry Isabel to Osmond so that he, and Pansy can enjoy Isabel’s wealth. Caspar Goodwood makes a last attempt to gain her, but she returns to Osmond and Pansy. The most important part of the book is the description of her inner consciousness in the dramatic moment when she realises the mistake she has made. The drama is not created by her actions, but by the thoughts in her mind.
That novel marked the beginning of James’s mature period in which little by little dramatic action almost disappears. Thereafter, characters usually spend their time talking about the different aspects and possibilities of the situations they are in, and the drama comes when the character changes from one way of looking at the world to another way. In the second period, as noted above, he abandoned the serialized novel and from 1890 to about 1897, he wrote short stories and plays. In the 1880s James began to explore new areas of interest besides the Europe–America contrast and the “American girl”. In particular, he began writing on explicitly political themes.
The Bostonians (1886) is a bittersweet tragicomedy that centers on an odd triangle of characters: Basil Ransom, an unbending political conservative from Mississippi; Olive Chancellor, Ransom’s cousin and a zealous Boston feminist; and Verena Tarrant, a pretty protege of Olive’s in the feminist movement. The story line concerns the contest between Ransom and Olive for Verena’s allegiance and affection, though the novel also includes a wide panorama of political activists, newspaper people, and quirky eccentrics.
The political theme turned darker in The Princess Casamassima (1886), the story of an intelligent but confused young London bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, who becomes involved in far left politics and a terrorist assassination plot. The book is something of a lone sport in the Jamesian canon for dealing with such a violent political subject. But it is often paired with The Bostonians, which is concerned with political issues in a less tragic manner.
Just as James was beginning his ultimately disastrous attempt to conquer the stage, he wrote The Tragic Muse (1890). This novel offers a wide, cheerful panorama of English life and follows the fortunes of two would-be artists: Nick Dormer, who vacillates between a political career and his efforts to become a painter, and Miriam Rooth, an actress striving for artistic and commercial success. A huge cast of supporting characters help and hinder their pursuits. The book reflects James’s consuming interest in the theater and is often considered to mark the close of the second or middle phase of his career in the novel.
After the failure of his “dramatic experiment” James returned to his fiction with a deeper, more incisive approach. He began to probe his characters’ consciousness in a more insightful manner, which had been foreshadowed in such passages as Chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady. His style also started to grow in complexity to reflect the greater depth of his analysis. The Spoils of Poynton (1897), considered the first example of this final phase, is a half-length novel that describes the struggle between Mrs. Gereth, a widow of impeccable taste and iron will, and her son Owen over a houseful of precious antique furniture. The story is largely told from the viewpoint of Fleda Vetch, a young woman in love with Owen but sympathetic to Mrs Gereth’s anguish over losing the antiques she patiently collected.
James continued the more involved, psychological approach to his fiction with What Maisie Knew (1897), the story of the sensitive daughter of divorced and irresponsible parents. The novel has great contemporary relevance as an unflinching account of a wildly dysfunctional family. The book is also a notable technical achievement by James, as it follows the title character from earliest childhood to precocious maturity.
The third period of James’s career reached its most significant achievement in three novels published just after the turn of the century. Critic F. O. Matthiessen called this “trilogy” James’s major phase, and these novels have certainly received intense critical study. Although it was the second-written of the books, The Wings of the Dove (1902) was the first published. This novel tells the story of Milly Theale, an American heiress stricken with a serious disease, and her impact on the people around her. Some of these people befriend Milly with honorable motives, while others are more self-interested. James stated in his autobiographical books that Milly was based on Minny Temple, his beloved cousin who died at an early age of tuberculosis. He said that he attempted in the novel to wrap her memory in the “beauty and dignity of art”.
James considered The Ambassadors (1903) his most “perfect” work of art. A middle-aged American goes to Paris to rescue the son of a friend from the evils of European society. When he arrives he is still a moralistic New Englander and he disapproves of everything he sees, but slowly he begins to see Europe in a different way. In the end the boy is happy to be rescued and to go back to America, the man, however, wants to stay in Europe. The Ambassadors (1903), is a dark comedy that follows the trip of protagonist Lewis Lambert Strether to Europe in pursuit of his widowed fiancée’s supposedly wayward son. Strether is to bring the young man back to the family business, but he encounters unexpected complications. The third-person narrative is told exclusively from Strether’s point of view.
The Golden Bowl (1904) is a complex, intense study of marriage and adultery that completes the “major phase” and, essentially, James’s career in the novel. The book explores the tangle of interrelationships between a father and daughter and their respective spouses. The novel focuses deeply and almost exclusively on the consciousness of the central characters, with sometimes obsessive detail and powerful insight.
James was particularly interested in what he called the “beautiful and blest nouvelle“, or the longer form of short narrative. Still, he produced a number of very short stories in which he achieved notable compression of sometimes complex subjects. The following narratives are representative of James’s achievement in the shorter forms of fiction.
The Beast in the Jungle (1903) is almost universally considered one of James’s finest short narratives, and has often been compared with The Ambassadors in its meditation on experience or the lack of it. The story also treats other universal themes: loneliness, fate, love and death. The parable of John Marcher and his peculiar destiny speaks to anyone who has speculated on the worth and meaning of human life. Among his last efforts in short narrative, The Jolly Corner (1908) is usually held to be one of James’s best ghost stories. The tale describes the adventures of Spencer Brydon as he prowls the now-empty New York house where he grew up. Brydon encounters a “sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity.”
The final phase of James’s short narratives shows the same characteristics as the final phase of his novels: a more involved style, a deeper psychological approach, and a sharper focus on his central characters. James’s most famous tales include ‘The Turn of the Screw’ , written mostly in the form of a journal, was first published serially in Collier’s Weekly, and then with another story in The Two Magics(1898). The protagonist is a governess, who works on a lonely estate in England. She tries to save her two young charges, Flora and Miles, two both innocent and corrupted children, from the demonic influence of the apparitions of two former servants in the household, steward Peter Quint and the previous governess Miss Jessel. Her employer, the children’s uncle, has given strict orders not to bother him with any of the details of their education. Although the children evade the questions about the ghosts but she certain is that the children see them. When she tries to exorcize their influence, Miles dies in her arms. The story inspired later a debate over the question of the “reality” of the ghosts, were her visions only hallucinations. In the beginning of his career James had rejected “spirit-rappings and ghost-raising”, but in the 1880s he become interested in the unconscious and the supernatural. James wrote in 1908 that “Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are not “ghosts” at all, as we now know the ghost, but goblins, elves, imps, demons as loosely constructed as those of the old trials for witchcraft; if not, more pleasingly, fairies of the legendary order, wooing their victims forth to see them dance under the moon.” Virginia Woolf thought that Henry James’s beings have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts “the blood-stained captains, the white horses, the headless ladies of dark lanes and windy commons.”
Between 1906 and 1910 James revised many of his tales and novels for the so-called New York Edition of his complete works. His autobiography, A Small Boy and Others(1913) was continued in Notes of a Son and Brother (1914). The third volume, The Middle Years, appeared posthumously in 1917. The outbreak of World War I was a shock for James and in 1915 he became a British citizen as a loyalty to his adopted country and in protest against the US’s refusal to enter the war. James suffered a stroke on December 2, 1915. Two novels, The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past (1917), were left unfinished at his death.
To sum up, we can conclude that the production of James is defined as cosmopolitan because he reflected the experience of the Americans abroad. High class Americans admired European art, literature, architecture and fashion, which they considered superior to their own and they adopted a dependent attitude on European taste. But there was also a critical attitude to American dependence on European ideas and to the aristocratic character of European society as we have seen in Twain’s travel books. Against this background James went further. James ‘s novels often demonstrated the American moral and cultural superiority. Furthermore, his fascination lay in the contemplation of the dark forces underlying the rigid social codes. He presented the great confrontation between American and European culture and temperament. Most of his novels deal with the misunderstandings that result from the contact between the English and the Americans.
But he also did this through a new kind of realism, the psychological realism, which is a bridge between the 19th and the 20th century. He was an observer of the mind rather than a recorder of the times, mainly interested in the psychological responses which people make to situations. Few of his stories include big events or exciting action. In fact, the characters of his last and finest novels rarely do anything at all, they watch life rather than live it. The interest is in the way that their minds respond to the events of the story and how their consciousness changes. This was termed “stream of consciousness” literature, and although this approach caused a cold reception of his novels, it became a very common method in the 20th century.
4 STUDY GUIDE
British influence on America continued long after the Independence War. Nothing could change the basic fact that both were two independent nations sharing a single language and a single cultural tradition. American literature is only the continuation of the English genius into new conditions more or less propitious. But the 1830’s were the decade of America’s declaration of literary independence and it was the time when the Western frontier humorism became very popular. The works of Artemius Ward, John Phoenix, Bret Hartre and above all of Mark Twain came into the literary scene with an outstanding and explosive vitality.
The 19th century American West is a region of legend. The quest for a new land and a new hope to the West was after all the very origin of America. This part of the country was still in process of settlement. Much of it was wilderness, populated by Indians, white hunters and trappers and it is the combination of these characteristics what gave way to the rise of Western humour and to Western humour literature. Let’s see its main characteristics:
Western or frontier humour was not in fact confined to the West. Some of its characteristics were shared with the East. The habit of hyperbole had been acquired by Easterners before it spread West. Artemius Ward, John Phoenix and other humorists came from the East. Western humour relies mainly on exaggeration. It has the effect of singing comic words to a sad tune.
The element of fraud was also a recurrent element in American humour, but the ugliness of fraud was made into a joke.
Some of this humour was surrealistic in its polysyllabic, mock-solemn and inverted logic.
Apart from this Western humour was also used to poke fun at the sacred pieties of American life, mainly at the platitudes of patriotic democracy or to circumvent the taboos of the nation’s Victorian value system.
Mark Twain’s real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, and he was born in Missouri in 1835. In his childhood this state was part of the West frontier, and that, together with the river Mississippi, were two decisive influences on his works. In his youth he was a printer and he worked in the river boats of the Mississippi, but he also started to write for newspapers using the pseudonym Mark Twain. Due to the war traffic in the Mississippi was stopped, and he went first to Nevada and then to California, where he experienced the rough conditions of Western life. His fame started with the publication of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. This is a story about an apparently innocent stranger who cheats a famous frog racer and beats him. It is based on stories he heard in the California mining camps. The motif of how the weak succeed in cheating the strong is typical of Western humour.
A few years later came his first major book, The Innocents Abroad, based on the letters he sent to an American paper during his trip through Europe. This book shows his democratic hatred of the European aristocracy, but on the other hand he also directs his humourism against American tourists in Europe. He laughs at tourists who pretend to be excited by the art treasures they see in Europe or show false religious feelings when they visit Jerusalem just because that is what they are supposed to do.
One of his most famous novels was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a story of bad boys. That is a popular theme in American literature, but Tom and Huck are bad only because they fight against the stupidity of the adult world, and in the end they win. However, the two characters are quite different. Whereas Tom is very romantic and his view of life comes from the books he reads, Huck has had a harder life and he cannot see the world in the romantic way that Tom does. One of the great achievements in this novel is the creation of a highly realistic background and many colourful characters.
The continuation of this book was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, considered Twain’s greatest novel. Here Huck and an escaped slave run away on a raft along the Mississippi. During their trip, in the various towns and villages along the way Huck learns about the evil of the world.
Twain’s view of the human nature had never been very optimistic, but during final years, he become even more bitter and especially hostile Twain was towards Christianity. In his later novels he is less hopeful about democracy. In A Connecticut Yankee in the King Arthur’s Court the hero is the boss of a factory who wakes up in 6th century England after an accident. He modernises things and since he knows so much he becomes a kind of dictator called “the Boss”. He depicted the attitude of American society with its emphasis on technology and on the leadership of bosses who believed that they knew more than the ordinary people in society.
Twain’s pessimism grew deeper and deeper. In The Man That Corrupted Hudleyburg he describes a town that had been famous for its honesty but where in the end everybody has lied in order to get a big bag of gold. He dealt with the same theme again in The $30,000 Request. This pessimism is complete in his last story, The Mysterious Stranger. An angel visits three boys, and after showing to them the evil of mankind and destroying their happiness he reveals to them that he is Satan.
During the 19th century there was a flow of American artists removing to settle in Europe. Authors as well as artists crossed the Atlantic. There were different reasons for this.
On the one hand there were practical reasons to move to Europe. They could derive important benefits such as cheapness of living and more artistic opportunities. Some of them went abroad as journalists or editors. Concern over copyright was another factor. American authors could usually gain some protection against practical British publishers by arranging for first publication in the United Kingdom and sometimes by establishing residence there at the time of publication. As a result many American books were published in Britain before they appeared in the USA. American writers were inclined to consider living in Europe at least for some time in order to safeguard their works.
However, those who went to Europe were often cosmopolitan in their origin or in their attitude to life. Many of them looked for a real setting for their works suitable with their ideas and America would not do in this respect, too much was missing. It had no tradition and they looked for this tradition in Europe. Europe seemed to have more reality. America remained a convenient point of reference, a place to which characters may depart or from which they may arrive bringing with them America’s special ambience.
Henry James was born in New York in 1843, but his father wanted a cosmopolitan education for his children and so the family lived in different European countries. Back in the US he attended university and started his literary career writing reviews and stories. After a few years in which he travelled frequently to Europe and when he wrote his first novels, he finally settled in England, where he moved in the intellectual and literary circles, getting integrated into the British society. His only source of income was his writing, with which he lived conformably, although he never achieved an assured grip on popularity. He stayed in Britain until the end of his life and became a British subject at the beginning of the first World War as a protest against American isolationism.
James is one of the major figures of trans-Atlantic literature. His works frequently juxtapose characters from the Old World (Europe), embodying a feudal civilization that is beautiful, often corrupt, and alluring, and from the New World (United States), where people are often brash, open, and assertive and embody the virtues — freedom and more highly evolved moral character — of the new American society. James explores this clash of personalities and cultures, in stories of personal relationships in which power is exercised well or badly. His protagonists were often young American women facing oppression or abuse.
James published many stories before what would prove to be his greatest success with the readers of his time, “Daisy Miller” (1878). This story portrays the confused courtship of the title character, a free-spirited American girl, by Winterbourne, a compatriot of hers with much more sophistication. His pursuit of Daisy is hampered by her own flirtatiousness, which is frowned upon by the other expatriates they meet in Switzerland and Italy. Her lack of understanding of the social mores of the society she so desperately wishes to enter ultimately leads to tragedy.
The Portrait of a Lady is the best novel of this period. A young American girl goes to Europe to explore life, and after many good offers of marriage she chooses the wrong man. In The Portrait of a Lady (1881) James concluded the first phase of his career with a novel that remains to this day his most popular long fiction, if the Amazon sales rankings are any indication. This impressive achievement is the story of a spirited young American woman, Isabel Archer, who “affronts her destiny” and finds it overwhelming. She inherits a large amount of money and subsequently becomes the victim of Machiavellian scheming by two American expatriates. The narrative is set mainly in Europe, especially in England and Italy. Generally regarded as the masterpiece of his early phase, The Portrait of a Lady is not just a reflection of James’s absorbing interest in the differences between the New World and the Old, but a profound meditation on the themes of personal freedom, responsibility, betrayal, and sexuality.
In The Princes Casassima the hero is a revolutionary who wants to destroy the European aristocracy, but gradually he falls in love with the aristocratic world. This change leads to his suicide.
Henry James never tries to give a detailed picture of society, rather he selects a single situation or problem, and often the problem is about the nature of art.
In The Real Thing (1893) the problem is how art changes reality. An artist wants to make a picture of typical aristocrats, but with real models he fails because they are so real he cannot use his imagination. He only succeeds using lower-class models.
In The Death of the Lion (1894) a writer faces the problem of being too popular, since he is too busy with his admirers to write.
Another problem James studied was the introduction of children to the evil and immorality of the world around them. This is the theme of What Maisie Knew (1897), it is depicted a preadolescent young girl, who must chose between her parents and a motherly old governess.
In The Wings of the Dove (1902) a heritage destroys the love of a young couple.
The Ambassadors The novel depicts Lambert Strether’s attempts to persuade Mrs Newsome’ son Chad to return from Paris back to the United States. Strether’s possibility to marry Mrs Newsome is dropped and he remains content in his role as a widower and observer.
A problem that he frequently deals with is the “unlived life”, the hero is so afraid of life that he cannot really live. In The Beast in the Jungle (1903) the hero is sure that something terrible is going to happen to him, but eventually he realises that the terrible fate waiting for him is that nothing is to happen to him.
The Turn of the Screw (1898). The latter is a famous ghost story of two children and their nurse. The nurse is sure the children are haunted by ghosts, but it is not clear to the reader whether the ghosts are real or only in the nurse’s mind.
5 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster, 1927
Plots and Characters in the Works of Mark Twain by Robert L. Gale (1973);
The Art of Mark Twain by William H. Gibson (1976);
Mark Twain’s Last Years as a Writer by William R. Macnaughton (1979);
Mark Twain by Robert Keith Miller (1983);
The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century by Bud Foote (1990);
Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale by Henry B. Wonham (1993);
The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography Fred Kaplan (2003);
Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain’s Final Years by Karen Lys
Theory of Fiction by James E. Miller (1972);
James the Critic by Vivien Jones (1984);
The Wordsworth Book of Literary Anecdotes by Robert Hendrickson (1990);
A Companion to Henry James Studies, ed. by Daniel Mark Fogel (1993);
Classic Horror Writers, ed. by Harold Bloom (1994);
A Private Life of Henry James by Lyndall Gordon (1999);